Jimmy Carter is widely acknowledged to be the
most active and prolific former U.S. president in the nation’s
history, and now one of Georgia’s most famous sons can add
another bullet to his resume: novelist.
With the publication of The Hornet’s Nest (Simon & Schuster, 2003),
Carter becomes the first former president to publish a work of fiction, and the
task Emory’s University Distinguished Professor set for himself was no
small one—The Hornet’s Nest is nothing less than an attempt to cover
the breadth and depth of the entire American Revolutionary War through the lens
of historical fiction.
“There literally have been hundreds of books written about the War Between
the States, and dozens written about the Vietnam War and the First and Second
World Wars, but you can hardly find a book written about the Revolutionary
War,” said
Carter, who now has written 18 books. “So there was a dearth of books
about this war, which in my opinion is the most important war of all for
America. It shaped our basic premises of life.”
Like many things associated with Carter, The Hornet’s Nest has a distinctly
Southern feel. Its near-500 pages are set primarily in the South, and many characters
are lifted directly from the history books: For example, Elijah Clarke, namesake
of Georgia’s Clarke County, figures prominently (though not necessarily
heroically) in the narrative, as do many other real-life historical figures.
Even the fictional characters are grounded in reality; Ethan Pratt, the “protagonist” of
Carter’s sprawling novel, is a composite of the former president’s
own family history. Like Pratt, Carter’s ancestors moved from Pennsylvania
and New Jersey to North Carolina, then later into northeast Georgia. Presidential
progenitor Wiley Carter lived in the Quaker settlement of Wrightsborough,
where Pratt makes his home upon relocating to Georgia.
“As far as I know, the book historically is completely accurate,” said
Carter, who read some 45 books for background and spent seven years working on
his novel. “I went back and made sure every battle was correct
and that the dates were true to history.”
Indeed, The Hornet’s Nest reads most successfully as a meticulously
researched work of history; even Revolutionary War buffs are sure
to come away from the book with new insights on how the conflict
affected the lives of everyday New World colonists, and that is
exactly why its author chose to fictionalize his subject.
“I wanted to bring to life the torturous decisions that British subjects
had to make during those years,” Carter said. “It was very difficult because an adult many times in life
had taken an oath before God to be loyal to the king—when
you got a marriage license or a land deed. I didn’t see any
way to bring the actual events of life into reality without making
it fiction.”
Chief among the novel’s triumphs is the way it recounts the
conflicted attitudes of colonists who struggled to balance their
very real devotion to Mother England with their equally impassioned
desire to see the colonies treated fairly as loyal subjects to
the crown. The Civil War often is portrayed as a struggle of brother
against brother, but Carter said the War for Independence was the
first to draw its battle lines straight through American families.
“Every war in which America has been involved has been geographically divided,
but in this war there was no geographical division—the division was inside
families,” Carter said. “Maybe the older son, the senior
son, would decide because of the exigencies of life to take up
arms against the king. And in a few weeks he would be on the battlefield
fighting against his own brothers. That was common.”
As is only appropriate for a college professor, common misconceptions
of the Revolutionary War—and a general lack of knowledge about it among the populace
it liberated—is another reason Carter decided to write his
book.
“You ask the average person on the street—or the average student
in an Emory history class—what they know about the Revolutionary War, and
they’ll know there were a few skirmishes around Boston,” Carter said. “They
know that Paul Revere rode his horse in the middle of the night, that George
Washing-ton crossed the Delaware River in a snowstorm and had a hard time one
winter, and that Cornwallis surrendered. That’s about it.”
One misconception Carter clears up is the thought that most of
the war was fought in New England; nearly all the major battles,
he said, took place from Georgia through the Carolinas and into
southern Virginia. Also, in an understated theme that resonates
in today’s hyper-nationalist (and occasionally xenophobic)
world, Carter’s novel makes clear that American independence
would not have been won without the aid of France.
“Another thing that’s unknown about the war is that it was by far
the bloodiest war we ever fought; it was filled with intense hatred and vituperation,” Carter
said. “There were orders that went out on both sides: ‘Don’t
take any prisoners.’ One British general ordered that, if
you took a prisoner, you would lose your rum ration for a month.
So if anybody on either side surrendered, they were executed with
a bayonet through the gut or a bullet through the head.
“This didn’t happen in any other war, and it happened
regularly in this one. So this war was filled with different kinds
of experiences, of interrelationships and challenges, of dreams
that were shattered,” Carter said. “In my opinion,
no other war had that.”
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