A Time for Reckoning: Jimmy Carter and the Cult of Kinfolk.

Only seven months after Jimmy Carter was inaugurated thirty-ninth president of the United States, walking down Pennsylvania Avenue in a symbolic populist gesture of brisk commoner who disdained the "high-falutin" pretensions of limousine wealth, the New York Times published a summary of a twenty-three-page genealogy report issued by Debrett's Peerage of London, which claimed that the new chief executive had not only descended from a family of nobility that produced the first American millionaire but was also related to both George Washington and the Queen of England. Up until this report, it had been assumed that President Carter's first direct ancestor to set foot on American soil was an indentured servant who sold himself to pay his way from England to Virginia.(1) The president's middle son, Chip Carter, even made a much publicized trans-Atlantic pilgrimage to Christ's Church in Hampshire, the believed spot of origin where the Carter family coat of arms first appeared; now the New York Times raised the distinct likelihood that he visited the wrong location.(2)

Most American families have at least two conflicting genealogical charts, not to mention disjointed collateral lines, but now, courtesy of the New York Times, citizens were jettisoned into yet another new quandary of how to perceive their famously complex and multifaceted president. Was he the direct descendant of either British royalty or a white slave? While new presidents are always a little mysterious, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. noted, Jimmy Carter "seems more mysterious than most."(3) A "populist president" was the most commonly used shorthand tag to explain Carter's approach to governing, but his critics claimed that in truth he was a "phony populist," a typical pandering opportunist trying to be all things to all people--liberal and conservative, soldier and peacemaker, peanut farmer and wealthy businessman, nuclear engineer and backwoods poet, politician and antipolitician. The president himself saw nothing unusual about his jarring juxtapositions; they were all parts of the essential Jimmy Carter, who could be understood if one studied his Georgia roots and personal history. "I don't see myself as being complex," Carter has stated. "There is a unity to everything I do which comes from my ancestors and parents and church ... and, of course, Plains and the land around it."(4)

The importance of Carter's interest in his Georgia roots had a direct influence on any number of policy decisions he made while president. Instinctively, he appointed fellow Georgians knowledgeable of his family's heritage as his closest advisors including Hamilton Jordan as White House chief of staff, Jody Powell as press secretary, Andrew Young as United Nations ambassador, Bert Lance as head of the Office of Budget Management, and Frank Moore as congressional liaison, among others. When his brother Billy behaved like a greedy buffoon--accepting a consultant's fee from Libya's Momar Quadaffi--President Carter refused to publicly repudiate him because "he was kin." Often, during the difficult Iran hostage crisis, President Carter would return to Plains, walk the land of his ancestors, clean up their gravesites, and ponder options. His understanding of racial strains, he said, came from his firsthand experience with the sharecropper system in the Deep South. And when considering human rights policy, President Carter contemplated everything from his family's slave-owning heritage to the Confederacy's loss of the Civil War.

Years before the Debrett's Peerage report--or his presidency--Carter had been intensely interested in his pedigree, trying to understand his past by discovering sunken family gravestones hidden in a tangle of kudzu and weeds and rot, rummaging through old family letters and deeds, hunting for time-forgotten clues to the Carters's and Gordys's (maternal ancestors) faded past in towns all over Georgia. His partner in these searches was his father's older brother, Alton Carter, affectionately named "Uncle Buddy" a stocky, soft-spoken raconteur of family history and the proprietor of Plains Antique Store. When Jimmy Carter's father, Earl Carter, died in 1953, Undo Buddy assumed the unfillable role of substitute father. "Alton became head of the whole Carter family," his son and former Georgia state senator Hugh Carter--whom Jimmy calls "Cousin Beedie"--has noted.(5)

People would travel far and wide to hear Uncle Buddy reminisce in Uncle Remus fashion about Georgia's bygone days, spinning colorful yarns while sitting on a wooden fruit crate. North Carolina novelist Reynolds Price, who had ventured to Plains in 1976 to write an article on Carter for Time, fell under the spell of Alton Carter's "tendrils of memory and hearsay that reached from the main stem back towards the Revolution, England and Ireland" (Price 1977, 26). Jimmy Carter was Uncle Buddy's most attentive listener and note taker. Often, the two would take long Sunday drives through the Georgia countryside, stopping to pick plums and scuppernongs in Webster County, discussing their roots, Uncle Buddy the "great rememberer" and Jimmy the new storehouse of knowledge. Once, Jimmy even brought a tape recorder to his home and got Uncle Buddy to reminisce for two hours.(6) But Jimmy's research took him even further back. "Jimmie [sic] Carter was over at Warrenton, Georgia a few days ago and he found a plaque located on the courthouse lawn that showed the names of the soldiers who enlisted in the Revolutionary War from Warren County," Uncle Buddy wrote to a cousin in 1967. "Wiley Carter's father, Jas Carter, Jr., and Thomas Ansley, who was Wiley Carter's first wife's father were among those whose name is on that plaque ... the more you dig in this the more interesting it gets."(7)

When Carter left the governorship to campaign for president during America's bicentennial year, he brought this message of roots, heritage, and kinship to the campaign trail. "As the campaign progressed," the Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine noted, "the theme became liturgy" (see Shannon 1977, 8-9). At one memorable stump even in the days before the New Hampshire primary, a precocious five-year-old boy tugged on the Democratic presidential contender's pants. "What's this all about?" he asked in a simple and direct fashion, too innocently interruptive to be ignored. "It's about our American heritage, our forefathers," Carter responded as if playing the Southern version of a Frank Capra film hero. "It's about how my ancestors and your ancestors left Europe to make a better life, to form a government as good as its people."(8) At an energized Des Moines campaign rally during the Iowa primary, Carter told a packed house he found solace by meandering around a Plains cemetery where his ancestors--"who were born in 1787"--were buried, proudly noting that "we haven't moved very far" (see Carter 1978, 12). The importance of knowing one's ancestors, of learning one's family history, was paramount both to Carter the politician and to Carter the farmer. "I know it's probably foolish," Carter confided to journalist James Wooten in 1976, "but I'd like to see everybody in the country get to know his family tree, to study it, to find out about their own people--who they were, where they came from, how they lived, when they died, where they're buried" (see Wooten 1978, 62).

