JIMMY CARTER, NOVELIST OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

In February of this year, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter entered hospice care. Presumably, the 98-year-old Carter’s death is imminent. When it comes, you will hear a lot about his career as a Naval officer, as a peanut farmer, as a Governor of the State of Georgia, as a President of the United States, as an ex-President of the United States, as a humanitarian, and as a husband and father. One thing you probably won’t hear much about is his career as a novelist. But, as short as it was (he produced just one novel), I think it deserves attention.

In 2003, Jimmy Carter became the first American President to publish a novel. And he remains, to date, the only U.S. President to have written a novel by himself (Bill Clinton has written two thrillers in collaboration with James Patterson). Carter’s novel is called The Hornet’s Nest, and its subject is the Revolutionary War that ultimately severed Colonial America from Great Britain. Countless novels have been written on that subject, but Carter’s is less typical because it focuses exclusively on how the war played out in America’s southern colonies. Although Carter began writing the book in 1996, and published it twenty years ago, it nonetheless speaks to a lot of contemporary issues, including the 1619 Project, the pandemic, gerrymandering, crooked elections, environmental destruction, free trade, immigration, and much more.

The Hornet’s Nest, though filled with imperfections, is fascinating to read, a highly detailed and shockingly blunt account of how America gained its independence. As a schoolchild, in the 1960s and 1970s, I was left with the impression that the Revolutionary War was fought primarily in places like Concord, Massachusetts, New York’s Fort Ticonderoga, Bunker Hill, Massachusetts, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire’s Fort William and Mary. To be sure, the fighting started up north and many of the most famous incidents connected with the war (Paul Revere’s Ride, The Boston Tea Party) took place there. But the war eventually spread all the way down the Eastern Seaboard. Carter’s book focuses primarily on South Carolina, Florida, and, especially, Georgia, his home state, of which he was the 76^th governor.

Between July 4, 1974 and December 31, 1976, CBS Television ran a nightly feature in prime time called Bicentennial Minutes. Each segment began with the words “Two hundred years ago today…” and then described an event from the Revolutionary War that had occurred exactly two hundred years earlier. This left poorly educated TV junkies like me with the impression that the war was fought largely in the years 1774-1776. For years afterwards, my impression of America’s birth was that a group of brave and honorable American patriots battled and defeated a British Army that was much larger, much better armed, and much better trained, after which they drew up a Constitution and made General George Washington the first President of the United States of America. In fact, the war began in 1775, dragged on until at least 1783, and Washington didn’t become president until 1789. Wikipedia claims that the Revolutionary War lasted about eight years and four months, ending with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in September of 1783. Carter notes that it was not until November of 1784 that American troops finally replaced British troops in the state of New York, which occurred nearly ten years after the opening shots of the war were fired in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in April of 1775.

As a schoolchild I used to get the Revolutionary War and the Civil War confused. This is understandable. A handful of the soldiers who fought in the former war were still alive when the latter broke out. Henry Lee III (aka “Light Horse Harry”) fought valiantly in the Revolutionary War. His son, General Robert E. Lee, fought valiantly in the Civil War (alas, for the wrong side). It was difficult for me to remember if the Battle of Chelsea Creek, the Battle of Gloucester, the Battle of Philippi, or the Battle of Carthage were fought during the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. Some of them didn’t even sound as if they were fought on American soil. (The first two were Revolutionary War battles; the second two are Civil War battles.)

America’s Civil War lasted almost exactly four years and ended with a decisive victory by the United States Army over the Army of the Confederacy. America’s direct involvement in World War One lasted only about a year and a half. America’s involvement in the Second World War lasted “only” three years and eight months and ended with decisive victories over the Axis powers. The Revolutionary War, as described by Jimmy Carter, however, most closely resembles the Vietnam War, with the American rebels cast in the role of the North Vietnamese. Both conflicts were long and brutal and marked by countless war crimes. In both wars, the side with the deepest pockets represented a country located far away and across the sea. Ultimately, both wars were won not by the richest of the two belligerent sides, but by the side that had no other country to retreat to. “We have seen this play out time and time again in modern history, when a smaller country – or parties within a smaller country – with a willingness to fight can wear down a larger power,” wrote Phillips Payson O’Brien in the Atlantic on July 1, 2022. “Be it Afghanistan (twice) or Vietnam (twice), morale and commitment to a fight mean more than which side is the more ‘powerful.’” O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, was commenting on Russia’s inability to level a knock-out blow in its current war against Ukraine. But what he wrote is also true of America’s Revolutionary War.

