Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln [Paperback]

Stephen Berry (Editor)
STEPHEN BERRY is professor of history at the University of Georgia. His books include Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges (Georgia); House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War; All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South; and Princes of Cotton: Four Diaries of Young Men in the South, 1848–1860 (Georgia). He lives and writes in Athens, Georgia.

Angela Esco Elder (Editor)
ANGELA ESCO ELDER is the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on the antebellum and Civil War era, with an emphasis on gender, emotion, family, and trauma in the American South.

These letters chronicle the wartime courtship of a Confederate soldier and the woman he loved—a sister-in-law of Abraham Lincoln. It is a relative rarity for the correspondence of both writers in Civil War letter collections to survive, as they have here. Rarer still is how frequently and faithfully the two wrote, given how little they truly knew each other at the start of their exchange. As a romantic pair, Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd had no earlier history; they had barely met when separated by the war. Letters were their sole lifeline to each other and their sole means of sharing their hopes and fears for a relationship (and a Confederacy) they had rashly embraced in the heady, early days of secession.

The letters date from April 1861, when Nathaniel left for war as a captain in the Fourth Alabama Infantry, through April 1862, when the couple married. During their courtship through correspondence, Nathaniel narrowly escaped death in battle, faced suspicions of cowardice, and eventually grew war weary. Elodie had two brothers die while in Confederate service and felt thel³)