In 1953, Nancy Hawkins Sellers entered the Jefferson Davis Soldier Home in Biloxi, Mississippi, known more famously as “Beauvoir.” It was created to care for impoverished Confederate veterans, as well as their wives and widows, who had been approved for military pensions. Oddly enough, Nancy Sellers had no direct memory of the American Civil War. Born in 1867, she was the eldest of seven children raised in the Florida panhandle where her father and grandfather worked as laborers with no noted property or personal wealth when the war began. In the 1880s, though, Nancy met John Andrew Sellers, whose prewar life was the exact opposite of hers.
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