In recent years woke leftists have been arguing that the true birth of the U.S.A. occurred in 1619, when the first slaves were brought here from Africa. Conservatives have fought back in an effort to reclaim July 4, 1776, as America’s true birthday and to present positive stories about America’s founding fathers. Neither side in this debate seems interested in a compromise right now, but I’d like to suggest one anyway. I recommend that American educators and school boards stick with the 1776 birth date but make The Hornet’s Nest required reading for all high school students. Although Carter clearly believed he was writing about the birth pangs of the United States of America, his book also makes it clear that most of the slaves on southern plantations would have preferred a British victory to an American one.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of the creators of the 1619 project, has said, “I think the thing in the project that made people the most upset was when I wrote that one of the reasons why the colonies decided that they wanted to start a revolution and form the United States was to preserve slavery. That was really shocking to a lot of people.” Brown University History Professor Gordon S. Wood rejected this notion, writing, "I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves ... No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776."

Carter seems to split the difference. While acknowledging (as we’ll see below) that many, if not most, slaves wanted a British victory, he points out that there was still plenty of support for slavery in Britain at the time of the war. As one of his characters notes, “This is something not much discussed, but the slave trade provides a steady stream of money back to England, a lot of it through Liverpool. The colonies in tropical climates must have workers to accommodate the extreme heat, and the British have found that a few places to buy slaves along the West African coast are as good as gold mines. The British elite pretend to disassociate themselves from slave traders, but they are deeply and eagerly involved in the accumulation of the profits, even as they look the other way.”

Nor does Carter turn away from the horrors of slavery. He notes that slaves who attempted to run away or commit some other crime were often hanged or worse. “On several occasions, after a slave was hanged, his head was cut off and placed on a stake for viewing for several days, and on four occasions in North Carolina, for particularly heinous acts, slaves were burned at the stake.” Carter’s primary Caucasian characters are mostly too poor to be slaveholders themselves. What rankles them more than the killing of disobedient slaves is that the law provides for slave owners to be compensated by the taxpayers if a slave has to be imprisoned or executed for his crimes. At a meeting of small farmers, one man stands up and complains about the situation, noting that the governor’s council, which makes the laws, consists entirely of “rich and powerful people who seem to be more interested in the eastern counties than in those of us out here in the Piedmont region. There seems to be special attention paid to big farmers near the coast, all of whom have large numbers of slaves. I don’t know if you all have heard this, but there is a new law that makes us taxpayers compensate rich farmers every time one of their Negroes dies, even of natural causes – if they certify that the death was premature!”

Carter takes pains to point out that, then as now, a wealthy elite ran the country and only occasionally were they responsive to the needs and complaints of the poor and the working classes. In fact, many of the political battles of the 1770s mirror the battles playing out in America today. These days, local school boards and parents often fight for greater control over what students are taught in class, particularly regarding issues of sex and gender. They don’t want the agenda set at the state or national level. They want these things decided locally. Carter’s characters live in a time when same-sex marriage and gender reassignment weren’t a part of the conversation, but they nonetheless want hot-button issues decided locally, not by the state government or the Crown. Says one angry townsperson: “We want to have a hand in choosing the local officials who take care of things around the courthouses, and in monitoring and correcting how they perform their duties. We’re tired of being cheated and overcharged by sheriffs, justices of the peace, tax collectors, recording officers, and judges. Their highest calling is to enrich themselves. We insist that, through public meetings, we citizens can help set the policies that affect our lives.” This mirrors the much more recent complaints of citizens in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, a town of about 21,000 people where, in the year 2013, more than 31,000 arrest warrants were issued by the local courts. Most of those arrests were for minor traffic violations and other lesser offenses. The police and the courts in Ferguson, a town populated mostly by African-Americans, were using draconian tactics to finance town services by annually levying fines against nearly everyone who lived there. Carter’s white, working-class Georgians of the eighteenth-century were in similar straits. They were heavily fined, in part, to maintain the wealth of the slave-owning class.

Back then, as now, taxes were always a bone of contention. “Now let me speak a word about taxes,” Herman Husband, a leader of the North Carolina Quaker community in Carter’s novel, tells a political gathering. “We don’t mind paying our share, but the laws are being changed every year to shift the burden from the ruling elite to the shoulders of peasants, small farmers, and honest workers. Many of them cost the poorest citizens the same amount as the richest ones, like the poll tax, work levies, and duties and fees on the necessities of life…The tax laws are a crime, and an embarrassment to every right-thinking citizen!”

