And here at length is somewhat of revenge,
For men’s most golden dreams of pride and power,
Are vain as any woman’s dream of love;
Both end in weary brow, and withered heart,
And the grave closes over those whose hopes
Have lain there long before.*
The South began the war confidently, believing the Yankees would fight a war of aggression with only their flawed isms to steady their arms. The Confederates would wage a defensive war for their fields and firesides. As the Yankees began to occupy those fields and warm themselves before those fires, however, this defensive posture began to feel very vulnerable to many Confederates. Their sisters, mothers, and sweethearts were being occupied, after all, the people in whom they had vouchsafed the best of themselves and for whom (they were convinced) they were fighting in the first place. In the long stretches between battles, men helplessly far from home had all the time in the world to imagine the worst. “I wish you to keep [a] pistol loaded and capped,” Edwin Fay instructed his wife precisely, “and if the Yankees come to Minden to wear it on your person, never be without it and the first one that dares insult you blow his brains out. This you must do or you are not the woman I married.” Winston Stephens had the same concerns for his beloved Tivie: “One thing I do hope and ask of you don’t let [the Yankees] get near enough to insult you—for my sake go from home back in the Country when they come. I had rather lose every thing in this world than to have you in their power.”1
In Tracks of the Armies (1863), Adalbert Volck drew on the fear, common among Southern soldiers, that Yankees intended to ruin farms and families. Here a Confederate soldier is depicted returning to his tumbled-down house. His wife lies dead amid the rubble, nude to the waist and clutching some strands of hair, presumably those of her rapist and murderer. Among the ruins are the carcasses of a dog and a mouse, underlining Volck’s (far-fetched) point that the Yankees systematically slaughtered everything in their path. Etching, ⅝ x 7½ in. Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum.
If the image of Yankees possessing their wives was disturbing, so too was the almost inexpressible fear that their wives might want to be possessed. “Already,” remarked William Nugent, “there have occurred instances of nice young girls marrying Yankee officers…and in N.E. Miss. there are numberous cases [too] of illegitimacy among the wives…of soldiers who have been gallantly fighting in Virginia for two years.” Illegitimacy is a concern in any war. Nothing is more harrowing to the soldier than to discover that while he is fighting to protect his wife’s virtue another man has taken her to bed. But the fear that the enemy might be sleeping with her has a psychological dimension all its own. Certainly the sense of betrayal is more acute. The wife has committed not merely adultery but, in giving aid and succor to the enemy, she has committed the marital equivalent of treason. But is there not also, buried deep in the self-doubting psyche of the soldier, a horrible fear that the enemy better deserves his wife’s bed? Particularly for those soldiers whose homes have been occupied or are threatened with occupation, an important psychological battle has already been lost, no matter the outcome of the war. Each man has failed in his most basic function—protecting his family. Even if his house still stands and his wife is safely lodged with a relative, he experiences a kind of helplessness he has probably never known. Forced by circumstance to watch from afar as his home is disgraced, he feels a kind of self-loathing—did he really do his all to ensure that his wife was safe?—and in his self-loathing he may lead a Yankee to his wife’s bed and force himself to watch this disgrace as well. “I often think what would become of you and Rosa if I should get killed,” Winston Stephens wrote his wife, “for you would have nothing left you for a support as the Yankees would take your negroes from you leaving you nothing but a small peace of land in Marion and perhaps they would confiscate that. Then I think perhaps your Father might live through it and would perhaps take care of you, but then another thought pops in my brain and that is that you might be taken north and in a few years marry some Yankee that had been instrumental in destroying me! I want you to promise that no matter what befalls me that you will never marry a yankee, no matter what his calling or position.” What is Stephens talking about? Why does he torture himself with this? Surely he knows that his wife wouldn’t let a Yankee in the door, much less into her bed. And yet he can’t seem to help it. The idea just, as he put it, popped into his brain. And this, of course, is Winston Stephens’s death wish. For being unworthy of his wife and manhood, this is how he must pay—dying with the knowledge that his wife, his life, his all, will take a Yankee lover.2
The decision to join the Confederate army, it has been suggested, was like a conversion experience—soldiers had only to give their assent, and they were reborn, re-Christened as defenders of the Confederate faith. Beginning in 1864, Confederate males began en masse to experience a sort of unconversion experience—they registered their varied dissents and reclaimed the project that was themselves from the project that was the Confederacy. As in their conversions, men bound women up in their unconversions, using them to explain to themselves why they wanted no longer to be soldiers.
This process was highly individual, of course. The next two biographical sketches give a sense of the compelling variety in men’s war experiences—and a sense of the continuity within those experiences. Both Nathaniel Dawson and Theodorick Montfort installed women at the center of their war efforts. Both wrote, imagined, and dreamed of home to have their faith restored in the cause for which they were prepared to give their lives. And both began to doubt that cause when it interposed itself between them and their sweethearts.
The man and the hour were officially met at 1:00 P.M. on February 18, 1861, when Jefferson Davis turned his back on the Union (literally) and inaugurated a new country. Thousands of spectators thronged the state capitol building in Montgomery, straining to catch a glimpse of a president they had never voted for. In even tones and measured phrases, Davis made clear that the Confederacy intended a peaceful removal from the Union; he made more clear, however, that any resistance to that removal would be met with force of arms. Though not a moving or particularly eloquent address, it had one unequivocal virtue—its meaning was lost on no one. “A Government is formed for the South,” noted one observer, “and no idea of reconstruction is entertained.” The inaugural exercises complete, men and women returned to their homes and hotels to prepare themselves for the Confederacy’s first gala event, a levee to be held in Davis’s honor at Estelle Hall. Tiffany & Company of New York had shipped $30,000 worth of jewelry to Montgomery in the days preceding the levee; Confederate belles would celebrate their independence in Federal chokers and chains. By dusk, “every house, little and big, was illuminated from the Capitol to the Exchange,” and rockets and bengal lights were being thrown steadily across the width of the street. The receiving line formed at about eight o’clock and quickly bunched up behind the voluminous skirts of the carefully coifed ladies. In the press of bodies, the temperature in the hall rose steadily toward the unbearable, and by ten o’clock the crowds began to disperse, the weary for their beds, the stalwart for a dance being organized at nearby Concert Hall. There the festivities continued until dawn, closing what one observer called “the greatest day in the annals of Montgomery.” It is possible that many new romances were inaugurated in this heady moment of Confederate becoming. History records only one, that of Elodie Todd and Nathaniel Dawson.3
Born in Charleston on February 14, 1829, Nathaniel Henry Rhodes Dawson was a quiet and sensitive youth. While his sister resembled their father—outgoing and lively—Dawson was bookish and reclusive, apt to miss meals while lying out in the gardens that surrounded his family’s mansion. There, he would later remember, he spent many of the happiest hours of his childhood, playing in the woods or walking with his “loved mother…look[ing] up into her face as she recounted the deeds of Robin Hood and his men.” Introspective by nature, Dawson developed an early affection for “domestic scenes” that did not leave him when he learned to conceal it behind a “reserved exterior.” In 1842, the family relocated to Carlowville, a Dallas County, Alabama, outpost for Charleston bluebloods. Dawson attended local schools until he was old enough to be sent to St. Joseph’s College in Mobile. He returned home in 1848 to study law under his father, but the sickly old man died just before Christmas, and Dawson was forced to move to Cahaba to study with George R. Evans. He was admitted to the state bar in 1851 at about the time his beloved mother died.4
