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Perhaps it's no surprise that Jimmy Carter, a small-town Southern boy who owes much in his own life to a sense of place and permanence, is siding with advocates of slow growth.
The former president, who recently authored a book about the Revolutionary War, has fired a shot in the 21st-century battle between developers and preservationists. He says it's important to protect the integrity of historical sites in the Fredericksburg area.
"I'm strongly on the side of preserving those precious areas," Carter said during a recent telephone interview with The Free Lance-Star.
Fredericksburg is one of the cradles of the Revolution and the site of a number of important Civil War battles. Carter said he once visited the area years ago, when it was rural and home to numerous farms.
Last month the Plains, Ga., native spoke at an event in his home state intended to help the owners of historic family farms ward off sprawl.
In recent years, rapid development has threatened to encroach on George Washington's boyhood home at Ferry Farm and on Aquia Church, both important sites in the Colonial period in Stafford County. Civil War sites at Salem Church and Chancellorsville also have been points of contention in Spotsylvania County--where the Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday night to reduce by nearly one-half the number of houses that can be built without rezoning.
Now the first president, who grew up at Ferry Farm, plays a part in the Carter's new book. Gen. George Washington is one of the figures in "The Hornet's Nest--a Novel of the Revolutionary War," the first work of fiction written by a president. It's based on historical fact, but there are also fictional characters.
During the interview, Carter said Washington "never really fought a major battle," but won the most important fight of all--the one to keep the his men together.
"He skirmished at Trenton and Princeton, but he was primarily engaged in preserving his army," Carter said.
Part of "The Hornet's Nest" deals with the way Washington was forced to cope "in a fairly brutal way" with what Carter said were "horrendous desertions" by his men.
Washington "had to order that lots be drawn and that some men in a deserting company execute other men in that same company," Carter said during the interview to promote his latest book.
The former president, winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, said few realize the Revolution was "the bloodiest war that Americans ever fought--much more so than the Civil War.
He said there was much more "animosity and hatred" than in the Civil War because the vast majority of "redcoat" soldiers fighting for Britain were Americans loyal to the crown.
"In the Civil War, there was a geographic dividing line," Carter said. "In the case of the Revolution, the dividing line was inside families. The father would be loyal to the king and the son to the Revolution. And you'd have battles with fighting between father and son."
At the Battle of King's Mountain in South Carolina, he said, "there were 1,000 redcoats on top of the mountain--and every one of them was American."
The patriot forces won and executed hundreds of colonists who had taken up the British cause, forcing English officers to watch.
"This precipitated intense hatred," Carter said. "The orders were to give no quarter. If someone surrendered, shoot 'em on the spot."
"The Hornet's Nest" focuses primarily on the war in the Deep South, which Carter said has been neglected by Revolutionary historians, most of them from the North.
"What I wanted to do was show the human element," Carter said. "I also wanted to tell how life was in those days between settlers and the British and the Creek and Cherokee Indians."
Ethan Pratt, the central character, is based on a Carter ancestor.
One of the book's main characters is a beautiful and bright slave woman named Quash. She is brutally raped by a white overseer. That kind of scene is a huge departure from the nonfiction the former president had been writing.
This is his 18th book, but Carter, now a professor at Emory University, said it was daunting to write a work of fiction for the first time. He asked friends in Emory's English department to recommend novels for him to read before he began "The Hornet's Nest."
"The creation of fictional characters and [determining] how they changed was daunting," Carter said.
"I asked the professors to give me advice on creative writing, and they gave me voluminous reading assignments, as they would a grad student," he said.
He pored over biographies of soldiers and officers and books about how crops were raised and cabins were built in Colonial times.
The former president hopes "The Hornet's Nest" will create interest in learning more about the Revolutionary War.
"People know about a few skirmishes at Boston, Washington crossing the Delaware, the horrible winter with his soldiers at Valley Forge," Carter said.
"And that's all they know about the Revolution. I don't know of any other books that paint a definitive picture of what the Revolutionary War actually was about."
To reach MICHAEL ZITZ: 540/374-5408 mikez@freelancestar.com