Then as now, rapacious lawyers were the bane of the citizenry. Herman Husband again: “Even worse in many cases are the dishonest lawyers who now stand between us and getting licenses, buying property, recording deeds, having our day in court, and even paying the taxes we are charged. When they can’t find an honest case they encourage court suits to be brought against us, and then everyone in the courthouse eats up our fees and fines like hogs in a trough of slop!” This mirrors contemporary complaints about excessive occupational licensure hurdles. In some states, such as Utah, you can’t braid African-American hair without a cosmetology license. This is true also of a lot of other professions that probably shouldn’t require government licensing. And, of course, to negotiate the complex licensing process it is often necessary to employ the services of an attorney. When running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1976, Carter famously tried to take advantage of the public’s dislike of lawyers by pointing out again and again that he was the only one of the six major candidates (including far left-winger Jerry Brown and far right-winger George Wallace) who lacked a law degree.

Loyalty pledges have long been a tool of both left- and right-wing zealots in America. Novelist (Earth Abides, etc.) and U.C. Berkeley Professor George R. Stewart published a book in 1950 called The Year of the Oath, about his fight against Berkeley’s Board of Regents who in 1949 implemented a requirement that all teachers at Berkeley sign an oath declaring that they were anti-communists. Lately it is the anti-racists who have embraced loyalty oaths, and many liberal colleges and institutions require fealty to the gospel of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) from those seeking employment at the institution or to engage in business with it. Carter reminds us that loyalty oaths in America predate the Declaration of Independence. “An official notice, signed by [North Carolina] Governor Tryon, stated that…every male inhabitant would be required to swear an oath of allegiance to the colonial government and to the Crown. The penalty for refusal to do so would be arrest and trial for subversion. State and county officials would visit every home to secure the written pledges.”

Carter’s historical tale also includes illustrations of how an epidemic can tear a community apart. When a Dr. Railston discovers that Miss Norma Hume, a midwife, has contracted smallpox, he insists on quarantining not just her but also the neighbor women who have been treating her. He tells Sophie Pratt, the wife of the town’s only leather worker: “Maybe your husband will agree to let you come to our house and stay for a few days until we can see how Miss Norma gets along.” Sophie doesn’t like this suggestion and tells him, “I want to go home first and talk to him.” But Dr. Railston replies, “We don’t want your husband to be in contact with the pox, so it would be best for you and him not to be together just yet.”

After informing Henry Pratt that his wife, Sophie, was being quarantined, the doctor consults a medical pamphlet on medical quarantines. Carter writes: “It described how everyone in a contaminated house or ship could best be quarantined, how they must not be permitted to come in contact with other people, and what treatment was most effective. People who had previously survived the pox were not known to have it again.”

Dr. Railston becomes the Anthony Fauci of his time and place, the most important public authority on the epidemic, which also makes him a bit of a lightening rod. Carter writes: “Word of the illness swept through Hillsborough in an hour or two, and the community agreed to support Dr. Railston when he imposed a strict quarantine on Miss Norma and everyone she had contacted during the three days since she had returned from Norfolk.” Just as the COVID-19 pandemic had medical experts racing to find a vaccine, so too in Carter’s novel does Dr. Railston attempt to find a pharmaceutical intervention that will save lives. He asks Henry Pratt for permission to try an experimental treatment on Sophie Pratt. He explains: “Henry, in the last few years some people have been given a light dose of smallpox, also called a variola, in hopes that it might head off a more serious case, but this is something that hasn’t been proven for sure. They call this procedure variolation, or inoculation. It’s a hotly debated subject among doctors and especially among the general population, and is illegal in most cities along the coast, except Philadelphia. In 1760…a doctor in Savannah who tried variolation had his house and apothecary burned down and was, in effect, run out of the colony for trying to give smallpox to people who had been exposed.” In spite of this, Dr. Railston wants to inoculate not just Sophie, but also himself, and Mrs. Railston, all of whom have been in contact with Miss Norma and are probably already infected. But the first successful medical injections using hypodermic needles didn’t occur until 1844, so syringes aren’t an option for Dr. Railston. Instead he collects pus from one of Miss Norma’s open sores on a piece of string and allows it to dry there. He then makes a small slit in the arm of the person he is inoculating, ties the string so that it pushes into the small bloody wound, and then wraps it in place with a bandage. By doing this he hopes to introduce small amounts of smallpox into the bloodstream, giving the immune system an opportunity to fight it, so that it will know what to do if a larger infection occurs. Henry Pratt reluctantly gives the doctor permission to inoculate his wife (back then, a doctor wouldn’t have treated a wife for any medical condition without the permission of her husband). Railston also inoculates himself and Mrs. Railston. The doctor and his wife respond positively to the inoculation. Sophie, alas, does not. Her condition worsens. Henry asks to see his wife, but the doctor advises against it, urging “him to limit his visits to talking through the window of the room where she lay,” a heartbreaking situation that played out over and over again in 2020 at the height of the current pandemic. Sophie “struggled to talk and to keep his spirits up, but her throat felt clogged and, to Henry, her few words didn’t seem quite rational.” Soon, Sophie dies and, inconsolable, Henry refuses to talk to Dr. Railston. Then, as now, a highly infectious disease was a subject that could tear a community apart.”

