With no lust in its heart

It’s best to forget that Jimmy Carter’s account of the American Revolution in Florida, the Carolinas and his native Georgia is supposed to be a novel. The former president has no more idea of how to write compelling fiction than we do, say, of how to broker peace between Israel and Egypt. Yet he has researched the period deeply and presented his findings with admirable evenhandedness. If we read “The Hornet’s Nest” -- named for an area of backwoods Georgia where rebels held out while the rest of the colony was under British control -- it’s to be informed, not entertained.

The story begins in 1763 with the courtship of Ethan and Epsey Pratt, who leave Philadelphia to farm raw land in North Carolina. Abused by Colonial officials, they move to Georgia and befriend a young couple, Kindred and Mavis Morris, and a member of the Creek tribe, Newota. These people, we think, will be the main characters, but we learn surprisingly little about them -- little, at least, in a novelistic sense. Instead, in the book’s plodding opening section, Carter lectures us on the politics, economics, religion, crafts and medicine of the period. The characters don’t converse so much as brief each other. Possibly Carter attended so many briefings in his career that he thinks people talk this way all the time.

Only twice does his prose approach novelistic intensity. One instance is when Thomas Brown, a Tory landowner, is tarred and feathered in Augusta, Ga., by the Sons of Liberty, a group protesting British taxation. Embittered by this ordeal, he leads a paramilitary group, the Florida Rangers, in devastating raids on Georgia. The second is when Ethan, after the British victory at Briar Creek in March 1779, leaves the wounded Kindred behind to be bayoneted by the Redcoats. Guiltily, he wonders if he misjudged the risk to his friend because of his secret desire for Mavis, which is consummated later in what has to be one of the most perfunctory love scenes in all American literature.

As Carter points out, much of the fighting in the final stages of the Revolution took place in the South. As in the border states during the Civil War, it was vicious and personal fighting among neighbors. Moderates like Ethan and Kindred are inexorably sucked into the conflict. Ethan is repelled by a massacre of Creek women and children by rebel militia leader Elijah Clarke, but he reconciles himself to serving under Clarke after irregulars led by Brown kill Ethan’s young son. Readers might refer to the 2000 movie “The Patriot,” starring Mel Gibson, which muddles history and can’t match Carter’s balance but supplies the spectacle and passion that “The Hornet’s Nest” lacks.

Carter’s main achievement here is to show us that, despite the quaint costumes and primitive technology, politics was as complex and war as coldblooded in the 18th century as they are now. The combatants didn’t hesitate to use biological weapons. British commanders “had realized as early as 1775 that the Europeans were relatively immune to smallpox, and encouraged infected people to leave British posts so they could carry the disease to the more susceptible Americans.... The Americans also used slaves to send smallpox to the enemy, as plantation owners gave freedom to black people with the disease and encouraged them to flee to [British] strongholds carrying blankets and clothing saturated with the virus.”

In the end, the Pratts and Morrises, whom we expected to carry the story, almost disappear to make room for more belligerent characters, such as Brown and Clarke, just as the fiction gives way to straight history in which the author describes every Southern battle, skirmish and diplomatic initiative of the Revolution.

In Georgia, at least, Carter views the rebel victory as a tragedy for Native Americans, perhaps for African Americans as well. The last British governor, James Wright, ran an honest administration and enforced treaties that kept settlers out of Creek and Cherokee lands. The tribes naturally supported the British. Their defeat, Carter says, led to new incursions by revengeful, land-hungry whites and, a generation later, to the forced march to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. At the same time, small farmers found they couldn’t compete with slave plantations. Whether black people in America would have been better off under rule by England -- which freed its slaves in the Western Hemisphere by 1833 -- can only be conjectured. But in his epilogue, Carter is clear about the consequences for the fledgling United States: “The ravages of slavery and its aftermath would affect the nation for another 150 years.” *