In 1852, he married Anne Mathews, the daughter of a Selma cotton mill owner. The union produced only one child, Lizzie, before Anne died in October 1854. To forget his grief, Dawson threw himself into politics, losing a close race as a “Know-Nothing” and subsequently stumping for the Democratic party. In 1857, he married his second wife, Mary Tarver, who gave birth to a daughter of the same name in 1858. By that year, Dawson had become a prominent Selmian; his name and his inheritance from his father, as well as his legal practice and his investments with his father-in-law, provided him a firm foundation in the planter class. His property included fifty-one slaves and 2,129 acres outside the town and a house and law office within it; his net worth was $133,984. With this wealth and social standing came political opportunities. In 1860, Dawson was selected to attend the Democratic convention in Charleston and was with William Yancey when the Alabama delegation stormed out in protest of the Douglas nomination. Waiting for him at his hotel was a note urging him to return to Selma. His second wife was dying, and he made it home in time to say good-bye. By the time Lincoln was elected, Nathaniel Dawson was thirty-one; he had lost both parents and two wives in a little over a decade. The truth, though, was that he was getting better at grieving. Each time he lost a loved one he tightened his grip on his Episcopal faith and added an anniversary to his sacred calendar. “Tho the reflections caused by the yearly return [of these dates] are melancholy,” he noted, “I love to dwell on them. They are mile posts on the road which reminds us of our progress on the journey of life.” Death, as he had come to understand, was simply part of the process by which God “wean[s] us from this world.”5
In early April 1861, Jefferson Davis called for three thousand volunteers from the state of Alabama to be organized and mustered into the Confederate army. Dawson had been leading a small group of men in military drills for a month and asked them if they wished to offer their services. The vote was taken “without a dissenting voice,” and the men hastily prepared their kits. “Tho’ the step is one that will call for some sacrifices,” Dawson wrote a friend, “I hope it will give me that entire, constant employment that seems so much to relieve the troubles of this life.” Still grieving Mary’s loss, Nathaniel had little to draw him to Selma, and the army offered an escape. “My own home is so dark & desolate,” he noted, “that I will hardly miss its absence and I can expect no trials that can equal those of the past year. I would fly from them if I could.” Selma did have one attraction for Dawson, however—one that had been growing on him steadily.6
Nathaniel Dawson first caught sight of Elodie Todd in the fall of 1858 on the streets of Selma; she was peering in the window of Mr. Clark’s bookstore and Dawson sized her up in a brisk walk by. Her bouncing black curls, then the essence of female fashion, made a particularly strong impression on him and he made the customarily discreet inquiries as to her identity. Elodie, he learned, was the sister of Martha Todd, now Martha White, a Selmian and an acquaintance of Dawson’s. Their brother-in-law, of course, was Abraham Lincoln, the Republican making a name for himself in the North but not yet so famous that Elodie’s visit to Selma would receive much coverage in the press. When she returned in November 1860, however, things were different. Elodie was now a sister-in-law of the president of the United States and a walking propaganda coup for the Confederacy. At the inaugural reception in Montgomery, Martha and Elodie were the cynosure of the affair and were repeatedly toasted for their patriotism. It was during that reception, Dawson would later recall, that “I made up my mind to endeavor to make the star mine in whose beams I had wandered.” When they returned to Selma, Dawson began his courtship in earnest. Under the pretense of lending books or sending flowers, he attached short notes that gradually revealed his feelings. By early April, just as he was preparing to leave for the Confederate army, he had become determined, and on April 19, he asked Elodie for her hand. Dawson understood that some might question the move, coming so soon after his second wife’s death, but he claimed that he could no longer bear “the want of that sympathy & friendship which a wife only can give.” Elodie had not anticipated the question and knew her mother would be displeased. “Ever since I can remember,” she noted, “I have been looked upon and called the ‘old maid’ of the family and Mother seemed to think I was to be depended on to take care of her when all the rest of her handsomer daughters had left her.” Elodie, though, had her own ideas. They may “think I am committing a sin to give a thought to any other than the arrangements they have made for me,” she contended, “but as this is the age when Secession, Freedom, and rights are asserted, I am claiming mine.” So Elodie said yes and Dawson sped off with his Magnolia Cadets, now part of the Fourth Alabama Infantry Regiment, to his new post just outside of Washington and his soon-to-be brother-in-law.7
Elodie Breck Todd was born on April Fool’s Day 1841, a fact that she felt gave her a special license to commit mischief. She was a confident young woman, and, while not a staggering beauty, was easygoing about her appearance. “I am just as they say in K[entucky],” she noted, “the ugliest of my Mother’s handsome daughters and simply plain Dee Todd. I am used to being called so and I do not feel it at all.” She had a natural wiliness that made her mature for her age and a wit that edged toward the sarcastic. Her mother had “always predicted” that her “temper and tongue would get [her] into trouble,” but Elodie was prepared to “stand up to whatever it utters.” She was, above all, she told her friends, a Todd, a member of a family “noted for [its] determination or as malicious people would say, obstinacy.” Her worst trait, then, was one she would never apologize for, an unforgiving heart that once angered could “never again be reconciled to the offender altho’ that person may have been my dearest friend.” Fierce in her hating, she could be fierce in her loving as well, particularly when it came to her family or her Kentucky roots.8
Beginning in the spring of 1861, it often came to both. The Todds were arguably the most bitterly divided family of the war; in their sprawling saga the fratricidal conflict seems less tragic or glorious than wrenching and bizarre. “Surely there is no other family in the land placed in the exact situation of ours,” Elodie noted, “and I hope will never be [another] so unfortunate as to be surrounded by trials so numerous.” Elodie’s father, Robert Todd, married his first wife, Eliza Parker, in 1812. Eliza bore seven children before her death in 1825—including the future Mrs. Lincoln. After Eliza’s death, Robert Todd remained a widower for a scandalously short six months before proposing to Elizabeth “Betsey” Humphries. Betsey bore him nine children before he succumbed to the cholera epidemic of 1849—of whom Elodie was the second youngest.9
Despite a fundamental disagreement over the worth of Betsey Humphries as a mother, the Parker Todds and Humphries Todds shared a father and, for the most part, fond recollections of each other as children. When their father died, the three male Humphries Todds—Samuel, David, and Alexander—moved to New Orleans, where a rich uncle owned a sugar plantation. Each joined the Confederate army; each was killed in its service. Samuel was shot in the temple by a sharpshooter’s bullet while leading a charge at Shiloh. David took up a command at a Richmond prison camp where he was scandalized by reports of torture and desecration; he died from wounds sustained at the battle of Vicksburg. Little Aleck, remembered fondly by all family members for his red-headed innocence, was killed during a skirmish outside Baton Rouge. Though notoriously unsympathetic to her Confederate relatives, Mary Lincoln was brought to tears by Alexander’s death. “Oh little Aleck,” she cried on hearing the news, “why had you to die?” Still more bizarre, Elodie’s sister and Mary’s half sister Emile married a West Point graduate, Benjamin Helm, to whom Lincoln offered the position of paymaster of the U.S. Army. Helm’s conscience pulled him southward, however, where he rose to the rank of brigadier general before being killed at Chickamauga. Of the fourteen children of Robert Todd who survived to adulthood, five were Unionists, nine were Confederates, five were either casualties of war or had husbands who were, if we count Lincoln in that number.10
In 1861, of course, most of these grim developments awaited the future. For both Elodie Todd and Mary Todd Lincoln, however, there was even at the war’s outset a sense of foreboding, of pressing sadness, for their family’s condition. They would each deny it, often fiercely; they would each support their respective sections, often fiercely. But the steady rhythm of their family’s tragedy hammered at them remorselessly, often becoming more than they could deny or bear. Elodie was only a year old when her half sister married Abraham Lincoln, and Mary did not return to Lexington often. Still, Mary had a maternal instinct toward her younger half sisters, perhaps because she never had a daughter of her own. Emilie and Elodie were particular favorites in this regard; vivacious and talkative, they seem to have lightened Mary’s often brooding spirit. While in fundamental disagreement on political questions, Elodie and Mary were placed in oddly similar circumstances by the war. For the first month, Elodie’s fiancé and Mary’s husband slept twenty miles from each other, the Potomac River rolling gently between them. The Confederate flag that so galled Lincoln by its proximity to Washington flew over Dawson’s division, and it is not impossible that the president spied his would-be brother-in-law in his telescope while surveying enemy positions.