Until the publication of Debrett's Peerage--a reliable royal genealogical report based on manorial records found in the Hertfordshire Record Office and the Record Office in London--and noted British genealogist Noel Currer-Briggs's (1979) The Carters of Virginia: Their English Ancestry, Jimmy Carter's knowledge of his family tree was based on sketchy histories and fragmentary findings passed on to him by the Georgia Genealogical Society, the Mormon Church, and by Uncle Buddy and other family and friends. The Genealogical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints had placed Carter's origins in Hampshire in southeast England; Debrett's Peerage and Noel Currer-Briggs traced his lineage back to 1361 to Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, today a commuter suburb twenty-five miles north of London.(9) "So far as the ancestry of President Carter is concerned, everything depends on the accuracy of his descent from Thomas Carter of Isle of Wight," Currer-Briggs has noted, stressing the inherent complications of sorting out English bloodlines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.(10) The Carters became, however, part of the Virginia gentry who not only owned large plantations worked by West African slaves but also controlled the county courts, parish vestries, and the lower houses of the Assembly. These elite planter families intermarried and established multigenerational family dynasties. To put these powerful Virginia dynasties in perspective, when Patrick Henry told the members of the First Continental Congress in 1774 that he was "not a Virginian, but an American," an astonishing 70 percent of the House of Burgesses was drawn from affluent families residing in Virginia since before 1690. The Carters--along with the Byrds and the Lees--were the richest of all the eighteenth-century Virginia clans, owning 170,000 acres of land and 2,300 slaves dispersed over seven counties. Their bloodline connection to George Washington came from both sides of the Atlantic: the Tookes and Newces families in Hertfordshire and Virginia. The Carters are also kin to former U.S. presidents William Henry Harrison (1773-1841) and Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) (see Roberts 1977, 181; New York Times, August 12, 1977).

While exact details of Jimmy Carter's colonial Virginia heritage are somewhat vague and open to a certain amount of debate, his family footprints become considerably clearer once they appear in North Carolina and Georgia after the British surrender at Yorktown. Not long after the American Revolution, the Virginia dynasty slipped into a spiraling decline, losing much of its power and privilege as scores of middle-class lawyers and teachers, small-scale farmers, and clever strivers fought their way into the political arena of the post-Revolution south. During the transitional period from colony to nation, some of Thomas Carter's fortune-seeking family ventured south to North Carolina, many putting down stakes in Bertie County. The fuzziness in Jimmy Carter's lineage turns focused in the figure of Kindred Carter, his fifth-generation grandfather, the first of the line in Georgia.

A severe depression had gripped North Carolina in the late 1780s as the state's currency failed, tobacco prices bottomed out, and business had to be done on the barter system. Instead of waiting idly for good times to return, Kindred loaded his ox-drawn wagon; packed up his wife, four children, and ten slaves; and headed south to Georgia in 1787, leaving behind the exhausted tobacco soil of his old 640-acre Northampton County homestead (for information on Kindred Carter, see Wooten 1978, 63-67; Shannon 1977, 8; Thomas 1976, 40; and Carter 1978, 166). Kindred was not alone. Before the American Revolution, the only part of Georgia that had been populated was a narrow strip of settlements along the Atlantic coast and up the Savannah River to Augusta. By the late eighteenth century, the weary and hopeful were trudging to all parts of Georgia. "Some thousands of people are now moving into this state," an anxious James Jackson reported to his congressman, John Milledge. "They will rush like a torrent in search of subsistence" (Jackson is quoted in Lane 1973, xv).

Kindred Carter was in search of more than mere subsistence he wanted to amass a fortune. Hard work and peaceful Quaker prayer, he believed, would allow him to achieve his goal. Tall pine trees were felled, trimmed, and hacked. Settling along Little Germany Creek in Richmond County, on land in present-day McDuffie County, Kindred planted cotton and wheat on his 307-acre farm, worked by ten slaves. He started raising hogs and cows and made frequent wagon journeys down mud roads to Savannah, less than sixty miles away, to trade on the wharf. Interested in keeping the British out of his new home state, Kindred served as a private in the Georgia State Militia under Captain William Few in 1793 (see Thomas 1976, 40).

The price "substantial planters" like Kindred Carter paid for cheap land tracts in those days was high: the possibility of losing one's life or engaging in a violent confrontation with the Creek or Cherokee, who were understandably reluctant to relinquish their tribal homeland of thousands of years to white-faced invaders with rifles and fountain pens, men who threatened them with a choice between bogus treaties, voluntary expulsion, or systematic death. Between 1820 and 1840, at least fifty thousand Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole--referred to by historians as the "Five Civilized Tribes"--were driven westward on a one-thousand-mile death march to Oklahoma in a ruthless mass exodus from the Deep South. While by now most students of American History have heard about the horrific and brutal removal of the eastern Cherokees by General Andrew Jackson, aptly remembered as the Trail of Tears, the dismal fate of the Creek Nation remains largely forgotten.(11)

Ever since he was a little boy growing up in Plains during the Great Depression, Jimmy Carter's favorite hobby has been roaming the woods and fields of his home county collecting Creek arrowheads, a fascinating remembrance of a proud and ancient people too easily forgotten. "Anytime you see Jimmy Carter walking in a field, his head always bent [it] doesn't mean he is in deep prayer" jokes Hugh Carter. "What it does mean is that he is looking for arrowheads as he relaxes. He loves to talk about the life-style of the Creeks and Cherokees who once lived here and trod the very ground he walks" (see Carter 1978, 20).

