Practical Strangers: The Courtship and Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln ed. by Stephen Berry and Angela Esco Elder (review)

Practical Strangers: The Courtship and Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln documents the yearlong epistolary romance between Confederate volunteer Nathaniel Henry Rhodes Dawson and Elodie Breck Todd, a sister of President Abraham Lincoln's wife. After meeting Todd at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, Dawson, a Selma, Alabama, native, conducted a swift campaign to win the hand of Kentucky-born Todd, while on an extended visit to his hometown before he departed with the Magnolia Cadets, Company C of the Confederacy's Fourth Alabama Infantry Regiment, in April 1861. Written during wartime, these letters reveal the rapid progress of their courtship and demonstrate how their separation, the discomforts of martial life, and the ever-present threat of death accelerated their path to marriage.

Typically, courtship correspondence provided Civil War soldiers with an escape from the grim realities of war and gave them a future orientation that fueled their will to survive. On the home front, affianced women mobilized patriotic enthusiasm and material support, enhancing the well-being of individual soldiers and securing much-needed resources for forces in the field. The letters discuss religion, gender, marital prospects, and at lighter moments, gossip, expressing Dawson's passionate eagerness to proceed rapidly with their romance and Todd's playful restraint, a reflection of conventional gender roles. Significantly, the couple's courtship took a more serious turn after Dawson survived the first battle of Manassas, when Todd recognized the mortal risks her suitor faced.

Richly illuminating how the couple constructed their intimate relationship, the Dawson-Todd correspondence includes an intriguing twist: Elodie Todd was the thirteenth of fourteen siblings almost evenly split in their Civil War loyalties between North and South. Todd cast her lot with the Confederacy, but she refused to renounce her familial affection for her sister, Mary Todd Lincoln. Demanding respect for her brother-in-law, the Union's commander in chief, Elodie Todd became unpopular in wartime Selma. Yet in writing to Dawson, she nonetheless asserted her southern nationalism, seeking a "country freed from Northern tyranny" and confidently, if somewhat ironically, asserting that any Confederate soldier would "prefer death to slavery" (p. 146). The deepening Todd-Dawson romance played out against their emerging recognition that the war they both so confidently welcomed had become costly for them as individuals and for their imagined nation.

Dawson and Todd are good correspondents, yet despite their engaging writing, this volume is at times confusing. The editors have not used standard date lines or writer/recipient identifications, which would be helpful for readers. And while some annotations contain excellent contextual information, others are less helpful, exposing inconsistencies in quality and in format. Scholars will find puzzling the editors' decision not to note excisions of text within letters as well as the exclusion of whole letters. The editors ultimately paired the book with a website, providing full transcriptions of all extant letters in the Todd-Dawson courtship, but that endeavor was far from finished at the time of the writing of this review. When the full correspondence is available, researchers should have a valuable resource for understanding how gender, romance, and family both shaped and were shaped by the Civil War.