Both Elodie and Mary were unwavering in their loyalty to their respective sections, yet both faced considerable suspicion for their ties to the enemy. Much has been written of how the Washington press and public hounded Mary Lincoln for her Confederate connections. Elodie was similarly mistrusted in Selma. “The inhabitants of this little town think because Kentucky is not on a Cotton Plantation that there is no difference between me and a Northerner,” she wrote Dawson. “I sometimes let them know of their mistake…for when I am at home we Kentuckians think ourselves as much Southerners as anybody.” While incensed at the suspicions of their fellow countrymen, both sisters attempted to compensate by occasionally denying any emotional commitment to their step-siblings. When David Todd joined the Confederacy, a piqued Mary Lincoln declared that “by no word or act of hers would he escape punishment for his treason against her husband’s government.” Elodie was irate when she read the comment in the papers. “I do not believe she ever said it,” she noted, “and if she did and meant it, she is no longer a sister of mine nor deserves to be called a woman of nobleness and truth…. What would she do to me, do you suppose? I have as much to answer for.” But like Mary’s, Elodie’s indignation often belied her pain, her fits of temper could only partly conceal her real concern. “You see I am sad today,” she confessed to Dawson, “and you may be right in thinking I take the cares and troubles [of my family] to heart too much, but I have tried in every way to drive them from me and I cannot. Tho’ I employ every moment & take no time for thought, yet they find their way to me.” While her principal anxiety was for her full brothers in the field, her sympathy extended across the lines of battle and all the way to the White House. To be sure, Elodie disapproved of Lincoln’s policies, but she would not allow him to be personally insulted in her presence. “That is a privilege I allow myself exclusively,” she explained, “to abuse my relations as much as I desire—but no one can do the same before me.”11
Elodie’s stand on this issue did not play well in the Selma ladies’ circle and infused a local society already divided and volatile. Throughout the spring of 1861, the town was uneasily grouped into two camps, one associated with the men of the Selma Blues regiment, the other associated with the men of the Magnolia Cadets. The Cadets had left Selma in such a rush that the women of the town did not have time to organize a proper send-off. The Blues, by contrast, hung around for weeks after they were organized, parading in their uniforms and indulging in local hospitalities. The disparity was too much for Cadet partisans, who chided the Blues for being too dainty to eat army rations and too comfortable to ever leave Selma. The Blues departed eventually, but the divisions remained an essential part of the town’s social calculus. “It seems strange to me that so few are together and all helping for the one and the same cause,” Elodie noted, “that they cannot work together cheerfully and happily in place of actually working against each other and throwing as many obstacles in their way as possible.” “I do not know of anything that has been tried,” she claimed, “that has not been opposed by another party.” The divisions played themselves out most viciously at the tableaux, the fund-raising soirees organized by the Selma ladies’ circle. Every month or so, the women of the town put together a program of charades, skits, dancing, and musical entertainments designed to solicit donations from the remaining local gentlemen. These donations, of course, had to be distributed between the Blues and the Cadets, a process that became so bitter Dawson threatened to return the money sent to his men. The social politicking became even more rancorous when it was decided to hold separate tableaux for the two regiments, and it was Elodie’s touchiness on the Lincoln issue that cemented the antagonisms for the remainder of the war. Fond of singing, Elodie had participated in several of the earlier soirees and had been present when an organizing committee suggested a skit that ridiculed Abraham Lincoln. Incensed, Elodie made clear she took personal offense at the suggestion and threatened to remove herself from the program. The committee relented, and the Lincoln scene did not appear at the tableaux. A few months later, however, Elodie received the program for the first soiree organized for the exclusive benefit of the Blues: the skit was on the evening’s agenda. Elodie was irate. “I must confess that I have never been more hurt or indignant in my life,” she wrote Dawson. “What have we ever done to deserve this attempt to personally insult and wound our feelings in so public a manner?” With this incident, the loose division in the Selma social circle became a deep rift. “Society [here] has undergone a change,” Elodie explained, “and is now divided into two distinct classes.” The first class, calling itself the Anti-Whites, contained the Weavers, Weedows, Fourniers, Morrises, Mrs. Steele, the Perkinsons, the Watts, Miss Echols, and the Misses Sikes and Carroley. The second class, calling itself the Whites, was composed of Elodie, her sister Martha, Mrs. Mabry, and the Misses Goodwin, Elsberry, Ferguson, and Bell. “The rest of the inhabitants,” Elodie noted, “have been allowed the privilege of placing their own positions.” With everyone clear on the sides, women who had insulted each other only obliquely heretofore came straight to the point. “There has been a war here in words,” Elodie reported, “and the Victory is not yet awarded.”12
Dawson was sympathetic to Elodie’s predicament. He conceded that Selma could be a disagreeable town and that no family’s loyalty had been more tried than the Todds. But he also seems to have found Elodie’s tales of social unpleasantness an unfortunate intrusion into his reverie and routine. He assured her she would come to like Selma, or, failing that, she could so throw herself into her duties as a wife that it would not matter. Counseling her on her familial problems, he waxed poetic and vague, suggesting she “cheer up [and] take a brighter view of the matter. Look beyond the clouds and see in the distance arching the heavens the bow of hope assuring you that there are pleasures in the future for you, that happiness may yet crown your life with its greenest bays and laurels will be the reward of those who love so well.” He was not being insensitive per se but was distracted by his own difficulties and by a domestic imagination that needed to see Elodie as someone beyond petty trials, as “an imaginary being … as perfect as humanity can become.”13
After rousing scenes at various train stations between Selma and northern Virginia, the life of a Magnolia Cadet settled into a dull routine. They were raised at 4:30 in the morning by reveille and drilled until breakfast at 7:00. They had a general inspection at 8:00, further drilling from 9:00 until 12:00, recess from 12:00 to 12:30, more drilling until 5:30, then supper and lights out by 9:30. Playing whist, reading novels, and writing letters filled out the interstices, particularly on rainy days. For Dawson, Elodie was a fundamental part of that routine. He wrote her a letter a day, sometimes two. He kept her miniature attached to his watch fob, creating a somewhat embarrassing situation when anyone asked him the time. Every evening at nine o’clock, he left his tent for a secluded spot where he might gaze at the moon, imagining the life that awaited his return to Selma. Elodie, he knew, was on her porch, musing on the same subject, staring at the same moon, just as they had agreed before his departure. Hundreds of miles separated them; they could not talk and letters took a week or more to exchange. They were connected, however, by the shared reality of the moon, and its magnitude, its permanence, seemed somehow reassuring. But while Elodie was a part of Dawson’s daily routine, she also embodied his hopes for a life beyond such routine. Amid the monotony of days and the deprivations of camp life, Dawson could only believe there to be something more in him than these, something Elodie came to symbolize.14
Partly this was a simple function of Dawson’s isolation. He had few male friends, either in camp or out of it, and he seems to have preferred it that way. He had spent most of his boyhood daydreaming and had quickly lost touch with his college acquaintances. Politics, too, had soured his opinion of his own sex, leaving him with the opinion that “men are friendly only to be benefitted.” Dawson’s disaffection for men, however, went beyond the imputation of selfish motives. He tended, for instance, to be disturbed when another man attempted to get close to him, either physically or emotionally. James Averitt, a fellow Selmian and Episcopal preacher, for example, believed that he and Dawson were dear friends, a “second Damon and Pythias.” Dawson, though, found Averitt “too loving. He puts his hands on me and is guilty of many such to me unpleasant ways as I do not think become the conduct of a gentleman.” In part, Averitt was effusive by nature, a trait that clashed with Dawson’s emotional restraint. Ebullient and fun loving, conditioned by his profession to be comfortable with touch, Averitt tended to be physical in his affections, demonstrative in his emotions. In his mind, his friendship with Dawson was marked by complete confidence and high regard; their physical familiarity was easy and natural. Dawson recognized this and counseled himself to excuse Averitt’s excesses. “I like him,” Dawson wrote, “he is a very innocent man. All his geese are swans [and] he will speak in the most rapturous terms of a hot roll or a fried chicken.” But at other times, Dawson found Averitt’s physical attention more troubling. He described it as the behavior of “a very