Ironically, as the Anglo-Americans who migrated into Georgia were forcing the Creeks and Cherokees off their land, they were importing black slaves from Africa and the West Indies. In 1750 there were more than two hundred thousand slaves in the colonies; from 1750 to 1800, as many as one million additional slaves were captured and brought to fear the auction block and crack of the whip (for African-American life in Georgia before the Civil War, see Grant 1993, 3-76). Georgia, once a beacon of hope for honest debtors and dissolute drifters, had woefully mined to slavery to heal its perceived economic wounds. From 1750 onward, the "race problem" would in one way or another affect every economic or political decision in Georgia, where the equality between blacks and whites has never been fully achieved. As historian Eugene Genovese (1972) has maintained in Roll Jordan Roll: That World That Slaves Made,

   Cruel, unjust, exploitative, oppressive, slavery bound two peoples together
   in bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and
   ambivalent that neither could express the simplest human feelings without
   reference to another.... The Old South, black and white, created a
   historically unique kind of paternalistic society. (pp. 3-4)

The watershed advent of slavery meant that Georgia would be based on a new single cash crop economy: cultivated tobacco soon made way for King Cotton.

King Cotton and Wiley Carter

Most historians mark the 1820s as the time when upland cotton became the primary cash crop--almost a monoculture--of Georgia. Farmers looking to get rich turned away from tobacco to Gossypium hirsutum--a shrub-like plant that produced creamy-white flowers that turned deep pink and fell off, leaving cotton bolls to be harvested. As more and more plantations and farms turned to this staple crop, the land became exhausted, forcing planters to move west into Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. Georgians, like most farmers of this period, were wasteful and unknowledgeable about scientific farming and rotating crops. Cotton can be environmentally devastating: it wears out the soil and leaches it of nutrients, leaving crops vulnerable to disease and pests like the infamous boll weevil. The agrarian ways of the time were simple: you use the land and leave it behind.

What really caused farmers of the period more consternation than anything else was the erratic fluctuation they encountered when bringing their cotton harvest to market. In an inflationary year like 1818, a Georgian planter could expect to bring in twentynine cents a pound; when a depression hit, like the one in the late 1830s, the price sunk to as low as five and a half cents a pound. But nothing--depression, yellow fever, mosquitoes, or Creek Indians--could stop the lust for King Cotton: production soared from 90,000 bales (usually five hundred pounds each) in 1821 to 150,000 bales in 1826 to 326,000 bales in 1839, making Georgia the world's largest cotton producer. Luckily for Kindred Carter, "Georgia was blessed" as one historian put it, "with plentiful land that produced even when abused" (see Grant 1993, 34).

From the start, Kindred Carter and his family embraced Georgia for many of the virtues of which James Oglethorpe had once boasted: temperate climate, good fishing creeks, abundant wildlife, plenty of fine lumber, and a deep rich virgin soil, iron red in color and ready to be planted. Family support was important for economic survival, and Kindred's three sons--James, Henry, and Jesse--became responsible for doing men's work at a young age: shooting game and building barns, feeding livestock, and overseeing slaves. When Kindred died of pneumonia in 1800 at age fifty, the three boys, now married men with children, continued to work and expand their holdings, purchasing another slave or horse as they could afford it and always planning another row of cotton (see Wooten 1978, 63-65; Shannon 1977, 8; and Thomas 1980, 40).

After years of relative success, the boys' joint venture ended amicably. James, the restless, business-minded one, pressed on westward in 1815 to neighboring Warren County with his wife of seventeen years, Eleanor "Nellie" Duckworth, and their first son, Wiley. Nellie's Southern aristocratic family had some coastal wealth and as a wedding present had given the couple 133 prime cotton-growing acres along White's Creek in Warren County. With industry and thrift--and slaves--James and Nellie almost tripled their acreage in just a few short, hard labor years. Their inherited home, Rock House built around 1785 with no downstairs windows and twenty-inch-thick walls to protect against Indians--was perhaps the most impressive in the country and certainly the most sturdy and durable (for a history of the James Carter home, see Askins 1983; Carter 1978, 164).

Back in the winter of 1968, two years before he was elected governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, with Uncle Buddy and Cousin Beedie at his side, drove his Plymouth down paved U.S. 39--formerly a rutted dirt path that their ancestors traveled by horse and wagon--to see Rock House, by then abandoned and in a state of ghastly disrepair. Built by Jimmy's great-great-great-great grandfather Thomas Ansley, the house had survived like little else in McDuffie county. Jimmy and Uncle Buddy, dressed in their Sunday best, posed while Hugh snapped a picture of them in front of the house, its roof caving in but otherwise structurally intact. (The photo later appeared in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution in a special inauguration edition of the newspaper's Sunday magazine in January 1977.) An authority with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources told the Carters that Ansley was born in New Jersey around 1737, moved to North Carolina sometime before 1760, and migrated to Georgia around 1769. He sold the house to James Carter. When it looked like Carter might actually capture the White House in 1976, Rock House suddenly became "historically significant" instead of just a dilapidated colonial eyesore.(12) "This property could get real important if he gets elected," Democratic state senator Sam McGill predicted to the press (quoted in "Just in case Carter gets close" 1976). In the twenty years after Carter's presidency, the ancestral house has been renovated by the Wrightsboro Quaker Community Foundation and the one-acre site made into a McDuffie County historical landmark.