Carter’s history doesn’t take a reliably liberal or conservative bent. At one point, he argues that 18^th century European farming methods were much more environmentally sensitive than Indian methods. He notes that some northern Indian tribes had adopted the crop rotation systems of the Europeans, which keeps the soil from being depleted of its nutrients. But in Georgia the Indians used a traditional method that the Europeans called “swidden,” which involved chopping down or burning up all the smaller trees on piece of cropland. Trees too big to be felled the Indians would strip the bark from, which killed the trees where they stood and prevented them from drawing nutrients from the surrounding soil. The Indians would overplant the area with food crops until, after about five years, “the soil around an entire village was no longer productive and, with the game and fish also depleted, the village had to be moved.” According to Carter, “One adverse consequence of this was to give proof to the Europeans’ claim that the Indians were nomads and not fixed to any particular place, and therefore would not object to moving farther westward.”

But Carter is also extremely critical of the excesses of the colonists. In the Revolutionary War, if Carter’s novel is to be believed, the Indians mostly favored Great Britain. Carter argues that, under King George III, Britain was interested primarily in building up settlements on America’s east coast. The King didn’t approve of colonists pushing westward because he understood that they’d be more difficult to rule (and collect taxes from) as they got further from the major east coast cities where the seats of government resided. Thus the Indians mostly sided with the King against the revolutionaries.

Carter also notes that the colonists used a form of capitalism to help corrupt the Indian way of life and make the natives dependant on the settlers. An Indian named Newota explains to a sympathetic white man, “The great king across the sea has forbidden any settlement in Indian lands, but your people pay little attention to his proclamations. Our people are hungry for merchandise from Europe and are constantly outtraded. Some have quit growing our own food. They prefer to exchange deerskins and furs for corn and meat…We are always at a disadvantage when the traders reach an agreement, but the reaction of our people is just to be grateful when they can buy goods on credit, regardless of the cost. There is no doubt that your political leaders encourage and even pay merchants to ensure that our people are always in debt. They know that we have only our land to repay what we owe.”

As sympathetic as he is to the Indians, Carter argues that most of the white people – British and American colonists alike – sought to live harmoniously with the natives and that only a troublemaking few can be blamed for the harm that befell the Indians. He writes: “The vast majority of natives, British officials, and American settlers had much in common, including a strong desire to live as neighbors and to overcome difficulties peacefully. But there were strong and increasingly angry men with clear goals, and among them violence was preferable to patience and accommodations. There was an insatiable demand for more land from the stream of new settlers who moved south and west from the northern colonies or from Europe, and on this tide of immigrants into the frontier regions was a froth of indolent and unruly riffraff, often incompatible with established neighbors or unwilling to comply with the legal standards of any organized society.” Carter’s evocation of “riffraff” sounds somewhat like Hilary Clinton’s evocation of “deplorables.” And he doesn’t seem especially tolerant of immigrants.

Throughout the colonies, it became dangerous to express support for either the Crown or the revolution, depending upon the community you spoke up in. Echoing contemporary contentiousness over issues like gender dysphoria or critical race theory, Carter writes, “The men glanced at each other, knowing that for several months they had not been free to express their frank opinions in a community that was becoming increasingly polarized.” And, also much like today, in Carter’s novel, those wishing not to take a side on a hot-button issue often find themselves forced to do so. One of Carter’s characters notes that he “personally saw three of them [supporters of American independence] night before last in the inn where we are staying, physically abusing a frontiersman from the west who refused to join them in a toast to freedom. He insisted that all he wanted was to mind his own business and to live in peace, but he finally drank with them.”