affectionate wife to her husband” and took comfort in the fact that Averitt was “very much in love with some lady.” Clearly, Dawson was disturbed not only by Averitt’s effervescent homosociality but by his potential homosexuality, an observation he could never make categorically, but one that filters through his language of awkward obfuscation and confession. One cannot know, of course, whether Averitt’s attentions had any sexual import, but it seems highly unlikely, and, indeed, there is evidence that it was Dawson, not Averitt, who tended to probe the sexual significance of homosocial relationships. Dawson’s friendship with a Lieutenant Shertridge, for instance, soured when the man over-indulged in toasts to the Confederacy and “in a fit of intoxication” drew his knife and “insulted [Dawson] most wantonly.” The two had known each other for years; Shertridge had read law in Dawson’s office and had been an enthusiastic supporter of Dawson’s captaincy. Shertridge, however, was under the impression that Dawson “liked Lieut. McCraw better than himself” and had determined in his stupor to avenge his wounded pride. “Did you ever hear of such infatuation?” Dawson noted after the incident. “It may become a jealous lover but not a man.” It is possible, of course, that Shertridge had a deep emotional attachment to Dawson, but again it is unlikely. Rather, it seems that Dawson had positioned himself as the object of the lieutenant’s desire, if only rhetorically, if only to condemn his actions as ridiculous. Dawson chose this same rhetorical position when Elodie suggested that had he not proposed when he did, Averitt might have been a rival for her attention. In his next letter Dawson set the love triangle straight—Elodie was “the rival that [had] supplanted” Averitt in his own confidence. None of this is to suggest that Dawson had homosexual tendencies, only that he was unusually attuned to the sexual dimension of all human dynamics and that his homosocial relations were characterized by an awkward distance he was careful to maintain. Sensitive and introverted, Dawson found other men incomprehensible at a distance, off-putting up close, and the result was a slight alienation from the rest of his sex. Unable to express the feeling any other way, he confessed to Elodie, “I frequently think that I was intended for a woman.”15
Dawson was most comfortable at home in his library. There emotion was dispensed in clean, discrete units that never pawed or pressed but stole courteously and quietly into his receptive mind. Roasting his feet by the fire in winter, propped in front of an open window in summer, Dawson indulged an appetite for Bulwer and Collins, Shakespeare and Pomfret, Addison and Madame DeStaël. Reading, he claimed, was “an amusement that can never be taken from you,” and in moments of unhappiness he turned to books “with the avidity of an opium eater.” “I [have] derived more relief” from reading, he noted, “than from the society of friends.” The library, though, could be a lonely place, and the rich imaginings of the mind were nothing without someone with whom he could share them. Elodie, he hoped, would one day join him in this sanctuary, and the room provided the setting for many of his domestic fantasies. “I love to create a picture,” Dawson told his beloved, “where you are enthroned [there] as the principal personage. I love to see myself seated at your feet, listening to your sweet voice as it discourses of love and home.”16
Trapped in a “tent hardly 8 by 10 feet, the ground wet, not even straw to place on the ground with the rain beating in at the door,” Dawson’s mind turned naturally to the warmth of hearth and home. He believed, though, that he had from his “earliest boyhood yearned for the comforting love of woman” and felt they possessed a singular ability to soothe his “troubled and wounded spirit.” His mother was his model in this regard. She had been, he claimed, a woman of remarkable virtue, and he lamented that he had ever been forced to wake from his happy childhood to “the stern realities of life.” When his mother died, Dawson acknowledged, he had “felt all alone and yearned for the love of someone to supply her place.” His wives had filled this “gaping void of companionship,” and Dawson recognized that “the deep love I have always had in my nature for domestic scenes” made it impossible for him ever to live long unmarried.17
Dawson’s courtship of Elodie Todd, however, went beyond a quest for domestic companionship. With much of his society, he believed women to be unique repositories of divine grace, and he saw Elodie as a kind of personal intercessor in his relationship with God. “I sometimes reproach myself that I have not as much love of sacred things as I have for you,” Dawson confessed to her, “but I hope you will pardon me for loving you as I do for I can love Him through you.” God had made woman that she might teach man “the love he should bear his creator,” and Dawson did not believe that “men could have received the revelations of the gospel without the inspiring faith of the gentler sex.” “All of the virtuous impulses I ever feel,” he noted, “are [to be] attributed to the teachings of my sainted mother and the influence of [the female] sex. Without these I would have been a barbarian.” Content with this indirect pipeline to the Almighty, Dawson set about the rituals of courtship with a devotional enthusiasm. He gave up smoking and drinking for Elodie’s sake and found himself able to resist the other vices of campaign life as well. Her love, he noted, had made him a better man, and the desire to do nothing that she would disapprove of exercised a “very healthy control” over his conduct. “It is in some degree the feeling which actuates the Christian in all his dealings,” he noted, “and I hope for my own good that I will never be relieved from the ‘bonds’ of my love for you.” Letter writing became a religious exercise, a chronicle of his devotion, confession, and spiritual struggles. Often he would admit that he had opted to write to Elodie rather than read the Bible, regarding the two rituals as roughly equivalent from a spiritual perspective. The coincidence was not lost on him that he knelt while writing and that “like the penitent Christian…commun[ing] with a Superior being,” he felt “a better and purer man” when the ceremony was over. It did not seem to matter to Dawson that Elodie was by her own admission not an Episcopalian but “a stubborn, hardheaded Presbyterian,” that she was “ignorant…on religious matters,” that she had never been confirmed and was not prepared to take the step, or that “far from being able to assist” Dawson in his duty, she would require assistance from him. Dawson glossed over these facts easily. Elodie was a woman, “an angel of goodness,” “a messenger of Peace and Love from above, sent to brighten and cheer” him in the path of life.18
Interestingly, while Dawson’s formal religion, Episcopalianism, tended to be somewhat stiff in its presentation, his devotion to Elodie freed him from such proprieties and allowed him to indulge a more mystical, even totemic, sentiment. He worshiped her, he claimed, with a kind of “Eastern idolatry” and he regularly turned toward Selma and kissed the miniature attached to his watch fob. He felt best when his love took material forms, and he often sent personal objects folded into the pages of his letters—pressed flowers, leaves, pebbles, scraps of material, a lock of his hair, a bit of gold lace from his sword belt. When Elodie requested that her letters be burned after he read them, Dawson refused, telling her they were “sacred writings” and had to be preserved. He took considerable trouble to make sure the letters were returned to her for safekeeping, though he kept two of them on his person at all times. When he had no new letters to fire his domestic fantasies, he took long walks across the flattened grasses of camp to some secluded spot to be inspired by his own sentimentality. “I am disposed to be romantic,” he explained to Elodie: “Scenery and circumstances by which I am surrounded always affect my disposition.” At Quantico Creek he sat on a hillock picking violets, staring bemusedly at a Union gunboat on the river. “I can see the men aboard plainly,” he noted, “and sometimes fear the sorry little wretches will throw a shell at me.” At Harper’s Ferry he chose a vantage overlooking the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac. “You have [from here] a lovely view of the surrounding country, fields and farms,” he noted, “while, just at your feet, the waters of the two noble streams…mingle together in friendly sympathy…. In the distant fields one sees flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, browsing upon the rich clover and luxuriant blue grass [under] a blue and broadening horizon.” From such a scenic lookout, the war and the monotony of camp life seemed far away—the distance between him and Elodie began to close. “I see your image in the beautiful morning,” he told her, “and in the beautiful country around me. You color everything.” Commemorating the moment, Dawson carved Elodie’s initials into a rock. “If fortune favors our love,” he told her, “and we live, I will bring you here that you may see for yourself.”19
