Product Description

The first work of fiction by a President of the United States -- a sweeping novel of the American South and the War of Independence

In his ambitious and deeply rewarding novel, Jimmy Carter brings to life the Revolutionary War as it was fought in the Deep South; it is a saga that will change the way we think about the conflict. He reminds us that much of the fight for independence took place in that region and that it was a struggle of both great and small battles and of terrible brutality, with neighbor turned against neighbor, the Indians' support sought by both sides, and no quarter asked or given. The Hornet's Nest follows a cast of characters and their loved ones on both sides of this violent conflict -- including some who are based on the author's ancestors.

At the heart of the story is Ethan Pratt, who in 1766 moves with his wife, Epsey, from Philadelphia to North Carolina and then to Georgia in 1771, in the company of Quakers. On their homesteads in Georgia, Ethan and his wife form a friendship with neighbors Kindred Morris and his wife, Mavis. Through Kindred and his young Indian friend Newota, Ethan learns about the frontier and the Native American tribes who are being continually pressed farther inland by settlers. As the eight-year war develops, Ethan and Kindred find themselves in life-and-death combat with oppos- ing forces.

With its moving love story, vivid action, and the suspense of a war fought with increasing ferocity and stealth, The Hornet's Nest is historical fiction at its best, in the tradition of such major classics as The Last of the Mohicans.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #708269 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11
• Released on: 2003-11-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 465 pages

From Booklist
Carter continues to have one of the most productive and varied post-political careers of any former U.S. president. A prodigious writer with 16 works of nonfiction to his credit, Carter turns to fiction with this account of the Revolutionary War as fought in the Deep South. Because most of the accessible literature revolves around battles fought in New England and the Middle Atlantic colonies, it is easy to overlook the fierce fighting that took place in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. The plot revolves around the migration of newlyweds Ethan and Epsey Pratt from Philadelphia to a homestead in Georgia. When the War for Independence heats up, the Pratts and their friends and neighbors--many of them Quakers--are forced into the vortex of historical events beyond their control. What Carter lacks in narrative style and characterization, he more than makes up for in the breadth of historical fact and detail interwoven into this obvious labor of love. It is not surprising that a history-maker would turn to history for fictional inspiration; what is surprising is the effectiveness of his debut effort. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Jimmy Carter, who served as thirty-ninth President of the United States, was born in Plains, Georgia, in 1924. After leaving the White House, he and his wife, Rosalynn, founded the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that works to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health around the world. The author of numerous books, including the bestselling memoir An Hour Before Daylight, Jimmy Carter was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 16: Massacre of the Indians

Having experienced troubles with doubtful land titles in the Carolinas, Elijah Clarke and his neighboring families were careful to get the proper documents when they obtained rights to settle near the Savannah River along the northern border of the 1773 land grant. Elijah encouraged the other men to locate their homesteads so that the entire group could remain in close contact with one another. All of the cabins were soon connected with a spiderweb of trails. Elijah and Hannah decided to build a new cabin and barn that almost joined each other, and to accept the constant animal sounds and odors in lieu of risking another fire being set by undetected intruders. This proximate location made possible an additional safety precaution, as they spent weeks of hard work putting up a stockade of upright poles, just large enough to encompass the two buildings and a small yard. Except for slits left as rifle ports and the large swinging entrance gate, the barricade cut off their view of the surrounding woods, but they did not trust the Indians who lived only a few miles away, and felt that the increased safety was worth the trouble.

Aaron Hart and his wife had settled within a mile of the Clarkes, and within sight of where two major trails crossed. Maintaining his far-reaching trade route and not intending to farm for a living, Aaron decided to take a minimum amount of land, only fifty acres, which was to be used mostly for pasture. An extra shed was built on the side of the Harts' cabin as a storeroom for his goods, and he now cut off some of his former trading territory in North Carolina and added an equivalent area in south Georgia. When Aaron was away, his wife frequently spent nights with the Clarkes.

Their decisions concerning safety seemed justified toward the end of January 1774, when Aaron came home to report that a group of Creeks had burned a homestead fifteen miles to the southwest, and murdered and scalped a man named William White, his wife, and their four children.

Elijah said, "Damn the bastards! We've got to go teach 'em a lesson."

