In 1863 Griffin Alexander Stedman, commander of the Connecticut Eleventh Infantry, wrote this letter as one of his many thinly veiled attempts to convince his closest correspondent, Charles J. Hoadley, to visit him during the height of the Civil War. They had a close and intimate relationship, one that went beyond the standard polite niceties of nineteenth-century letter writing. The two shared gifts, gossip, news, favors, and personal insecurities while Stedman was deployed. Only twenty-four letters by Stedman exist, and out of those twenty are addressed to Hoadley. This correspondence is a classic example of what historians have deemed “romantic friendships.” In the past, these unique friendships were interpreted as non-sexual and platonic, but historians have since surmised the possibility of closer bonds that challenge our modernist definitions of what the parameters of a friendship could be. In the case of Stedman and Hoadley this is a moot point as...
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