No place, however, provided a better setting for Dawson’s reveries than the local cemetery. At each new camp, he sought out graveyards and markers, sometimes strolling the grounds for hours, musing on Elodie and the nature of man. “You know I am fond of such places,” he wrote his beloved. “They teach us of the uncertainty of life and always carry to me a touching lesson of our mortality.” At the Lord Fairfax plantation he came across the marker of a Williamme Herris, a British soldier who died in America during the Glorious Revolution. Dawson made detailed comments on the stone’s design, a slab of freestone supported by four pedestals with deep reliefs of a griffin and an hourglass at the top and a sword insignia at the bottom. At Fredericksburg, Dawson chipped a piece of granite from the tomb of George Washington’s mother and sent it to Elodie. “Is it not singular,” he asked her, “that the American Union did not last to see the Washington monument completed?” Dawson was particularly impressed by a cemetery near Dumfries, where “umbrageous oaks…flourished upon the elements of man.” “This is one of the laws of matter,” he noted, “that nothing perishes, and here it is beautifully exemplified.” He was seeking, he told Elodie, “an acquaintance with the living through the silent instruction” of the dead—but what he indulged was an appetite for melancholy, for emotions strong enough to carry him back to Selma. Squatting and bedraggled in his tent, death could seem faceless, pointless, without memory or remorse; in the cemetery, death was cultivated and courtly, polite and dignified, its magnitude was not terrifying but epic. Here Dawson could borrow against its enormity to drive his emotional commitment to life, to romance, to Elodie.20
Dawson also sought romantic inspiration in literature, particularly when the rain or the cold made a scenic stroll impossible. He had a strong taste for sentimental novels and tended to hold them up as models of how emotion should be felt and prose written. In his letters to Elodie, Dawson frequently managed a well-turned phrase of his own: “You are the first subject of my thoughts in the morning,” he told his beloved, “and when sleep closes over me, you are the bright image that woos me to the land of dreams.” But he was also continually frustrated by an inability to render his own romance as ably as his sentimental authors had rendered theirs. Partly, he contended, it was “the poverty of words” that made it impossible to capture his love in language. But partly, too, his affections had gotten beyond his simple ability to express them. “I feel at a loss how to write you,” he wrote Elodie helplessly. “The rehearsal of my love must have become tiresome….I wish I could write you in beautiful language how deeply you are loved and how much I feel your absence from me.” Occasionally, Dawson relied on other authors for his prose, not cribbing so much as citing places where Elodie might do some supplemental reading. “I wish I could describe my love as eloquently as Bulwer has made Claude Menotte declare his for Pauline,” he wrote her. “Get the play [Lady of Lyons] and read it, imagining yourself Pauline as addressed by me.” But more often Dawson hoped his beloved would accept his imperfect rendering of devotion and forgive him the “unstudied language” of his heart. “I imagine no picture of the future that is not gilded by your presence,” he told her plainly. “[I] think of no joy that is not doubled by having you to share it, and no privation that is not lessened because you will divide it with me.” It was not an eloquent notion, he admitted, but it had the advantage of being “the plainer language of truth.”21
Elodie was certainly flattered by the strength of Dawson’s affection, but she was wary of it too. Though young, Elodie Todd was not without a certain savvy. She wondered that Dawson could know her at all from their short engagement and teased him that his love would prove a fading fancy. “It does well enough for you to write about such things,” she told him, “but you must remember I have brothers-in-law and possess a wee portion of knowledge about gentlemen.” Admitting she was a novice at love, she nevertheless made it clear that Dawson should not think her innocent in the ways of the world. Her love for him was not a little girl’s reverie or the first blush of womanhood. When Dawson asked if she had “any fears about being deceived or not realizing all” her dreams for marriage, she answered, “not one.” “Do you suppose I allowed myself to be drawn into an engagement,” she asked, “without giving the subject serious reflection, such a serious and important step in life? I have seen and observed too much to be hasty about this matter.” Indeed, Elodie had screened her suitors carefully. Her mother had begun to suppose she would never marry and claimed “if she were a suitor she would bring a clergyman with her when she asked the important question and have it over at once if the answer was favorable.” Elodie, though, was confident and told her mother, “just wait until I see the right one.”22
Elodie’s initial impression of Dawson, however, was not favorable. “You must know,” she told him, “that before our acquaintance began and I never saw you to know you until our meeting in Montgomery, I used to hear very much of you and fancied I knew you.” Then she had thought him “so cold, not unfeeling, but reserved [and] undemonstrative,” a man who “did not care for friendship or love either.” She had been surprised when Dawson began his suit—and more so by its warmth. Possessing a sturdy set of defense mechanisms herself, Elodie sympathized with Dawson’s and forgave him his icy exterior. Her public presentation could be fairly prickly, too, and she tended to give her barbed wit a wide license. In her heart, though, she knew that “love is as essential to my life and happiness as the air I breathe.” Dawson had passed a first muster, “writing so often” and generally “playing the devoted.” It remained to be seen if it would last.23
So Elodie set about testing his sincerity. In veiled and playful ways, she reminded him that she was not an angel or a shrinking violet and delicately corrected the rosy excesses of his domestic reveries. Under Elodie’s careful management, their letters became a kind of flirtatious negotiation, Dawson setting grand goals, Elodie reigning him in. When he called her beautiful, she called him a flatterer and insincere. When he called her gentle, she advised him that she had a temper of her own and not the amiability he “lover-like” attributed to her. Partly, of course, she was just being coy. A woman of irreverent wit, she could not resist poking occasional fun at Dawson’s chronic ardor. A few days into his army service, Dawson managed to drop a trunk on his head—the gash required stitches and left a permanent scar. “I am sorry to hear that you are battling already,” Elodie wrote sympathetically. “[I] would prefer your escaping as many scars as possible but do not think of returning home without some as you will never be accounted brave and bold. Kittie says she fears you will come home limping or without arms, Matt says without a head, so you can see what a subject of concern you are in the family.” Even after Manassas, Elodie could be darkly comic about decapitation. “I would prize your war steed very much,” she wrote him, “but to be a Hero you must have it killed under you in some way—have its head shot off, I think that would appear the funniest.” Elodie’s playfulness, however, could not mask her deeper concerns, partially for Dawson’s physical well-being, partially for their relationship. Where Dawson indulged his anticipations, Elodie laid out the dangers of indulgence. “Do you not think,” she asked him, “that we cause ourselves often unhappiness by allowing these bright and beautiful anticipations and imaginary pictures to take possession of us?” By giving thought to their hopes, they but strengthened the desire to have them realized until “almost unconsciously we build our air castles and it is not until they totter and fall that we realize they were but the baseless fabric of a vision.” And this, of course, was Elodie’s central fear—that Dawson was infatuated less with her than with his own love, that he would prove disappointed and intractable when their married life became routine.24
Dawson sensed this fear but pronounced it baseless. “You say we hardly know each other,” he wrote Elodie, but “I think differently. I know you from your letters intimately.” “Had I not been a volunteer,” he noted, “I never would have known how rich were the imaginings of your mind and how pure and beautiful were the flowers that grow in the garden of your heart.” With each exchange of letters, the couple revealed some new confession, admission, desire that brought them closer together. By the time “we are joined in the holy bonds of marriage,” Dawson claimed, “we will have discovered in each other many latent qualities of head and heart that, otherwise, would have been known only after long years of association.” Certainly the distance was a hardship; certainly nothing could compare to spending time together. But while most couples had a merely perfunctory and artificial courtship, Elodie and Nathaniel were enduring a trial by fire. “Do you not think,” Dawson asked her, “that the circumstances which will prevent our marriage at any certain time will have a tendency to strengthen and increase our love for each other? When tried and made to pass thro’ an ordeal we generally come out stronger and better.” In Dawson’s mind, then, distance did not so much compromise their love as help to constitute it. As the chasm that opened between them grew deeper, their longing grew deeper to fill it; the forced space tested and redoubled their devotion. Dawson had opened his very first letter to Elodie with this same sentiment: “We are speeding on our way over the water and at each revolution of the wheels the distance between us is lengthened but the ties which bind us are only increased.” Time, he believed, would bear him out.25
