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Introduction During the American Civil War, James Madison Bowler and Elizabeth CaleJ Bowler courted, married, became parents, and bought a farm. They attended dances and two circuses,shared political opinions and reading preferences,and confided their deepest fears and feelings for one another.They buried her sister, attended several funerals, and survived numerous maladies.They observed the cycle of seasons—fall’s fair days;winter’s cold,snow,and rain;spring’s planting; and summer’s sweltering heat.Because of the war,they experienced all of these relatively routine events separately,sharing them through nearly three hundred letters written between September 1861 and September 1865, while Madison served in the Third MinnesotaVolunteer Regiment and in the 113th U.S.Colored Infantry and Lizzie remained in Nininger, Minnesota. During those four years, they had only two six-week furloughs when they were under one roof. Although this collection of letters is between and about only two people, it also opens a window into the lives of those nearest to them.The couple kept each other apprised of their families’ and friends’ health,comings and goings,and war experiences.This exchange of information—or more often gossip and rumor— maintained connections between Lizzie and Madison not onlyas a couple but also as members of two distinct but overlapping communities:those of Nininger and its environs and of various military camps, including Union-occupied Little Rock,Arkansas. When the war began in 1861, Madison Bowler was a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher in NiningerCity,Minnesota.Six years earlier,he had left his hometown of Lee,Maine.Apparently,his father,Edward Bowler,and his mother,Clara Augusta Smith Bowler,had separated,and there was a falling out between father and son,although Edward later admired Madison’s “going awaywhen only a boy and mak[ing] [his] own way in the world.”1 Madison’s younger brother Joseph 3 1. Clara Bowler lived with her sister’s children,Minerva and Martha True,in Patten, Maine,sometime between 1850 and 1862,according to the “Bowler-CaleJ Family History and sisters Sarah,Georgette,and Clara remained at home with theirfather,attending school and eventually teaching at various schools in Maine.Like many single, middle-class men at midcentury, Madison probably went west in search of new opportunities.Traveling through Wisconsin and Iowa, he eventually landed in St. Anthony, Minnesota, where his uncle and aunt Joseph and Lucy Smith resided.While there, he taught school and worked in a printer’s oIce. Madison Bowler and the Smiths joined the many white settlers who poured into Minnesota Territory in the 1850s after the Dakota ceded most of their land in 1852 and 1858. Even before the land cession, some whites moved into MinnesotaTerritory ,including Elizabeth CaleJ’s uncles Peter and Henry CaleJ from New Brunswick,Canada,who were among the first settlers at BluJ Landing (renamed Nininger in 1856).They ostensibly established a trading post but spent most of their time building a mill and waiting to register a land claim once the area was surveyed.Peter and Henry’s father,Jedediah,and their sister Sarah also moved to Nininger, while another sister, Margaret Hawkins, and her family farmed nearby in Hampton Township.Sister-in-law Henrietta CaleJ lived with her son Robert in Hastings. Latecomers Samuel and Susan Justason CaleJ and their three daughters—Katherine, or Kate; Elizabeth, or Lizzie; and Dorothea, otherwise Dolly, Dollie, or Do—settled outside of Nininger at Rose Hill in 1856. The extended CaleJ family, as well as their Bowler-Smith counterparts, were part of a wave of immigration into Minnesota Territory from eastern Canada, New England, and especially New York and Pennsylvania. Minnesota’s white population soared from 6,077 in 1850 to 150,037 in 1857.2 Eager to direct as well as profit from the migration to the new territory,boosters promoted new towns that they promised would rival already established cities like St.Anthony and St. Paul and would provide newcomers with opportunities to establish prosperous businesses.Established in May 1856 twenty-five miles southeast of St.Paul on the Mississippi River,Nininger City was one of the 366 town sites recorded during a three-year land and population boom.Ignatius Donnelly,later the lieutenant governor and a representative to the U.S.Congress during the Civil War,was the town’s consummate promoter. He promised that NiningerCitywould become a centerforcommerce,attracting farm produce from 4 go if you think it your duty and Genealogy,”compiled byAnna Skovholt,Barbara...

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