By the time Elijah and Aaron arrived at White's place, a dozen men were there, looking at the smoldering ruins and already having dug six graves for the scalped and mutilated bodies. Since no one else seemed to be in charge, Aaron asked Elijah what he thought they should do, and the others seemed willing to listen to his opinion. Naturally assuming the role of leader, he decided that they should follow the war party, which they assumed had crossed the Ogeechee River.

Clarke insisted that they examine the surrounding area carefully and report to him on all tracks left by unshod horses, which they followed carefully. After a day and night of tracking and examining the trail and campsites, they learned that there were about a dozen Indians, that they had two or three guns, and that they were moving fast and staying together as a unit. It was also clear that the Indians were skirting the towns of their own people, indicating a renegade group. When the trail turned north and then east, the settlers decided that another attack was planned, somewhere north of Augusta. One by one, the men announced that they were returning to protect their own homes, and Elijah was not able to dissuade them. Finally, he and Aaron were forced to abandon the chase.

Two weeks later, at about nine o'clock in the morning, what seemed to be the same band of Indians attacked a place known as Sherall's Fort, where there was a small commissary store. They had apparently watched David Sherall and the youngest of his three sons leave the area and then began firing on the fort. Mrs. Sherall, two adult sons, and a Negro slave killed three of the attackers as they attempted to scale the palisade wall. The others set fire to a corner of it and then backed off and continued the assault with their weapons.

Sherall had stopped to talk to his closest neighbor down the trail, and they saw the smoke from his homestead. The boy was sent to get help from Elijah Clarke, who lived just three miles away, while the two men rushed back toward the fort. As they drew near, they glimpsed flames through the trees and drew up their horses to assess the situation. The fire seemed to be confined for the time being to one corner of the stockade, and the men rushed forward to extinguish the flames. At that moment, an Indian on each side of the trail fired muskets at the settlers, and others followed this attack with arrows. From a distance of not more than ten yards, almost every bullet and arrow struck its target. The Indians moved in with their scalping knives, then dragged the two bodies off into the bushes and resumed their positions to guard the trail.

As Elijah Clarke approached the fort, followed by five other men and Sherall's son, he held up his hand to stop the procession.

"When savages are attackin' a place for a long time, they are careful not to be surprised and always leave an ambush party alongside the trails. Let's split up, stay a hundred yards back from the path, and move forward. We need to move fast and don't have to be quiet. If they hear us, they'll back up toward the stockade."

As they broke into the clearing, the entire party of Indians looked at them for a few seconds, sized up their adversaries, and disappeared into the woods. One of the men said, "That's Big Elk giving the orders. He has been to my place a couple of times to do some trading. He's devious, knows these woods and trails like the palm of his hand, and he's mean as hell."

After burying the dead, the men decided they would take the Sherall family to the Clarke stockade and then spread the word to as many settlers as possible to assemble there the following day to decide what they should do. There was little argument when the meeting was held.

Elijah Clarke explained, "If the nearby tribes see these bandits succeed and go to war, we wouldn't have a chance even if all of us quit farmin' and spent all our time huntin' the bastards. Our lives depend on most of the damned Indians stayin' peaceful, and only sure punishment will prevent a general uprisin'."

Aaron Hart said, "We need some help from British troops. Governor Wright is under pressure from London to keep up trade and bring settlers to the ceded land, and he's expected to maintain order in the colony."

"Yeah, but maybe Georgia is not as important to England as we think it is," someone said.

Aaron replied, "We don't amount to much as far as trade is concerned, but the British need this colony. We lie between the Spaniards in Florida and the Carolinas, and to some degree we also tend to hold off the French west of here. I agree that the best approach is to stamp out any renegade uprisings when they are just getting started, but there ain't three thousand white fighting men in Georgia. We've been lucky so far, but there's been a lot of trouble with the Cherokee in the frontier areas of Carolina, and it's finally got here."

Clarke and two or three of the settlers wanted to go right after the Indians, but a strong majority finally decided that there might be more than one group of marauders and they needed to get more help before abandoning their own homes to possible attack. Also, Aaron was convinced that British officials should assume responsibility for overall peace with the natives. Aaron and two other men would go to Savannah to inform Governor Wright that they must have protection from some of the British troops, only a handful of whom were in the ceded area. They would remind him in respectful but forceful terms that they had settled in this frontier area with the clear assurance of protection, and a lot of families would have to abandon their claims and move to a more civilized area if military help was not forthcoming.