The problem, though, is that Dawson was speaking mostly for him-self. “Circumstances have made me love you more than I dreamed that I was capable of,” he admitted to Elodie—but he never examined the circumstances. At a thousand miles distant, surrounded by “comforts of home” that seemed in Dawson’s dim recollection “perfectly fabulous,” Elodie inevitably became a glorified abstraction, an embodiment of all he would return to, a reason in the meantime to pull on his boots and slog through the mud. Compared with this, what had the Confederacy to offer: honor and duty and state’s rights and white home rule. Dawson certainly understood the language of these notions, but he could not live them and feel them the way he could Elodie. Dawson, after all, had spent most of his life in Selma proper, partially abstracted from his own plantation. It had become in his memory a sort of bucolic retreat, a vacation spot he always meant to return to someday. “I am sometimes inclined to prefer a life upon the plantation,” he wrote Elodie, “where I could devote myself to you and the pursuits of domestic life, which are not incompatible with literature and books.” These musings, however, were as close as he had ever come to moving there, and he did not indulge them often. He took up the subject of slavery even less frequently and never in its connection to the war. Dawson was fighting, then, for the only force in which he had a perfect faith—his own love of woman. Elodie embodied that faith and became, symbolically and literally, all that was worth living and dying for. Lying “in the rain, on the ground… covered with one blanket,” Dawson was “supported by the knowledge” that he did it all for her. “I…confess that I am calmed and satisfied when I take this view of the war,” he told Elodie, and “I frequently think how just and right it is that I should be fighting for you and my little girls, defending my country and vindicating your rights and liberties.” What exactly those rights and liberties might be, Dawson did not say, likely did not know, but as long Elodie and his country remained roughly synonymous in his mind, he was willing to fight. Traveling to Evansport for supplies, he ran into Brigadier Generals French, Wigfall, and Whiting and their large retinue of aides on an inspection tour of the division. “It was a splendid cavalcade of gallant gentlemen,” Dawson wrote home, “all in uniform and mounted upon noble steeds. As the train rode, at a gallop, over hill and dale, thro’ the woods, beautiful in their autumnal robes of crimson, my mind reverted to the days of Ivanhoe, and I thought the comparison would have been complete if my Elodie had been in the lead, upon a black charger.” For three months, this was Dawson’s view of the war—wet blankets and whist on the one hand, Ivanhoe and Elodie on the other.26
On the morning of July 21, a Union column of ten thousand men forded the sluggish stream of Bull Run and managed to surprise an enemy that was expecting them. The Confederates gave ground grudgingly but were rocked back on their heels. Dawson himself was making good time in reverse when a cannonball struck a fence he was negotiating and sent him flying ten feet to the ground. Now at the rear of a retreating division, musket fire pouring down on him, Dawson, along with the two colonels of the Fourth Alabama, Egbert J. Jones and Evander M. Law, scrambled to catch up to their fleeing infantrymen. Though the Confederates would eventually rally and launch a devastating counterattack, the Fourth Alabama did not fully regain its composure until the battle was over. Dawson himself watched as Colonel Jones and then Major Charles Scott fell on his left and right, and he spent the rest of the afternoon hobbling around the rear of the battlefield, tending to the wounded and trying unsuccessfully to locate his scattered men. Though the Fourth Alabama’s overall conduct was unimpeachable, 38 killed and 208 wounded out of 750 engaged, rumors that Dawson had shamefully fled the field quickly circulated in camp and around Selma. For a man of Dawson’s quiet dignity, the imputation of cowardice was almost too much to bear. He made minute accounts of his conduct to anyone who would listen, including the newspapers, and confessed to one of his friends that it might be better if he never returned from the war. He fantasized about throwing himself into the path of enemy gunfire and promised to meet with pistols any man willing to repeat the charges to his face. The rumors were, of course, baseless and were eventually traced to a disgruntled Selmian who resented Dawson’s social standing and was himself infatuated with Elodie Todd; nevertheless, the experience soured Dawson on the military and convinced him that petty politicking would ruin the Confederacy. After Manassas, Dawson’s mind never again “reverted to the days of Ivanhoe.”27
Then, too, Dawson had begun to find the constraints of army life beset with almost unbearable indignities. For the company-grade officers, especially, army discipline marked the first time they were expected to do as they were told, not as their class prerogatives allowed. The most galling of these constraints from Dawson’s perspective was the army’s refusal to grant leaves of absence and its threat to force all volunteers to remain in service for the duration of the war. More than a breach of trust, these moves made it possible that Dawson would not be able to marry Elodie for a period of some years, a prospect he found offensive. “I am willing to lay down my life for you,” he told Elodie, “but the idea that I am to do so without having been married to you is a harrowing one.” Without the sanction of law and God, Dawson’s relationship with Elodie, and through her his reason for fighting, was faced with illegitimacy. “I have never felt so anxious,” he wrote, “upon any subject, as to close the term of my service in order that I might be with my loved Elodie….I know that unless we are married this spring, I will become useless to the country.” At the outset of the war, Dawson had determined to see the conflict as a defense of female integrity, as a vindication of Elodie’s rights and liberties. Now the simple synonymity he had always assumed between his fiancée and his country was breaking down; the Confederacy was forcing him to choose between them, and he made the choice easily. “You tell me that you have made up your mind to be secondary to your country,” Dawson wrote his beloved, but “You are my country, and can be secondary to nothing.” His own life could be sacrificed, he agreed, and all that he had—except her. “I am not a Roman to give my wife for my country,” he summed it up, because “without [you] I would have no country to live for and to die for.”28
The fall and winter of 1861 brought more whist and more rain; Dawson began referring to his flooded tent as a boat, the flaps whipping “in the wind like sails,” the whole structure threatening always to “capsize.” These were the quietest months of the war—the North was suffering a crisis of confidence, lamenting Manassas and stewing in a “half-acknowledged martial inferiority” to the South. With little going on, it seemed to Dawson that the army should let the twelve-month men return home; they had done their duty and others stood ready to take their place. Besides, he noted cynically, “our armies have done little but throw up lines of fortification to be abandoned when approached by the enemy. Our great men wrangle in Congress over their pay” while the men in the field freeze. By late 1861 it was not patriotism but duty to his men that secured Dawson’s allegiance. “When I reflect upon the condition of others so much more to be pitied than mine,” he noted, “I am warned that there is not in my nature enough of gratitude.” He did, after all, have a tent, a trunk, a servant, an abundance of clothing—everything “absolutely necessary to contentment,” while many of his men, “accustomed to the same comforts,” having “as warm firesides to welcome them back,” were exposed to trials Dawson would never know. The point was graphically illustrated by a young man who came to Dawson’s tent after returning from guard duty. He was “the only son of a widowed mother” and was “shivering from cold and rain,” but, taking a “vacant camp chair and sitting by the fire,” he seemed “as happy as a lord.”29
We have already seen that women formed the foundation of Dawson’s religion and his patriotism. He knew Elodie only through her letters, yet she had somehow come to embody all that gave God and country any meaning. It should not surprise us that when contemplating his men, Dawson grounded his egalitarian impulse in the home; men were all equal before their hearths, all alike in their quest for a good woman and a fire to keep her warm by. That manhood should be grounded in womanhood, that the crush of early love should deepen and color the affections of a man for his fellow man, for his God and his country’s cause, is not a revelation. But as Dawson himself dimly understood, this was not “the effusion of a mind diseased with love.” In a culture in which men surrender nothing easily to each other, the natural appetite for submission to something larger than the self can become unbearable. God was too distant, the Confederacy too vague; Dawson only felt comfortable granting his obeisance to a woman. “Yours will be a reign of love,” he promised Elodie, “I will always be inclined to be controlled by you.” The statement, of course, contains a paradox—if Dawson could incline to be controlled he could just as easily determine to be disinclined. And this, ultimately, was what God and country and women had in common, the thing that made them bleed so easily together—to them all Dawson could surrender his will with the perfect knowledge that he could always take it back. He did not comprehend this fully, of course; overawed by the strength of his own devotion, he was only partially able to understand its source within himself, only dimly able to see that he had fallen in love with negotiating the terms of his own surrender. But he knew enough to be confused, and with this problem, as with all others, he turned artlessly to Elodie for aid. “Is such love as I give worth anything?” he asked her, “Or is it simply the homage that man pays to your sex?” Elodie knew enough not to answer; she had after all “brothers in law [and a] wee portion of knowledge about gentlemen.”30