Life in early-nineteenth-century Rock House was arduous, but James Carter, in what would become a Carter family trait, understood the meaning of dedicated toil, working from sundown to sunup in pursuit of the American dream, best captured in a popular jingle of the era: "All I want in this creation is a pretty little wife and a big plantation" (quoted in Bartley 1990,15). James came close, although his "big plantation" was a simple but respectable Warren County estate. Meanwhile, in 1825, Jesse--as a result of the Indian Springs Treaty--was able to trade his father's McDuffie County farm for virgin Talbot County acreage obtained by lottery on land just recently made available by the evacuation of the Creeks. The lottery system, unique to Georgia, was used to distribute land fairly as new counties were created. Every free white male got a draw, two draws if he had a wife and a minor child. Petitioning names were sent from each county to the state capital at Milledgeville; commissioners appointed by the governor drew the names. With a minimal amount of paperwork--sifting through grant papers and collecting a nominal fee of seven cents an acre--the state would transfer virgin tracts of land to the lucky lottery recipient. Under this system, Georgia gave away about three-fourths of the state to more than one hundred thousand individuals and families, including James and Jesse Carter (for information on the land lottery, see Bartley 1990, 12. On James and Jesse Carter, see Wooten 1978, 63-67; and Shannon 1977, 8). Jesse went immediately to work, plowing and planting cotton, chopping down trees, and building a sturdy home. In 1835, James and his wife--after themselves winning a land lottery sponsored by the state to encourage settlers to move to lands vacated by the Creeks--left Rock House in the hands of their eldest son Wiley (Jimmy Carter's great-great grandfather) and headed two hundred miles southwest across the belt of red clay loam that cuts diagonally through southern Georgia to join his brother's family. Wiley Carter is important to Jimmy Carter's history because he is the first to homestead near Plains, to lay down roots in Sumter and Schley Counties (two good histories now updated and reprinted about the founding of the counties have been written; see Cox 1983; Williams 1982).

While the team of James and Jesse once again prospered, cotton bales increasing notably every fall harvest, Wiley met with personal hardship and bad luck. It began when his first wife, Ann Ansley, died in Rock House, forcing Wiley to finish raising their eleven children with the help of a slave "mammy." In late 1841, he found himself embroiled in an unfortunate dispute with a man named Usry over the ownership of a young slave. (Since Wiley held the rifle, it is unclear how and why the disagreement occurred.) According to Warren County court records of 1843, Wiley accused Usry of stealing a valuable slave. An enraged Wiley obtained a warrant from Sheriff Augustus Beau and with a small posse of supportive men went to pay the suspected slave thief a surprise visit. On their arrival, Usry refused to come outside and instead lit a kerosene lamp, loaded his rifle, and shouted a barrage of foul insults and threats at Wiley. "The sheriff offered to break down the door but Carter advised against it, hoping Usry would become sober and give up," the court noted for the record. The showdown lasted for more than eight hours. Finally, Usry's son burst out of the house and told Carter to leave or his daddy would "fill him full of bullets" until he lay dead. "Carter insisted in a friendly way that Usry submit to the warrant," the sheriff later reported. "Usry cocked his gun [and] abused Carter in a most offensive character. Usry and Carter were cursing each other and both raised their guns about the same time and Carter fired." When the gunsmoke cleared, Usry had been shot dead. A prolonged and much gossiped about criminal trial ensued six months later in April 1842; Wiley was acquitted of murder under the accepted plea of self-defense.(13)

Unpleasant memories of the lamentable shooting continued to haunt Wiley, so nine years later, with his second wife, Sarah, he packed up his family and left Rock House in the hands of his nineteen-year-old son, Littleberry Walker Carter. It was 1851; a tumultuous national debate was stirring over the abolition of slavery, and Bible-thumping John Brown would soon be bleeding Kansas with his rhetoric and sword, but Wiley Carter paid such national happenings little mind. He rambled his way south through featureless Washington County and then westward to a naked hamlet called Quebec, in the north part of Lee County (now Schley County), only ten miles from President Carter's hometown of Plains, known then from its biblical antecedent as the Plain of Dura. Quebec was surrounded by an even mix of flat and fallow prairie-like land and gentle, heavily wooded, rolling hills. The winters were mild, but summers were bug-ridden and excessively hot and humid. Although the fertile soil showed no signs of quick erosion, after only a few years in Quebec, Wiley witnessed wagonloads of settlers venture out for the even "newer" soils of Alabama and Mississippi. The area was no stranger to fatal diseases, with an epidemic of yellow fever sweeping through the countryside every couple of years.(14)

Wiley went immediately to work planting plenty of cotton along with sugarcane, rye, wheat, and corn. More than two hundred steamboats now plied the Chattahoochee-Flint River system with barges able to transport his agricultural products to market. During the winter months, dried black-eyed peas were picked and shelled, causing fingertips to bleed and blister. The two-story house Wiley constructed one hundred yards from swampy Muckalee Creek and shaded by a few strong-armed water oaks, which stood for years in ramshackle shape at the intersection of Highways 45 and 153, its top floor ripped off in a 1935 tornado, was built of thick, local heart pine. Two outhouses were erected behind the house, with flypaper pasted to the planks, and a deep well was dug next to the slave quarters. The soil was the best he had ever seen: a red clay subsoil with a top of gray and dark earth that was sandy enough to plow easily and not break into clods yet strong and resilient enough to retain moisture and protect his crops against danger from dry weather. Gullies were cut to gather the silt that gushed off the land during heavy rains. A fresh-water hole on his property was named Buttermilk Springs because its cool waters kept his milk and butter fresh during the sweltering summer months.(15) Dairy cows, referred to in the area as "the foster mothers of the world" (see Williams 1982, 41), were purchased in the spirit of diversification.

