Angela Esco Elder – författare

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 the full emotional weight of belonging to the war’s most famous divided family. Her sister Mary not only sided with the Union (as did five other Todd siblings) but was also married to its commander in chief.Here is an engrossing story of the Civil War, of Abraham Lincoln’s shattered family, of two people falling in love, of soldiers and brothers dying nobly on the wrong side of history. The full Dawson–Todd correspondence comprises more than three hundred letters. It has been edited for this volume to focus tightly on their courtship. The complete, annotated text of all of the letters, with additional supporting material, will be made available online.

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 the full emotional weight of belonging to the war’s most famous divided family. Her sister Mary not only sided with the Union (as did five other Todd siblings) but was also married to its commander in chief.Here is an engrossing story of the Civil War, of Abraham Lincoln’s shattered family, of two people falling in love, of soldiers and brothers dying nobly on the wrong side of history. The full Dawson–Todd correspondence comprises more than three hundred letters. It has been edited for this volume to focus tightly on their courtship. The complete, annotated text of all of the letters, with additional supporting material, will be made available online.

Between 1861 and 1865, approximately 200,000 women were widowed by the deaths of Civil War soldiers. They recorded their experiences in diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and pension applications. In Love and Duty, Angela Esco Elder draws on these materials—as well as songs, literary works, and material objects like mourning gowns—to explore white Confederate widows' stories, examining the records of their courtships, marriages, loves, and losses to understand their complicated relationship with the Confederate state. Elder shows how, in losing their husbands, many women acquired significant cultural capital, which positioned them as unlikely actors to gain political influence.Confederate officialdom championed a particular image of white widowhood the young wife who selflessly transferred her monogamous love from her dead husband to the deathless cause for which he'd fought. But a closer look reveals that these women spent their new cultural capital with great shrewdness and variety. Not only were they aware of the social status gained in widowhood they also used that status on their own terms, turning mourning into a highly politicized act amid the battle to establish the Confederacy's legitimacy. Death forced all Confederate widows to reconstruct their lives, but only some would choose to play a role in reconstructing the nation.