On July 4, 1851, a train steamed across a new wooden trestle cresting the Flint River and pulled into Oglethorpe, Georgia, the new terminus of the Southwestern Railroad line. The meaning of the event was lost on none of the men and women who gathered to celebrate its arrival. Formerly a sleepy nowhere, Oglethorpe would now have its chance to become a bustling somewhere. Soon planters with their wagons full of cotton were trundling into town from the hinterlands, delighted to have a new means to market. Soon businesses were springing up to ensure that none of the wagons returned to the hinterlands empty. After loading their cotton onto the trains, the planters had money to spend, and surely they had earned a few whiskeys at Oliver’s Hall. Surely their wives and daughters had earned the “Calicoes, Ginghams, and Muslins” to be found at J. Kaufman & Brothers or the “beautiful supply of Perfumery, Toilet Powders, and Paints” in the window of Fears Drug Store. At its apogee in 1855, Oglethorpe boasted eighty businesses, including ten cotton warehouses, eight livery stables, seven hotels, three groceries, two daguerreotypists, and a book store. An omnibus met every train, speculation in lots and land became a respectable profession, and the town’s newspaper trumpeted all of the details to any who would listen. “It is a great place,” gushed the editor, and destined to become the “greatest commercial city in the South.”31
In 1857, a train steamed through Oglethorpe on its way to the railroad’s new terminus at Albany. By 1858, the southbound trains didn’t steam through Oglethorpe at all, preferring to take the spur at Smithville, north of town. In two years, Oglethorpe had become a nowhere again, its moment as a somewhere so brief it hadn’t even been captured by the decennial census. In 1850, the town’s white population was a scant 113. In 1860, it was a hardly more impressive 268. But between these dates, Oglethorpe, Georgia, had been the starry dream of thousands.32
One of those thousands was Theodorick Montfort. Born in 1823, Montfort married Maria Louisa Daniel in 1848 and settled with her and a few slaves on a small farm outside Oglethorpe. There he planted, practiced law, and raised a family until swept into the war as a lieutenant in the Twenty-Fifth Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment. From November 1861 until April 1862, Montfort and his men were part of the division defending Fort Pulaski from the besieging Yankees, an unenviable assignment as the Confederates were outgunned, undersupplied, and without prospects for reinforcements. A fort under siege is like a prison. Retreat is impossible; escape seems impossible. Time draws out, the walls close in, and the occupants can only wait, moving in ever tightening circles, cornered and claustrophobic. After two months, Pulaski began to run out of food. Montfort sent to his wife for his fishing pole and was quite successful catching dinner for his men. The practice also seems to have relaxed him, helping relieve the mental strain of the siege. “I feel much better this evening,” he wrote his wife after an afternoon with the cane pole. “I wish it was possible for me to send you all some of the fish & oysters I have here. I shall catch thousands this Spring and summer if the Yankees will permit & they will have to be very watchful to keep me from fishing.” Gradually though, Pulaski ran out of other supplies as well. “I am entirely out of liquor,” Montfort wrote home, so “I have quit & do not now want it. I am reduced down to 1½ twist of tobacco. I have also concluded to quit that soon. My pants all have holes in them. Soon I shall quit wearing pants.” Montfort wasn’t entirely kidding about his impending pantlessness. “I don’t know that we would suffer much by going naked,” he wrote. “If our Company should be forced to it, we are going to make long shirts out of tents & wear them. … So soon as it becomes the fashion & style of Cockspur Island to wear long shirts only, it will look & answer well.”33
Montfort knew clearly why he suffered such indignities. “I am discharging my duty to my…family,” he explained to his wife. “I am prepared to submit to any inconvenience, make any sacrifice, & face any danger that duty may require.” Like many soldiers before and since, Montfort’s war effort was primarily personal, familial. While he could not (or at least did not) articulate precisely the nature of the threat, he was convinced the Yankees threatened the South at its most vital and tender point—its women, children, and homes. “We are anxious for the hour to arrive when by the aid of a Just God … [we will] avenge the damning insult & outrage that has been offered & promised…our wives, daughters & sisters,” he wrote Louisa. “[Only then can we] enjoy undisturbed from Yankee Invasion the happiness of home.”34
Because Montfort’s motivation to fight drew so deeply on his love of home, letters from his family became crucial to his continued willingness to endure deprivation and possible death. When he received a letter, he “cried & shouted like a child” and proclaimed himself “right side up & prepared for anything the Yankees may send.” But when he did not he felt an “anxiety…so great” it made him “sad & almost sick.” Letters, in short, allowed Montfort to see himself as he was seen from home, as the tireless protector of a family, and so long as they arrived, he could bear all that was maddening and miserable about life under siege.35
In February 1862, the Union army completed its encirclement of Pulaski and severed the lines of communication with the fort. Unlike the disruption to the supply of food, liquor, or clothing, the cessation of the mails was not something Montfort could accept with stoicism or a sense of humor. “[I] cannot get content to be satisfied with not hearing from home,” he admitted. Montfort’s discontentment was not idle chatter. Together with several fellow officers, he commissioned a courier to sneak across enemy lines to attend to their personal correspondence. The mission, Montfort admitted, was a dangerous one. The man had to “select some dark night & walk…five miles through a marsh from one to three feet deep in mud before [he would] pass the Yankees that are [patrolling] day & night.” Three times the feat was attempted. Three times the couriers were captured, leaving Montfort with the certain knowledge that “the Yankees have had fine times reading our letters.” Grudgingly, he admitted that “communication is now entirely & effectually cut off.”36
Isolated within Pulaski, Theodorick Montfort lived a sort of double life. During the day he made preparations for war. “All is life, animation, & excitement,” he wrote, “with the mere hope of a change & a fight. Such is the human heart. Men after being in camp a while become indifferent to danger & death. I begin to have that kind of feeling myself. A man looses his better feelings & becomes hardened & indifferent to evry thing.” But during the evenings everything was not animation and excitement, hardness and indifference. “In the dead hour of night when all is silent,” he noted, “when we feel alone in the presence & care of our Maker, then home with all its endearments come crowding upon our memory, then men who face & smile at danger, weep & pray for those dear ones at home.” Such a double life was perfectly normal, of course; virtually every wartime soldier led it. Each day he screwed himself up to face death (or cause it); each night he unwound to embrace the life that remained to him. In Montfort’s case, however, the tension of the siege coupled with the cessation of the mail seems to have disrupted this process. His home grew so far away his imagination could not find it. The war grew so close his mind could not purge it. Walled up in Pulaski, Montfort was himself besieged, imperiled not merely physically but psychologically.37
This psychological strain is most evident in Montfort’s plaintive attempts to familiarize his surroundings. His special charge at Pulaski included three large casement guns, their carapaces, ammunition, and firing crews. To him fell not only the job of drilling the men who would fire the guns but the privilege of naming the guns themselves. “The 1st 64 pounder I have dubbed Addie Elizabeth after Ma,” Montfort wrote home, “the 2nd 42 pounder Sarah, in honor of Mrs Hall, the 3d a 32 pounder Louisa after yourself. The names are hansomely written on each piece with white paint in large letters, they are known in Garrison as all the other guns are by their names.” With the familiar names emblazoned on their barrels and his near constant contact with them, Montfort began, by his own admission, actually to fall in love with his guns, to create from them a sort of ersatz family to replace the real one receding from him:
My guns feel to me as part of my family. You would be really amused to hear the endearing epithets & see the tender care & consideration that is paid to them. I love them on account of my frequent & almost hourly association with them; 2d I love them because they are willing & submissive instruments in my hands, to protect myself & my country; 3d I love them because it is human & natural to love & pett something (they are my Petts); 4th I love them because the names reminds me of home & my wife, my mother, my friends; & 5th I love them because the names act as an incentive to stimulate me to acts of bravery & to a faithful & unflinching discharge of my duty, in the protection of those dear ones at home—& when the hour of conflict comes (which I think will be soon) I hope & expect to be as faithful to my guns (or Petts) as I would to those whose names they represent—& if it should be my fate to fall it shall be in their midst. If I survive, neither my (Petts) nor those who in honor they are named shall feel ashamed or dishonored by me. So you see we find some thing to love & pett on this Island.