Wiley's eighty-four-year-old father, James--the first Carter to become a devout Baptist--came to visit Quebec in 1858 only to perish in bed of an escalating fever. By southern standards of time, his life had been blessed: a prosperous three-hundred-acre Talbot County plantation, successful children, six slaves, a three-piece suit, and enough pocket change to be buried in a fifty-dollar metallic coffin.(16) The carters of Georgia may not have become rich, but for the economic standards of the time, they were extremely well off. They had earned a reputation for being, as Uncle Buddy once put it, "a tough irrepressible lot."(17) By the time cannon shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, ushering in the Civil War, Wiley Carter had a thriving plantation complete with six hundred acres of improved land, sixteen hundred acres of unimproved land, two horses, eleven mules, ten head of cattle, 165 slaves, and two graceful two-story houses--one for himself and one for his daughters. Extra money was even generated by opening a slave market only two hundred yards from his home. By Georgia's standards, Wiley Carter had overcome tragedy and turmoil to become landed gentry, a determined man more business minded and ambitious than his neighbors (see Shannon 1977, 20).

The Civil War came at a most inconvenient time for Georgia's self-sufficient white farmers like Wiley Carter, for King Cotton and the state land lottery were just starting to make them rich. A typical Georgia slaveholder held property worth five times that of a normal Yankee. An 1860 census showed, in fact, that the per capita wealth held by Georgia's 592,000 whites was twice that possessed by an average Pennsylvanian or New Yorker. Prosperity abounded from the magnolia mansions of Savannah to the rice plantations of the Georgia coastal islands, to the agricultural boomtowns near Macon, to the scrappy railroad yards of Atlanta. The ownership of two of the state's 462,000 slaves--worth on average nine hundred dollars each made a Georgia man nearly as wealthy as the average Massachusetts citizen. Even though one-half of Georgia's white families did not own land and well more than 60 percent did not own slaves, they were still better off than most Americans: the land, particularly between Macon and Columbus, was fertile and the business prospects for skilled artisan and tradesmen promising (see Bartley 1990,16). As W.J. Cash (1941) noted in his classic The Mind of the South, even "the slaveless yeomen might wax fat in the sort of primitive prosperity which consisted in having an abundance of what they themselves could produce" (p. 23). Out of all the Confederate states, Georgia was also the least industrial; with the exception of the necessary grist and sawmills, factories scarcely existed. Margaret Mitchell (1936) had captured the twisted essence of the Southern secessionist era in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett O'Hara revealed that "she'd never seen a factory, or known anyone who had seen a factory" (p. 111).

Wiley Carter, in his own rough and tumble way, much like the coquettish Scarlett O'Hara, was a pure product of the antebellum plantation culture, his thriving agrarian way of life dismantled by the U.S. government. No sooner had Abraham Lincoln been elected president, than then Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown, terrified that Republicans might abolish slavery, made a desperate appeal to rally poor whites, one that would be echoed by most of the state's chief executives for more than one hundred years, until Jimmy Carter replaced Lester Maddox in 1971: "Negroes would come in competition with their labor, associate with them and their children as equals ... --claim social equality with them--and ask the hands of their children in marriage" (see Brown 1910, 56). Wiley Carter--who spent the Civil War growing food for the Confederate Army and boasting about his three sons, who served in a celebrated unit known as the Sumter Flying Artillery--died in 1864, not long after Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, leaving a deed found by his grandson Alton Carter almost one hundred years later for a two-and-a-half acre family "cemetery eternal." Jimmy found that forgotten cemetery; the simple grave slab read "Wiley Carter 1789-1864." Not long after the deed was discovered, Jimmy Carter and his brother Billy, with the help of close family friend and burial vault manufacturer John Pope, cleaned up the nineteenth-century family cemetery, landscaped it a bit, poured some cement, and put around it a chain-link fence. When Wiley Carter's great-great grandson Jimmy Carter was about to be elected president, and hordes of curious sightseers and journalists wanted to know about "The Man From Plains," a billboard was put out by the rural road for all to see: "Carter Family Cemetery."(18)

Sumter County and the Civil War

Sumter County was founded in 1831 and named for the honorable General Thomas Sumter, revered "Game Cock of Carolina," who was still alive, living outside of Bradford Springs, South Carolina, and reputed to be "spritely" at age ninety-seven. A native of Hanover County, Virginia, Sumter was the last surviving American-born general officer of the Revolutionary War.(19) The 312,576 acres of Sumter County--originally obtained by 1832 lottery at little cost--initially sold for anywhere from $5 to $50 per acre. Most of those who settled Sumter were of Anglo-Saxon stock and migrated from Virginia, the Carolinas, or other Georgia counties. Besides good soil, there were thousands of fresh water springs and creeks, not to mention rattlesnakes and alligators (see Borns 1978, 3; Thomas 1980, 3; and Sheppard 1987, 9).

Not long after the creation of Sumter County, a committee was appointed to select a land site for the county seat of government. Lively discussion ensued concerning what to name the new town, and ordinary citizens were invited to submit suggestions. The winning name was Americus, in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, then considered the discoverer of North America. (Another version of the story claims that the name was selected because so many of the town's early rough-and-tumble leaders were "merry cusses," each in their own right A-meri-cus) (see Williford 1982, 28-29). A town square was soon chosen; county commissioners were picked; streets were named; Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian preachers held Bible classes; the first white baby was born; and Wright Brady sold his first bottle of distilled Kentucky whiskey in his saloon. Americus was on the map.

