At the end of the Civil War, Confederate Captain Ben Chandler is heading home to Texas to try and rebuild his life.  Though much of what he left to fight for is gone.  Nevertheless, it is home.  He is more than ready to leave the suffering and hardships of war behind.  He has one thing to do on the way home and that is to find some breeding stock for his cousins, who have wired him the money. 

He knows it would not be easy to take a fine horse on the long journey but when he found the perfect one, bought it, and headed out he never expected to find a slip of a girl trying to steal him during the night.  When Clarity Breckenridge claims that it is rightfully her horse and that her underhanded cousin has wrongfully sold him Ben is frustrated but when she cannot produce any papers heads on his way. 

Clarity gets into more than one scrape while trying to get her horse back.  When she finally gets Ben to agree to head back to the town where he bought it so she can try and prove it, they are in for a huge surprise.  Everyone claims that Clarity is dead and that she is an imposter.  Now suddenly she must be making a mess of someone else’s plans as she is almost permanently silenced, from trying to prove who she is. 

Ben whisks her away to Texas and through different adventures they both grow closer and might even open their hearts, but are either of them willing to allow that to happen? 

The Salvation of Captain Ben Chandler is another look into the hard times that followed the Civil War in American History.  While romances have been written about this time frame before, Ms. Thackston takes a bit of a unique approach in talking about all the hardships, and having her characters go through many of them.  These aren’t fanciful adventures but ones that have a ring of ‘realness’ to them.   This is the thing that I feel sets her books apart and makes The Salvation of Captain Ben Chandler a fantastic sequel to “The Abduction of Miss Jenny Chandler”, which I also recommend reading, but is not necessary to enjoy this story.