Desperate to domesticate his formidable surroundings, Montfort dressed his own instruments of death in the raiment of family life. Love, Protection, Faithfulness, Tenderness, Humanity, Endearment, Home, Wife, Mother, Friendship—all this hung in his casements, like wash drying on a line, obscuring in some small way the dread purpose of the machines.38
On March 31, with the Union army preparing its final assault on Pulaski, Montfort made a last inspection of his casements. They were, he said, as “neat & clean as my house,” and for just a moment the determined defender lashed out. “We are nerved for the contest by the recollection of our homes, our families & our rights,” he affirmed. “If the Fort is taken we want them to find nothing [but] ruin[ed] walls & mangled corpse[s].” Penning a last letter to be delivered in the event of his death, he remonstrated his wife to teach his children to “hate [Yankees] with that bitter hatred that will never permit them to meet under any circumstances without seeking to destroy each other. I know the breach is now wide & deep between us & the Yankees. Let it widen & deepen untill all Yankees or no Yankees are to live in the South.” But Montfort was too decent a person to sustain such sentiments; his great wave of anger crested and broke on the shoals of his own goodness:
Yet amidst all of our vindictive feelings & bitter hatred [of] our enemy there is something sad & melancholy in the preparation for Battle. To see so many healthy men prepareing for the worst by disposing of their property by Will, to see the surgeon sharping his instruments & whetting his saw to take [from] them those necessary member[s] of our body that God has given us for our indispensible use, to see men engaged in carding up & prepareing lint to stop the flow of human blood from cruel & inhuman wounds, is awful to contemplate. Yet there is still another preperation for battle still more sickening—The Casemates are cleared; nothing is allowed to remain that is combustible or would be in the way during an engagement…the floor is covered around each gun with sand not for health or cleanliness but to drink up human blood as it flows from the veins & hearts of noble men, from the hearts of those that love & are beloved. This is necessary to prevent the floor from becoming slipery with blood so as to enable the men to stand & do their duty. These are some of the preperations for battle. How sad to contemplate, yet how awful must be the realization—What a calamity is war. When will men cease to fight, & love their neighbors as themselves? Not as long as the present generation lives I am certain.
The lawyers are drafting the wills. The sawbones are sharpening the instruments. The men are screwing themselves up to “stand & do their duty.” But Montfort’s mind is already flying ahead to the time when the men are dying, the saw is working, and the blood is pooling beneath his beloved “family.” Montfort would not be able to domesticate these images. There was nothing here that he could “love and pett.” The war with all its horrors had burst through his feeble defenses, and with nowhere else to turn, he had thrown himself on the mercy of a cliché: “When will men cease to fight, & love their neighbors as themselves?” It is a sad and plaintive question, wretched with impotence, the last gasp of a man who has come to understand that in war there is neither mercy nor sense, just death.39
Unlike the other men paired in this study, Nathaniel Dawson and Theodorick Montfort had similar temperaments. Each man drew his energy from the inner rather than the outer world; each man possessed a tenderness of heart that ill-suited a soldier; each man looked on his war service as a sacrifice for love. “You are my country,” Dawson had written to Elodie. “Without [you] I would have no country to live for and to die for.” Montfort felt exactly the same way: “I am discharging my duty to my…family,” he had explained to Louisa. “I am prepared to…make any sacrifice…that duty may require.” The men diverged in the nature of their war experience, however. Where Dawson’s Elodie presented herself nightly in the face of the moon, Montfort’s Louisa seemed ever mantled in the darkness beyond the fort walls. Ultimately, only one of these men could consistently make the metaphysical journey home, and the consequences were telling.
Writing home was a literal as well as a literary project. In concert with wives and sweethearts, Confederate soldiers created ersatz domestic worlds integral to their continued participation in the world of mud and marches. In war, as in the marketplace before the war, men’s individuality, which was their dignity, threatened always to dissolve in the impersonal relations of figurative or literal battles. In returning home, men became individuals again, heroes even, for their labors on behalf of their households. During the Civil War, of course, the journey home was a psychic rather than a physical one, but it was no less important. Confederates were all the time writing, imagining, and dreaming home, not merely because they wanted to be there but because they found there compensations for all the indignities they daily endured.
As the conflict dragged on, however, men found it increasingly difficult to find their way home; war began to dominate their inner understanding of themselves, and their houses and the families within them began to recede. Tally Simpson became so desperate to find a way home that he created a sponsor for his journey in a picture he cut from a magazine. Edwin Fay became so hardened that he could better imagine sleeping in his wife’s flower yard than in her bed. Certainly there were some men, like Nathaniel Dawson, who flew home and back almost unimpeded. But there were an equal number like Theodorick Montfort who gradually lost their way, becoming estranged from former lives and former selves. For these men, home became a dwindling memory, an almost unwelcome revenant of a former age. Thomas Cobb is a fascinating example of this tendency. For the first year of the war, he spent his happiest hours in nocturnal revery. “[You] flit through my dreams…like a smiling fairy,” he told his wife, and when I wake I long only “to catch the broken thread and dream on.” Like many soldiers, Cobb had placed his wife at the center of his war effort; he had only to close his eyes to conjure her image and remember the reasons for which he fought. A year later, however, Cobb took cold comfort in dreams. “I have dreamed so often,” he admitted helplessly, “that…I have a vague uneasy consciousness that it is all a dream.” Cobb, like Montfort, had become a liminal man, occupying the otherworldly space between sleeping and waking, living and dying. Here dreams offered no respite; the war was always present, even when he closed his eyes. “I dreamed about you all last night,” Cobb wrote his wife despondently. “You had married another man [and] I thought I saw little Sally standing alone just as I went into battle.” Cobb’s mind, like Montfort’s, had raced far ahead to his inevitable death on the battlefield, when his daughter would whisper her ghostly good-byes and his wife would mourn him and move on.40
To his credit, Cobb determined that men had only themselves to blame for their predicament. “Each of us magnifies our own importance and supposes that without us the world would be nothing to a large circle,” he admitted. Then “death comes and soon after oblivion. A…widow here and there cherishes a husband’s memory and weeps over his grave, but the tide sweeps over his resting place and [soon it] is as if he had never lived.” The quest for immortality, as Cobb finally grasped, brought only early mortality and an empty life. “What folly it is to seek after fame,” he admitted to his wife. “Oh for peace, darling, peace and Home and your embrace. Are these in store for me?” For a quarter million Confederates, Cobb included, the answer was no.41