Nine years after the county's creation, when the census of 1840 was taken, a total of 5,734 people lived in Sumter County (4,103 free whites, 1,630 slaves, and 1 free person of color). This was a golden decade for Americus: businesses from hotels to dry goods stores flourished, male and female educational academies were erected, degreed physicians set up clinics, and the cornerstone of a new brick courthouse was laid. Opulent Greek Revival white-columned homes, stately architectural gems, which still stand imposing and handsome, were carefully constructed, and the county even provided a small company proudly known as the "Sumter Volunteers" to serve in Mr. Polk's Mexican War of 1846. But the most important year in Americus' development, the year that radically altered the rhythm and pace of life, was 1854, when the Southwestern Railroad (SWRR) came to town. Cotton could now be rapidly shipped to market, local newspapers could be printed and dispersed around the county, mail service improved tenfold, easy travel between neighboring towns made social visits possible--all because of the railroads. As Sumter County's third decade came to a close, the atmosphere was one of unfettered optimism, oblivious to the ominous storm clouds in the air (see Williford 1982, 19-42).

After Lincoln was sworn in as the sixteenth president of the United States, more than forty Georgian counties sent to the General Assembly resolutions favoring secession. Sumter was one of the few that refused, choosing instead to send "a prayerful entreaty to the Almighty to guide legislators in working out a peaceful solution." The Almighty was not listening: after the secession of South Carolina on December 20, 1860, the governor issued a call for a state convention in Milledgeville (Sumter County sent three representatives) that, after a few days of vociferous and emotional debate, adapted an ordinance declaring that "the Union now existing between Georgian and the other states" was dissolved (see Williford 1982, 40-42; Thomas 1979, 190-214; and Luraghi 1978). All of Georgia's representatives in the U.S. Congress resigned a few days later. The South was, in poet Allen Tate's phrase, tired of being "Uncle Sam's other province" (quoted in Cash 1941, xivii).

The Civil War did not ravage Sumter County as badly as it did other areas of the state: food was in adequate supply, cotton continued to be ginned, slaves worked the plantations, and Sherman's unremitting march through Georgia skirted the county to the northeast. But the war touched the county in a tragic and profoundly barbarous way: it served as home to a prison for Union soldiers located near the insignificant SWRR stop town of Andersonville. As the Civil War wound down, shocking tales of horror and deprivation perpetrated by the Confederates in charge began to circulate about this twenty-acre prison compound located ten miles northeast of Americus. The acrimonious war crimes trial that ensued after the conflict further inflamed Northern fury and aroused knee-jerk defensiveness in the South to the point that the mere mention of Andersonville can still trigger a barroom brawl.

The site of Andersonville was chosen late in the war, in 1864, because of its remoteness from the battlefront, its mild climate, and the ready availability of food and water provisions. First named simply Anderson Prison, the stockade within the compound was named Camp Sumter. The parallelogram-shaped prison facility, a huge corral constructed in an oak and pine forest through which a creek ran, was overcrowded and mismanaged from the start, eventually housing thirty-five thousand inhabitants in an area planned for ten thousand. Many of the Yankee prisoners perished after only a few days in the camp from rancid pork, polluted water, virulent diseases, chronic scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery, which all turned healthy young Union men into barely alive skeletons. Medical supplies could not be found, hardtack rations were stolen by Confederate guards, vegetables were almost nonexistent, and lice-ridden prisoners were kept ill clothed and blanketless (see, for example, Futch 1968; Sheppard 1987). Because of starvation, unsanitary conditions, and rampant disease, men died so fast that often their limp, bony bodies lay in muddy stockade streets for hours, flies covering their festering, gangrenous sores, before fatigued work crews could bury them, sometimes as many as twenty to a grave.

The unconscionable prisoner-of-war abuses were executed by the Confederate soldiers stationed at Andersonville, who sold or kept for themselves the scarce food and supplies delegated for the Yankees. The Confederate soldier considered to be the most reprehensible and responsible for the deplorable cruelties at the prison was the brutish, Swiss-born Captain Henry Wirz, the commander of Camp Sumter, whom MacKinlay Kantor portrayed in his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning Andersonville as a human demon.(20) Recent scholarship exonerates Captain Wirz from such charges as deliberately exterminating prisoners, but his name will forever be associated with ruthlessness and grisly dereliction of duty. After standing trial for war crimes, with hundreds of Union survivors of Andersonville telling their anguished stories of what it was like to be one of Wirz's living dead, the camp commandant was found guilty in 1868. With great fanfare, General Lew Wallace, head of the military commission and future author of Ben Hur, ordered Wirz to be hanged the only Confederate sentenced to death in the courtyard of the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. "With the pronouncement one frail Swiss immigrant went to the gallows and Andersonville came to signify all that was evil in the hated Confederacy," historian William Marvel has noted.(21) Today, only twenty miles from Jimmy Carter's birthplace, visitors can walk peacefully among the 12,912 Union dead buried at Wirz's Andersonville Prison site, a stark monumental remembrance now for all POWs everywhere in the world. Due to their dose proximity, the National Park Service, for the sake of management convenience, has designated both Carter's Plains and Andersonville as part of the same unit.(22)

Growing up in Sumter County, Jimmy Carter naturally became interested in Andersonville. He was stunned when on a high school field trip, he witnessed with his own eyes the seemingly endless rows of numbered Union soldier graves, graves that famed Civil War nurse Clara Barton had successfully lobbied to have marked with name, military regiment, and date and cause of death. The prevailing wisdom in the area at the time was that the Yankee prisoners got what they deserved. Before the National Park Service became custodian of the historic cemetery, locals would even picnic at Andersonville using the Yankee headstones as benches. With a misguided burst of Dixie pride, the Georgia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a tall granite monument in the center of Andersonville to the memory of Henry Wirz to rescue his name from "embittered prejudice."

