Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln - Paperbackby Stephen William Berry (Editor), Angela Esco Elder (Editor) 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.