Where the battle was fought : a novel by Charles Egbert Craddock
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"Where the Battle Was Fought" by Charles Egbert Craddock is a novel written in the late 19th century. Set on a haunted Tennessee battlefield during Reconstruction, it follows the proud but ruined General Vayne and his lively daughter Marcia as their isolated, mortgaged household intersects with Captain John Estwicke, a Union officer unsettled by the ground’s grim memories. In parallel, a financier, Maurice Brennett, and his improvident associate Travis scheme around an
inheritance tied to Antoinette St. Pierre, stirring legal and moral peril. Expect a blend of Gothic atmosphere, postwar social tension, and intrigue over identity, honor, and property. The opening of the novel lingers on a ghost-rumored battlefield and a shattered mansion where General Vayne, Marcia, and Aunt Kirby receive Estwicke, whose uneasy reaction to “Fort Despair” hints at a hidden past; a ferryman later mistakes him for a dead Confederate officer who once burned the bridge there. In town, Estwicke befriends a young lawyer, Meredith, then catches a card-sharp cheating during a poker game at a hotel; with an unloaded pistol he forces the cheat to disgorge the winnings, only to reject the money in disgust. Meanwhile Brennett, captivated by Estwicke’s fierce presence, turns to urgent business: his partner Travis has been cut out of expected funds by a codicil favoring Antoinette St. Pierre, so they plot to regain value by pressing her to swap her city houses (clouded by a remainder-man’s title, John Doane Fortescue) for Travis’s plantations, or even to marry her, sweetening the approach with a storied family heirloom. These threads set a mood of ruin and calculation, establishing the central characters, tensions, and schemes without yet resolving them. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Craddock, Charles Egbert, 1850-1922 |
|---|---|
| Title | Where the battle was fought : a novel |
| Original Publication | Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1884. |
| Note | The battle of the title is the Battle of Stones River, Dec. 31, 1862 to Jan. 2, 1863. |
| Credits | Peter Becker, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Reading Level | Reading ease score: 71.1 (7th grade). Fairly easy to read. |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | Murfreesboro (Tenn.) -- History -- 19th century -- Fiction |
| Subject | Murfreesboro (Tenn.) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction |
| Category | Text |
| eBook-No. | 76397 |
| Release Date | Jun 27, 2025 |
| Copyright | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 439 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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