As portrayed by Carter, the British have money and arms galore and assume they cannot be defeated. At one point an agent for Patrick Tonyn, appointed Governor of East Florida by the crown, writes to the King with typical overconfidence, a foreshadowing of what many American generals would say roughly two centuries later about the North Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Afghans, and others: “As is well known, our army is blessed with a heritage of courage and experience, while their foe is a Rabble of temporary recruits, largely untrained…They have no funds to pay the troops, no clothing to be issued, and a great sense of Malaise prevails among them.” Carter probably winced when typing the word Malaise, as it was a term closely associated with his own presidency.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106508243

Elsewhere Carter writes that, “the entire British ‘southern strategy’ would be frustrated.” Nowadays the term “southern strategy” is commonly associated with Richard Nixon and his administration’s efforts to appeal to Southern white bigotry in order to carry southern states in important elections. Ironically, part of Britain’s southern strategy was to secure the support of Black southerners by promising an end to slavery if they helped defeat the colonists. Many slaves did manage to escape and fight for the British, only to be punished for it after the Brits were defeated. Nixon’s southern strategy was a play for the support of white people. Britain’s southern strategy was a play for the support of Black people. Carter writes: “In June 1779, [British] General Sir Henry Clinton offered freedom ‘to every Negroe who shall desert the Rebel Standard,’ which aroused anger and despair among all the plantation owners, even those who were supporting the Tory cause. Many of the slaves responded and began moving from the coastal plantations towards Savannah to offer their services as soldiers…Although some of them would fight heroically, they were ill-equipped to take up arms and, usually crammed into Negro camps without the medical care they had enjoyed on the plantations, were remarkably susceptible to ‘white folks’ diseases. Thomas Jefferson estimated that 90 percent of the slaves who escaped from Virginia owners died of smallpox, syphilis, or typhus fever.” (Jefferson, of course, was a slaveholder and had a personal bias in favor of keeping slaves on plantations, so his statistics should probably be taken with a whole ocean of salt.)

Carter’s novel changes viewpoint characters many times. One of the best sections of the book is told through the eyes of a slave girl named Quanimo “Quash” Dolly. Carter writes: “Quash quickly learned the Georgia laws and plantation rules designed to control slaves: they needed a written paper to leave the plantation; no more than seven males could travel together without a white to accompany them; they could not carry a firearm, purchase liquor, or buy or sell anything; large assemblies were prohibited, as was the playing of drums, horns, or other loud instruments that might call slaves together.” At one point Quash is surprised to learn that the same white doctor who treats her master also treats the slaves when they fall ill. “[B]ut later she came to understand that his slaves were Mordecai Singleton’s most valuable possessions, the source of his income and the measure of his wealth and social prestige. In fact, the slaves were usually worth about twenty times as much as the entire plantation on which they lived and worked.”

Quash’s story is so engrossing that I wish Carter had expanded it into a standalone novel. After being raped by the white overseer of the plantation, she becomes radicalized and determined to help the British defeat the colonists. First, however, she asks an older and wiser slave if the British are likely to be an improvement over the American colonists; he tells her tersely, “De British be better.” Quash is intimately familiar with the marshy swamps on its outskirts that largely protect Savannah from a British attack. And so she offers, through an intermediary, to lead the troops into Savannah where, she hopes, they will kill or disperse the revolutionaries, including her own master. She asks just one thing in return: Freedom. Carter tells us, “Quash had no compunction about the action she was taking. Regardless of the character of plantation owners or their treatment of Negroes there was almost unanimity among slaves that their lot would be improved if the British could prevail in the ongoing war…She knew that former slaves now in St. Augustine [Florida, held by the crown] and up the Atlantic Coast had been well treated by the British, and that some had even been given uniforms and weapons so they could engage in combat.”

With Quash’s aid, the British rout the American troops in Savannah. Carter writes: “The British captured 423 Americans, killed nearly 100, and more than 30 others were drowned as they tried to cross the waterways as the tide rose. Only 7 British were killed. Everything in the city was taken, including 45 cannons, 637 rifles and muskets, and a large supply of powder, shell, and shot.”

Carter, however, doesn’t portray the British as uniformly heroic. He writes, “Despite his best efforts, [British] Colonel Campbell was unable to control his own forces as they swept through the defenseless city. They pillaged the stores, raped some of the women, and disemboweled some of the captured soldiers, even after they lay down their weapons.”