The governor responded as they had wished, and within a week a Captain James Grierson arrived in Augusta with fifty men, obviously green troops and all wearing newly issued militia uniforms, except for two British sergeants. With great fanfare, they established a military camp at Sherall's Fort, and after a few days Grierson dispatched twenty of his men, on foot, to visit some of the nearby Indian villages to gather evidence so he could make an official report to the governor. When they had been gone less than two days, a small party of the renegade Indians ambushed the group, and three of the militiamen were killed by arrows and bullets fired from the underbrush. Not knowing the strength of their attackers, the troop returned to camp and refused to remain any longer in the "Indian-infested" land. Without any further discussions with the settlers, the entire detachment returned to Savannah.

Governor Wright was deeply embarrassed and used the occasion to dispatch an urgent message to London, describing the incident in the most compelling terms, emphasizing the seriousness of the threat, and requesting more British troops. What was more effective while the message was making its slow way to London was that the governor had Indian Superintendent John Stuart condemn the tribal leaders in the area for violating peace agreements and cut off all trade with them.

Finally realizing that they could expect no help from Savannah in the near future, some of the settlers met again at the Clarke homestead. They decided unanimously to assemble their families in safe places and to abandon their farms and homesteads long enough to punish the renegades. It was assumed that Elijah would be their military leader. One of the Indian traders reported to Aaron that he knew where Big Elk and his group of mostly young Creeks had been camping, deep within Cherokee territory, and offered to lead them there.

Elijah said he would need at least one hundred men who were willing to go on what was certain to be a difficult and time-consuming mission, and Aaron suggested that they send riders to the different areas in the ceded lands to call for volunteers.

Clarke replied, "No need to go to Wrightsborough. The damned Quakers won't help with anything that might involve violence, and we sure as hell intend to be violent."

The men laughed,...

Customer Reviews

Befitting a respected American President
I was so incensed by the Missouri reviewer who thought this book was just a Revolutionary War history "textbook masquerading as a novel", and who thought that it wouldn't have been published if an ex-President hadn't written it, that I decided to write a rebuttal review, my first fiction review on Amazon. So first of all, let's be clear on what actually happened. The Revolutionary War in the south was hardly the stuff legends are made of, but it was certainly vicious. Here's an outline.

There was strong Loyalist sentiment in Georgia and the Carolinas at the start of the war. The British planned to exploit this when in 1778 they seized Savannah as their base in Georgia. The plan worked, for two years later, British forces commanded by Sir Henry Clinton, the top British general, could advance north and besiege the American-held city of Charleston in South Carolina. The city was defended by General Lincoln with 3000 men. But Clinton forced Lincoln to surrender, which put the whole region in British hands.

For all practical purposes, there were now no American regulars left in the south. Clinton then went back to New York, and left the subjugated south in the care of Lord Cornwallis. American Patriot forces, however, were still active in the region, and kept up a bloody guerilla campaign against British and Loyalist forces. (Had the word been invented back then, the British might well have called them terrorists.) Encouraged by their struggle, Congress eventually got around to sending a General Gates south with a force of 3,000 to help the Patriots fight Cornwallis and the Loyalists. But Cornwallis defeated him in August of 1780 at Camden, South Carolina.

Finally it was the turn of the Patriots. In October of 1780, a Patriot force of 1,000 mountaineers attacked and totally destroyed a Loyalist force of 1,000, in their stronghold of King's Mountain in South Carolina. General Clinton, when he heard of it, wrote that it was the first link in a long chain of "evils" that eventually led to the loss of America.

The American General Nathaniel Greene now marched south to help the Patriots' guerilla war against Cornwallis. Eventually, General Greene did battle with Cornwallis in the spring of 1881, at Guildford Court House in North Carolina. Neither side won, but Cornwallis retreated north with worn-out forces, and took charge of the vital British naval base at Yorktown. There, he was later besieged by 9,000 Americans and 30,000 French, and, as all the world knows, finally surrendered to George Washington in October of 1781.

The war in the south was thus mostly a guerilla war with many minor engagements, individually unimportant, but collectively playing a significant role in the eventual defeat of the British at Yorktown. So what kind of a book has Mr. Carter written about this war? Would it have been published if you or I had written it? Almost certainly not. But so what? A then unknown John Grisham couldn't get "A Time to Kill" published by a major publisher. Jimmy Carter is hardly unknown, but his novel deserves to be published because it brings expertise, devotion to historical accuracy, literary creativity, and a presidential viewpoint to the story of that southern war that nobody else could. That makes it unique, and worth reading. And besides, it's very good.

