Craddock, Charles Egbert 1850-1922 creator text utu 2025 monographic en 1 online resource : multiple file formats "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.) The battle of the title is the Battle of Stones River, Dec. 31, 1862 to Jan. 2, 1863. Release date is 2025-06-27 Peter Becker, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Originally published: Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1884 Murfreesboro (Tenn.) -- History -- 19th century -- Fiction Murfreesboro (Tenn.) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction PS Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1884 https://archive.org/details/wherebattlewasfo00crad https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76397 https://archive.org/details/wherebattlewasfo00crad https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76397 UtSlPG 260607 20260610134752.0 76397