Elodie Todd, a native Kentuckian, was stunned when Confederate officer Nathaniel Dawson proposed marriage just before his company left his native Selma, Alabama. She was 12 years his junior and worried her family would never approve of the engagement, considering she barely knew Dawson. But Todd accepted, and over the next year, April 1861 through April 1862, the couple wrote more than 200,000 words to each other.