Is it a history textbook masquerading as a novel? Definitely not. But let's be candid on what kind of novel it's not. It's not anything like the tactical drama of the Gettysburg battle as told in Michael Shaara's classic "The Killer Angels", or the WW1 horror story depicted in Eric Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front", or the conflict of self-interest and honor in Hemmingway's Spanish Civil War novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls", or the chilling suspense of Ken Follett's WW2 classic "Eye of the Needle", or, to continue into the future, the suspense and surprise of Thomas Cronin's extraordinary USA/EU future conflict novel "Give Us This Mars". So certainly, if you buy the book expecting a classic literary masterpiece or riveting page turner, you could be disappointed. But I'm sure Mr. Carter didn't intend it to be any of those things. Instead, he has created a solid, interesting, eye-opening dramatization of the southern Revolutionary War. It needed doing, and Mr. Carter is just the person to do it. He has done an outstanding job of dramatizing the many interwoven events, even bringing in the local Indian tribes, which each side tried to exploit. This obviously well-researched novel, which includes a horrible massacre (fictional I hope) of Indians by whites, beats a history textbook every time.

Given the relatively minor nature of most of those far off events, we could expect that a history textbook about the campaign would be bed-time reading only for insomniacs. But war is never a minor matter for those at the front line, and Mr. Carter's novel brings the war in the south back to life. You experience it vividly through events in the life of Ethan Pratt and his friend and neighbor Kindred Morris, solid folk who have moved south to Georgia to live in a peaceful Quaker community. Many people, after reading this book, will probably be motivated to look up the history texts, as I was. If so, Mr. Carter will have succeeded admirably in bringing an important segment of American and world history to public awareness, a task befitting a respected American President.

I have one minor complaint. The writing style is good, but is not quite right for a novel. A bit on the academic side. Every so often, I wanted to alter sentences and paragraphs to speed things up. But what can you expect? Mr. Carter is over eighty and has written sixteen nonfiction books. You can't expect him to turn into a Dean Koontz or John Grisham overnight. Be thankful he has worked hard to create this very good novel, and enjoy it for what it is.

From a history lover
President Carter demonstrates that he was not only a wonderful President and man, but also a good researcher, writer and teller of stories with his first work of fiction. For someone who loves history and lives in Georgia, this was a fascinating look into a time in the history of our region about which very little is known or understood. I learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed the story line, the characters and the history!!

Well-researched, but disappointing
Let me begin by saying something I shouldn't have to - I think that Jimmy Carter was a fine president at a difficult time, and I think that any person in that office at that time would have had an equally difficult time. I also think that Mr. Carter is a fine, decent, honorable man, and the most scholarly of our ex-Presidents. I understand that he is a fine writer of non-fiction works.

That said... I was looking forward to this novel about a time and a place not often explored in literature. Most Americans (and Americans are virtually the only audience for historical fiction set in this time and place) know very little about the Revolutionary War in the American South; Mr. Carter had every chance to shine here, with few competitors. His name will bring people in to read the book, and he had a fine opportunity to educate as well as entertain. He knows his time, his place, and his subject well. I can tell he loves this subject, and this place. His scholarship shows on every page.

And therein lies the problem.

This is an extraordinary work of scholarship - I'd like to read it with the characters taken out as a survey of the Revolutionary War South.

It is an abysmal work of fiction, even by a first-time novelist. The characters are flat, the dialog is inexcusable, the transitions in time and place are poorly done. Speeches are put in characters' mouths intended primarily to educate us, the readers. Characters sound as if they are reading from 20th Century American history texts, breaking character each time. In real life, people don't (generally) lecture one another about current events; in novels the shouldn't either. Instead of a long lecture, the author should assume the other characters remember what is being discussed, and let the reader infer from the discussion.

I wanted to like this book very much; I couldn't get past the anachronisms, the speeches, the preachiness, the stilted way people, places, and things are introduced and described. I couldn't get past the way that the author transitioned from descriptive and narrative text. I couldn't get past the fact that the characters all spoke with the same voice.

There are far, far better works of historical fiction on this time, albeit not in the American South. Consider the works of James L. Nelson for the naval war in New England, or perhaps Dudley Pope for the British side of the same Naval War.

Please try again, Mr. Carter, but this time get a good editor who knows fiction, and who will help you to write better fiction. As a writer myself, I know how hard it is to change editors. I also know how much a good editor can improve my work.