Curiously, there was an actual slave named Quamino “Quash” Dolly who helped lead British troops through the swamps of Savannah to a location behind enemy lines from which they could take the city. But the real Quash Dolly was a man. Carter’s character is named Quanimo, not Quamino. I can’t tell if he is simply mistaken about Dolly’s actual first name and gender, or if he intentionally created a fictional female based on an actual male. The former option (he made a mistake) seems more excusable than the latter (he intentionally misgendered an actual African-American historical figure, thus erasing him from history and attributing his bravery and cunning to a fictional character). In a novel that employs numerous characters from real-life, I’m not sure why Carter would fictionalize the most important African-American in his story.

After Georgia falls to the British, Carter writes, “For all practical purposes, there were now only twelve states. British officials honored Colonel Campbell as the first military commander to have ‘taken a stripe and star from the rebel flag of Congress.’ It seemed obvious that the Redcoats would soon take Charles Town and control South Carolina, and the British commanders were confident that only a mopping-up exercise would be necessary to assure a solid base for military moves northward into North Carolina and Virginia.” This seems to mirror George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2013, during the early days of the Iraq War. Carter’s book was published just six months after that incident.

Another fascinating African-American character in Carter’s novel is named Mammy Kate. She was an actual historical person, a slave belonging to a Georgia planter and politician named Stephen Heard, who would become Georgia’s fourteenth governor. Mammy Kate was reputedly the tallest and strongest Black woman in the South. Heard, her master, was short and slight. After seizing control of Georgia, the British imprisoned Heard and planned to execute him. Carter writes: “Heard had a giant house slave called Mammy Kate, who learned that he was in Augusta and sentenced to be hanged. She filled a large basket with some clothing and some pies and cakes as gifts for the British guards, entered the compound, and got permission to visit her master so that he could dress appropriately during his last hours of life. Wanting as much of a pageant as possible for the public execution, the British agreed. Mammy Kate went into the guardhouse, put Heard in the basket, arranged the pile of clothes under a blanket on his cot to resemble a sleeping man, placed the basket on her head, and carried him out of Augusta.” It sounds fanciful, but every source I could find online pretty much echoed Carter’s version of the tale. After his escape, Heard freed Mammy Kate from slavery, although she worked for his family till the end of her life. Thanks to Mammy Kate, Heard himself enjoyed a long life, dying of natural causes in 1815 at the age of 75.

Just as Americans nowadays seem to be sorting themselves into ideological camps, so too did the Americans of the Revolutionary War era. Carter writes: “There was no doubt that any opportunity for neutrality was waning as the war continued in the south, and all militiamen knew of families who were leaving their homesteads and moving to a geographical area where neighbors would share their political commitments.”

The South, during the Revolutionary War, was much like the country as a whole during the Civil War. Carter writes: “[T]he southern countryside had become almost completely divided, often with brothers enlisted in opposing militia forces and fathers fighting their own sons…Many just wished to be left alone to pursue their own interests, and were swayed by an inclination to get along with the most powerful force – military or economic – in the neighborhood.”

Carter observes that the viciousness of the fighting  “was especially notable when it is remembered that, except for the British officers, most of the Redcoats were actually Americans who had maintained their loyalty to the crown and had offered their services as the British became dominant in the south. They were as deeply and sincerely wedded to their homes and families as were the revolutionaries who opposed them, and they despised the Continentals and Whig militiamen as traitors. The mutual condemnation was intense, and over months of bloody skirmishing, the robberies and atrocities in the south built up an almost uncontrollable hatred between Tories and revolutionaries, so that all restraints were abandoned in the heat of battle or in dealing with wounded men following an engagement.”