Embarrassed by the Confederate army's brutality and the Confederate Daughters' bravado, Carter tried to forget about Andersonville, focusing his imagination instead on the grey-horse gallantry of Robert E. Lee at Bull Run or on Stonewall Jackson at Shiloh. The barbarians of the Civil War, Carter thought, were Sherman and Sheridan, who marched through his home state destroying everything in sight. Although Carter retained a casual interest in Andersonville, it was not until the mid-1950s when his mother attended an Americus estate sale and bought for three dollars a large box of books that included The Southern Side, written by the Confederate medical doctor in charge of Andersonville, R. Randolph Stevenson (1876), that his interest became truly piqued.(23)

   The thesis of The Southern Side is that the Confederate mistreatment of
   Yankees had been greatly exaggerated and that Lee had tried to make a
   prisoner swap but Grant stoutheartedly refused. "He [Stevenson] pointed out
   from his own self-knowledge how the Confederates themselves didn't have any
   food," Carter recalls, remembering the great impact the Andersonville
   memoir first had on him when he read it more than thirty years ago.

      They had the same rations that they had for the prisoners that they
   would issue to the Confederate soldiers, but he acknowledged the
   Confederate soldiers could also get pecans or hickory nuts or a piece of
   chicken or something. He pointed out that Lee tried to swap prisoners
   because he couldn't feed them. He just didn't have any money and Grant
   refused to swap. And then Lee offered to swap two prisoners for just one so
   he wouldn't have to see them suffer. Grant still refused because he thought
   at one time feeding 30,000 prisoners was a great burden on the South.

The Confederacy was historically redeemed in The Southern Side, and Carter, a true believer who was serving on the Sumter County Library Association--created in 1876 when the Federal troops left Americus and new associations were encouraged to flourish--had "the very dilapidated" book "renovated," including new red covers. "At that time I went over to Andersonville to try to interpret where the events took place," Carter recalls.(24) What he found was the inherent truth of historian Garry Wills's statement, "Only the winners decide what are war crimes" (quoted in Marvel 1994). The Yankees, Carter decided, had "completely destroyed all remnants of the Civil War prisons in the North ... and completely obliterated all trace of them so they wouldn't look guilty of having their own Andersonvilles in Ohio and Illinois." This, according to Carter, was what historian C. V. Woodward must have meant by "the burden of southern history." The South had lost the Civil War; the history books would always have a pro-Northern bias.(25) As Dr. Stevenson wrote in The Southern Side, "Our would-be historians have vainly attempted to shift all the horrors of the war and its sequences to the shoulders of the South; happily, up to the present, they have failed to prove a single point in their tremendous indictments" (p. 283).

The Union prison camp reentered Carter's consciousness in a meaningful way again some years later while he was serving as governor in the early 1970s. "We were making a big effort to bring motion picture production to Georgia," Carter recalls. "Andersonville reentered my mind." Traveling by plane to Hollywood and New York to discuss revenue-enhancing movie projects with producers and investors such as David Rockefeller, Carter met with staggering success: twenty-six films were shot in Georgia his last year in office alone. MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville--which Carter despises--had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. Swallowing hard, Carter conceded that the book was "a natural" to be developed into a film and shot in Sumter County. The rigors of a presidential campaign took over before the project could advance beyond the 1977-pipedream stage. After receiving a phone reminder from Georgia's new governor George Busbee in early 1977, however, Carter sat down and wrote MacKinlay Kantor on White House stationary about making a film out of his Andersonville. Kantor responded to President Carter in a tart, unforgettable, single-sentenced note: "If you uncover a pile of dog shit, don't stir it."(26)

Littleberry Walker Carter and William Archibald Carter

The inevitability of war was apparent in Georgia even before the U.S. government fired on Fort Sumter and many headstrong young men rushed to join militia companies. Three of Wiley Carter's five sons--including Jimmy's great-grandfather Littleberry Walker Carter--did the family proud by volunteering as privates in the celebrated unit known as the Sumter Flying Artillery, which was headquartered in Virginia for the duration of the war. The unit was organized by an Americus mercantileman and Mexican War veteran, Captain A. S. Cutts. The Carter boys joined the Confederate Army in Richmond as Company A, 11th Battalion, Georgia Volunteers in the spring of 1862. The band of brothers--part of a unit commanded by the legendary "Jeb" Smart--saw action in Boonsboro, The Wilderness, Spottsylvania Courthouse, Petersburg, and elsewhere in war-ravaged Virginia, and somehow all managed to stay alive (for the Carter boys' Civil War service, see Shannon 1977, 20-21; Wooten 1978, 66-67; and Carter 1978, 167). After witnessing the Sumter Flying Artillery in battle, Jeb Smart filed the following report:

   The battery suffered greatly.... Three or four cannoneers had been shot at
   their posts and several wounded, and every shot of the enemy was dealing
   destruction on either man ... or horse.... The conduct of the brave, true
   and heroic Cutts attracted my admiration frequently during the action.
   (quoted in Cox 1983, 84)

Their tattered battalion flag, with a black cannon embroidered in the middle, is on display in the state capitol. For Littleberry Walker, the honor of fighting behind Lee, Jackson, Johnston, and Smart would be the high-water mark of his life for, as Hugh Carter put it, he would soon add "another violent episode to the Carter family tree" (see Carter 1978, 167).

