I'm sorry. I've read most of Lincoln's stuff (and Grant's and Sherman's and Franklin's and Paine's and Jefferson's and Adams'). The content is pure Lincoln.
The melancholy that bleeds through the Bixby Letter is vintage Abraham. He was empathetic and highly intuitive. He cared more about other people than himself and had a reputation for comforting those in grief.
I'd take this "professional assessment" with a grain of salt.
Abraham Lincoln letter mystery 'almost certainly' solved, experts sayBy James Rogers
Published July 20, 2017
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/07/20/abraham-lincoln-letter-mystery-almost-certainly-solved-experts-say.html (http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/07/20/abraham-lincoln-letter-mystery-almost-certainly-solved-experts-say.html)
QuoteForensic linguists say they have likely unraveled the mystery surrounding a famous Civil War-era letter, long believed to have been written by President Abraham Lincoln.
Historians have argued for years about the famed 1864 "Bixby letter" that was sent to Lydia Bixby, a mother in Boston grieving the loss of her five sons in the war. The beautifully-written letter was signed A. Lincoln, although it has been suggested that the note was actually written by John Hay, Lincoln's secretary.
While facsimiles of the letter are in existence, the original has been missing for over 100 years, making it even harder to work out the letter's true authorship.
Now, researchers at the University of Manchester and Aston University in the U.K. have deployed cutting-edge technology in an attempt to find out who actually wrote the letter. Harnessing a technique called N-gram tracing that searches for linguistic sequences, the team developed a series of computer programs to analyze hundreds of texts from Lincoln and Hay.
"It's a new method to analyze very short texts, which is something that has been a problem in forensic linguistics and linguistics in general," Dr. Andrea Nini, lecturer in English language and linguistics, told Fox News. Nini explained that, for longer texts, data can be compiled on the frequency with which certain words are used. For the Bixby letter, however, the team analyzed the words used and checked for the absence of words found in other writing by Lincoln and Hay.
Researchers at Aston University's Centre for Forensic Linguistics tested 500 texts by Hay and 500 by Lincoln, before drawing the conclusion that the Bixby letter was written by the President's secretary.
More at the link.....
Whether he wrote it or not - todays politicians are all worse and only fair to themselves and their sponsors.
An interesting text - thank you :)
This new linguistics program may point to Hays, but I also recall that many of the letters penned by Hays were dictated by President Lincoln;
and it is not uncommon for personal secretaries to adopt the style and mannerisms of their superiors thru long exposure and usage...
technology can be wonderful, but it is by no means infallible, especially in the initial stages of development and deployment...
in a case such as this, with really no hard core proof as to which is the actual author, it is up to the individual to draw their own conclusions
8)
Seeker
Most modern automatic translators use N-gram based methods, and we see how they fail, so I wouldn't put much trust on this. :)