The Bixby Letter
I dreamt of Abraham Lincoln.
After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns, the trees move. – I Go Among Trees, Wendell Berry
(A version of this piece appeared elsewhere.)
In January 2025, when “unleashed hell” ignited a polarized political fury with a new administration, I dreamt of Abraham Lincoln.
It was 1864 in the dream. The Civil War raged in its fourth year, and Lincoln was running for reelection against a Democratic Party platform which called the war a failure and demanded an armistice. Many in the North remained conflicted about the war and its human cost, and casualty lists appeared in weekly papers.
In the summer of 1864, Lincoln firmly believed he would lose the election. Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant remained pinned in an endless, bloody fight in Virginia, and Sherman was in a quagmire outside of Atlanta.
Lincoln won on November 8, and thirteen days later, a 139-word letter signed by him went to Lydia Bixby, a Boston widow who had lost two sons in the Union Army (the War Department had erroneously said five sons died). According to family, Bixby sympathized with the South and thought little of the President. They continue to read that letter at funerals today.
In the middle of a war, still mourning the death of his son Willie two years before, the President of a divided country penned a handwritten letter to a stranger mourning her children killed in war. And a stranger who may have despised him. He never asked which side she was on. Her loss was enough.
Lincoln wrote letters as an outlet. When anger about generals seized his soul, he wrote out his thoughts in full, then put the letter in a drawer and never sent it. Perhaps his most famous letter was the one to General Meade after Lee’s army slipped away from Gettysburg. He let that fury stay on paper and die there, a badge of remarkable emotional intelligence.
That’s who I dreamt of. A leader who could embrace a nation’s grief yet moderate emotions at the same time.
We don’t have that now, and two years in, it’s still how it began. On January 29, 2025, an Army helicopter and a passenger jet collided over the Potomac River. Sixty-seven people died, among them young figure skaters and their parents merely trying to get home after a figure skating event. The nation needed a Bixby letter—instead, after a moment of silence, the President blamed diversity hiring at the FAA before investigators had recovered the black boxes.
The Bixby letter isn’t a party platform—it’s a construct of what a leader and a nation should aspire to. It distills the arduous burdens of administration and the absolute sacrifice of citizenship into a profound statement of gratitude.
Change is here, and I dreamt of Lincoln. That must mean something.
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