Letters of Caroline Virginia "Jennie" Samuel, a young woman of Tuscaloosa, Ala., to her cousin Edward W. Samuel, a Confederate soldier based in Kentucky and Missouri, largely concern social and family life in Tuscaloosa during the closing months of the Civil War and the early days of Reconstruction. Samuel writes of the health of family members, news of relatives and friends, her music studies, her detestation of "yankees," the romantic entanglements and marriages of friends, and the upheavals and stresses of the war and its aftermath. In many letters Samuel flirtatiously inquires about her cousin's prospects for marriage and alludes coyly to her own lack of male company and later to her plenteous supply of it. Samuel also provides an account of the burning of the steamer Montgomery on the Black Warrior River in 1866 or 1867.
