With This Pledge

Name: With This Pledge
Rating: 4.7 (1983 reviews)

by Tamera Alexander Book 1 in the Carnton Novels series.

First published 2019

Amazon

4.7(1,983)

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Clouston is governess at Carnton when the Battle of Franklin turns the house into a Confederate field hospital. Assisting surgeons among hundreds of wounded men, she meets Captain Roland Ward Jones, a Mississippi sharpshooter whose injured leg may be amputated. The promises they exchange amid the hospital’s suffering develop into a courtship complicated by Lizzie’s existing engagement and her opposition to the Confederate cause.

Drawing on the real couple’s surviving letters, the novel treats romance as part of a broader moral crisis involving slavery, loyalty, military duty and medical trauma. Lizzie and Roland’s faith must survive disagreement and loss, and their relationship can progress only when principle is not silenced by affection or wartime sentiment.