The main revolutionaries in Carter’s novel are southern militiamen, members of small bands of armed guerillas who opportunistically attack the Tory forces and then retreat quickly into the dense forests and woodlands that they, as poor homesteaders and hunters, know much better than the usually city-bred Tories. Of one such militia, Carter writes, “This was a strange fighting force, operating on its own and having little if any relationship with George Washington’s Continentals. As a rule, the regular American commanders knew nothing of their actions until after they were over, and with few exceptions Congress never supplied weapons, horses, uniforms, or other supplies. These southerners met their own needs from the territory where they happened to be operating.” Again it is easy to see similarities between these rebel forces and the Vietcong.  The southerners weren’t inspired by the likes of George Washington or Paul Revere. Most of them had little knowledge of such northern icons. They were fighting to be left alone, not only by the British but also by the wealthy Americans who were constantly demanding taxes and fees from them. Many of the militiamen wanted to push westward, hoping to escape from the tyranny of taxation and government regulation. But Indians occupied much of western Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. Thus the Indians battled the militias from the west while the Redcoats encroached from the east. Occasionally, if Carter is to be believed, after the Redcoats killed a group of militiamen they would allow their Indian allies to scalp and desecrate the bodies. The militiamen fighting for American independence could be equally as brutal. At the Battle of Kings Mountain, Carter informs his readers, “The Americans killed 323 Tories, some in cold blood after they surrendered, severely wounded 163 others, and took 698 prisoners, while reporting only 28 killed and 62 wounded…After searching through the woods to find their own casualties, the patriots left the dead American Volunteers [i.e. Tories] for the hogs, wolves, and vultures to eat. The next morning, a Sunday, the families of some of the local Tories arrived at the site and were overwhelmed with horror as they drove off the animals and searched through the dead bodies for their husbands and sons.” British General Cornwallis, after hearing of the defeat at Kings Mountain, sent a dispatch to London saying that the Redcoats had been defeated “not by soldiers but by savages.”

Historians can often be critical of the militiamen for killing many of the prisoners they took. Carter is, too. Of one battle, he writes, “At about noon, a white flag appeared, and [Redcoat Major James] Dunlap shouted that thirty-four of his men were dead and he and the others were ready to surrender. When they walked out into the open and threw their weapons on the ground, [Georgia militia Colonel Elijah] Clarke had them lined up alongside the mill house and then ordered that they all be executed…From then on, loyalists understood that a ‘Georgia parole’ meant death.” No doubt, many of these prisoner killings were unwarranted and constituted a war crime, but the Georgia militiamen were basically backwoods farmers or homesteaders. Unlike the better-financed British forces, they had no stockades in which to hold prisoners. And releasing them meant they’d probably have to fight them again. Given the circumstances, it’s hard to see what else the militiamen could have done. The British, despite possessing numerous stockades, also often killed their prisoners rather than undertaking the enormous effort of marching them back to some military base for imprisonment. As Carter writes, “The earlier [British] policy of parole – releasing prisoners on their pledge of neutrality – had been abandoned, and future survival had come to depend on the killing of adversaries.”

Desertion was another big problem for the American Army. According to Carter, George Washington “had to stop the massive and almost unpunished desertions, which had become a way of military life among his discouraged and relatively inactive troops. After some New Jersey militia actually mutinied, Washington decided to set an example of stern discipline: he forced the top leaders to draw lots, and the winners shot the losers.”

Carter definitely knows his history. Almost all of the online sources where I double-checked various historical facts verified Carter’s account. He does make a few minor mistakes, however. In one scene, set in 1774, he writes: “Hannah, now dressed in her loose-fitting dress she called a Mother Hubbard, came out of the house.” According to every online source I checked, the Mother Hubbard dress got its name from a popular book of nursery rhymes, illustrated by Kate Greenaway, and published in 1881.

But the question remains: Was Carter much of a novelist? Well…not at first. The early chapters of The Hornet’s Nest are tough to get through. In these pages the dialog consists almost entirely of exposition with quotation marks around it. Here’s a sample: “Henry, what you don’t seem to understand is that in every colony, perhaps excepting Georgia, we have developed political systems that are much more democratic than anything Great Britain has ever known. Although the crown appoints the governors and their councils, all the colonies have some form of parliaments or assemblies that deal with internal matters…” That paragraph goes on and on, reading like an encyclopedia entry. And it is fairly typical of all the early chapters: wooden characters spouting dialog that’s about as natural as a cell-phone service contract. But somewhere around page 140, Carter starts to find his footing. It helps that the fighting is beginning to heat up and he is afforded plenty of opportunities to create action sequences and suspense. As the British begin to bring more and more troops to bear on southern cities, the novel’s pace and interest increase dramatically. Some of the characters even manage to escape the wood from which they seem to have been carved. Alas, after [British] Major Ferguson’s dramatic death on page 414, the story’s energy begins to peter out. This is understandable. Unlike World War II, which concluded with some incredibly dramatic (and awful) events, such as D-Day and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Revolutionary War sort of sputtered to a conclusion. In fact, like World War I, it didn’t so much end as simply put off its conclusion for a later war, this one in 1812.

