This story will follow two characters introduced in Book 2, FOR THE CAUSE OF FREEDOM. When Charlie disappeared and Abigail was concerned as to his whereabouts, her friend Clara introduced her to Mariah Wright, a woman whose husband was serving in the same regiment as Charlie, and who was able to provide insight into his current location. Unfortunately, Mariah's husband is killed at Petersburg, just prior to General Lee's surrender and the ultimate conclusion of the War Between the States.
While serving in the Confederate Army, Charlie Turner had befriended a Queenstown resident, Isaac Roberts. Isaac and Charlie had served together in the First and Second Maryland Infantry since the onset of the war in 1861. When they are paroled at Appomattox, the men return to the Eastern Shore and the lives they had left behind. Isaac, however, returns home to discover that not only has he lost his business during the war, but his wife's faithfulness as well. She has taken up with the man whom Isaac had entrusted with her care in his absence.
Following is the synopsis of FROM FIELDS OF PROMISE:
Belonging neither to the South where its sympathies lay, nor to the North which held it captive, Maryland’s Eastern Shore must forge a new path through the havoc left by the Civil War.
Mariah Wright, a Confederate widow, has to find a way to keep her husband’s farm from falling into poverty and ruin. Most of the slaves have headed north to freedom and there aren’t enough hands to work the fields. Left with the care of her aging mother-in-law and young sister-in-law, Mariah strives to carry the burdens the war has left her.
Isaac Roberts, a veteran of the Confederate Army, returned from Appomattox to discover that the life he left behind has moved on without him. Disillusioned from the loss of a cause to which he had given everything, and damaged from the savage realities of war, Isaac fears he has nothing left to live for.
With nowhere else to turn, Isaac accepts the challenge of helping a fallen comrade’s widow save all she has left of her husband’s legacy. As the fractured nation struggles to come together after four bitter years of fighting, Mariah and Isaac must find their place in a world which has changed forever.