Civil War-era letter from Abraham Lincoln to a mother whose five sons were killed was actually writt
A historic letter said to be penned by then-President Abraham Lincoln in 1864 sparked decades of debate after some historians claimed it may, in fact, have been written by his secretary John Hay.
It’s a hauntingly powerful consolation written to a woman named Lydia Bixby, whose five sons were killed while fighting in the Civil War, and is said to be one of the best letters ever written in the history of the English language.
Using an analysis technique known as N-gram tracing, a team of forensic linguistics experts may have finally put an end to the mystery – and, they say it was ‘almost certainly’ written by Hay.