But a lot of very good novels have similar flaws. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden begins with a description of the glaciers that formed California’s Salinas Valley, and that part of the book moves, appropriately but dully, at a glacial pace. The book’s tempo doesn’t pick up until the story moves into the twentieth century and then it rolls like a runaway train until the death of the book’s villainess (and most interesting character) hundreds of pages later, after which it sort of dawdles to the finish line. Carter isn’t in the same league as Steinbeck, but had he taken up writing novels in his twenties, like Steinbeck, rather than in his seventies, I feel confident he could have made a good living at it. As it happened, Carter spent most of his twenties in the U.S. Navy, serving in both the Pacific and Atlantic fleets. He left the Navy when his father died and he was forced to go home and take over the family farm. Eventually he turned to politics. He spent four years in the Georgia State Senate, and another four years as the state’s Governor. He twice ran for the Presidency of the United States, and spent four years as the leader of the free world. Even after being voted out of office in 1980, his life remained a busy one. He has founded a human rights organization (The Carter Center), helped Habitat for Humanity build houses for the underprivileged, participated in numerous diplomatic efforts across the globe, and has written more than thirty books, including an illustrated children’s book and a collection of poetry. He holds records as America’s longest-lived president and longest-married president, and he has had the longest post-presidency career of anyone to date.

Alas, Carter committed quite a few rookie mistakes in his only novel. Oftentimes, in order to disclose information to the reader, Character A will explain to Character B something that Character B clearly already knows. This happens a lot in novels, but most novelists have better sense than to preface the sentence with the words “As you know…” Seemingly dozens of Carter’s conversations begin that way:

Page 253: “As you know from living in Florida…”

Page: 257: “As you know the rebellious Whigs…” (would Character B even need to be informed that the Whigs were rebellious?)

Page 259: “As you know better than I, our brother Cherokees to the north…”

If you took a swig of Southern moonshine every time you encountered a sentence in The Hornet’s Nest that begins “As you know…”, well, you’d be passed out on the floor pretty quickly, something that probably wouldn’t please the abstemious Carter. Those readers who remember him might find themselves wishing that Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy, had lived long enough to co-write this novel with him. Billy, who operated a gas station in rural Georgia, lacked Jimmy’s polish and tact (he once peed on an airport runway in full view of various reporters and foreign dignitaries), but he had an earthiness and a shoot-from-the-lip style that might have helped loosen up the prose of this often staid narrative. Likewise, Carter’s sister Gloria might have added some spice to the book. She was a wild woman who was once arrested in an Americus, Georgia, waffle house for refusing to stop playing her harmonica. She was also a motorcycle enthusiast whose tombstone reads: “She rides in Harley Heaven.” The Hornet’s Nest could have used some of her irreverent energy.

I doubt that it was Carter’s intention, but his novel left me with the feeling that the Revolutionary War was a colossal waste of life, property, resources, and time, fought merely to protect the wealth of rich Americans from British tax collectors. Although the U.S.A. and Great Britain remained hostile to each other throughout much of the nineteenth century, for well over a hundred years now they have been the closest of allies and very little – a monarchy of no great importance, direct elections of America’s top executive (sort of) – differentiates their two systems of government. Maybe I’m missing something, but when I look at contemporary Great Britain, its citizens don’t seem any less free than the citizens of the contemporary U.S. It’s difficult for me to believe that the average American is much better off now than he would have been if the colonies had never gained their independence. African-Americans would certainly have been better off if the British had triumphed in the Revolutionary War and then abolished slavery, but it seems highly doubtful to me that King George would have done this (the abolition of slavery would have crippled the South’s economy, and thus drastically reduced the taxes paid to the crown). Over the course of my lifetime (which began in 1958) the average Brit has been less likely than his American counterpart to die in a war, get shot by a cop, or find himself the victim of a gun crime. The average American may have more money than the average Brit but, lacking a National Health Service, he has to spend a big chunk of it on health care/medical insurance. Like the Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln’s greatest piece of writing, President Carter’s greatest literary accomplishment situates the birth of the U.S.A. in the 1770s, which should appeal to more conservative readers. But Carter’s scathing portraits of much of the American military personnel, his disdain towards the country’s wealthy land- and slave-owners, and his disapproval of the way that Blacks and Indians were treated by Caucasian settlers, will probably find favor with those leftists who believe the country to be hopelessly riddled with systemic inequality and unfairness. The Hornet’s Nest is a book in which just about every reader will find something to love. And plenty to hate.