Just after Lee's dramatic surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on that fateful Easter Sunday of 1865, the three brothers--Littleberry Walker, Jesse, and Wiley, Jr.--laid down their rifles and journeyed back to Sumter County, traveling mainly on foot from Savannah, passing ragged clusters of Yankee and Rebel amputees hobbling on bayonet crutches, others with arms or heads swathed in bandages, all heading in the same direction: home. When he made it to Atlanta, Littleberry Walker found a city smoldering in ruin, the handiwork of General William T. Sherman's "scorched earth policy:" the hard-drinking Ohio-bred soldier's apocalyptic foot march through Georgia during which he burned everything in sight. (One hundred and twenty years later, Littleberry's greatgrandson, Jimmy Carter, after serving his country honorably as its thirty-ninth president, would oversee the Carter Center, a humanitarian complex to, among other things, resolve civil wars through diplomatic negotiations all over the world, constructed on the same hilltop overlooking Atlanta on which General Sherman had once stood.) After journeying six hundred miles, anxious for the cool comforts of his Dixie home, Littleberry returned to the loamy soil of Quebec in Sumter County only to learn that his father had died and that the family farm was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy (see Shannon 1977, 21-22; and Thomas 1980, 91, for a biographical profile of Littleberry Walker Carter).

For eight years, Littleberry Walker worked the land, trying to adjust to the new sharecropper system that arose after the abolition of slavery. Where his daddy used to sell slaves, he built a pump house and barn. Then, in 1873--after warding off diphtheria, carpetbaggers, and scalawags--I Littleberry was knifed to death during a drunken brawl with his business partner. They were fighting over--of all things--the proceeds of a merry-go-round (called a "flying jenny") at a county fair where Littleberry's nephew Charles Carter was operating the amusement. Sumter County Superior Court issued a murder indictment against D. P. McCann, but he had vanished to South America and was never apprehended. Shocked by the heinous stabbing of her war-hero husband, Littleberry's wife, Diligence, dropped dead herself in a spasmodic fit of hysterics not long after hearing the jolting news (see Wooten 1978, 66-67; and Carter 1978, 166-169).

Jimmy Carter became interested in Littleberry Carter in early 1994 when he was researching a book he planned to write on his own growing-up years. The paper trail was thin, he found, after spending an afternoon at Lake Blackshear Regional Library in Americus, scanning old copies of the Sumter Republican for Littleberry Walker's obituary to no avail.(27) (What has been found is a $20.75 estate sale receipt for a "flying machine" purchased shortly after Littleberry Walker's and Diligence's deaths.) The couple was buried together in a family plot later turned hog pen near Souther Field (where Charles Lindbergh made his first solo flight) leaving four children to look after themselves. One of those was fifteen-year-old William Archibald Carter--Jimmy Carter's grandfather.(28)

For years after the Civil War, residual guilt over Andersonville or slavery were the least pressing concerns of Sumter County citizens: there was no time for regret, only concern. With slavery abolished, a new economic system had to be erected in it wake. Hundreds of locals who had been well off before the war now found themselves in dire straits, while those who had been less fortunate were now flat-out destitute. Confederate money was deemed worthless, burned in roadside campfires or trash bins or used to paper walls. Gloating, blue-uniformed federal troops rode the streets of Americus high on their horses, in no hurry to usher in that era of reconstruction and good feelings that Lincoln had spoken so elegantly about before his fatal meeting with John Wilkes Booth.

Many slaves in 1865 were under the false assumption that the Emancipation Proclamation meant that they would not have to work at all, that the Promised Land had arrived, that heaven was here on earth. After a few months of jubilation, many of these impoverished slaves returned to their former masters, toiling once again on the same cotton fields for either subsistence wages or a share of the crops. Almost by inertia, this "share-cropping" system, which proved to be the salvation of desperate planters and farmers, took root. The sharecropper system, the Democratic Party, and the Ku Klux Klan would keep blacks "in their place"--politically voiceless and in the fields. The Civil War had dramatically changed the South, yet on the surface, it seemed that little had changed. "Although considerable redistribution of land ownership did take place, the parceling out of plantation lands in small plots among croppers was more a reflection of the revolution in the labor system that it was a revolution of land tenure," historian C. V. Woodward has noted (see Woodward 1951, 178). According to Jimmy Carter, "sharecropping was paradoxical--it both helped everybody and hurt everybody at the same time."(29)

Meanwhile, Georgia's post-Civil War government went through a period of feverish change. In the first election held under the Reconstruction Acts, voters were forced to hold a biracial State Constitutional Convention (December 9, 1867 to March 11, 1868) in which a new state constitution was written, the courts abolished and new ones created, all public and private debts were forgiven, public education guaranteed for all children, and the decision made to move the capital from the provincial Milledgeville to urban Atlanta (see Bartley 1990, 54-58). Apathy was anathema to the new pervasive spirit of "can-do" optimism in Atlanta-Constitution editor Henry Grady's (1938) "New South" vision of renewing Georgia by "the rapid diversification of crops and diversification of industries" so "sunshine everywhere and all the time" prevailed (see Harris 1938,110-15; for an interesting study of Grady's life, see Nixon 1969). After a spell of struggle, Georgia, and Sumter County in particular, had a slow recovery from ruin and was back in stride by the mid-1880s, the decade when Jimmy Carter's Uncle Buddy was born.

Littleberry Walker Carter's son, William Archibald, was part of Grady's (1938) New South optimism. Only days after his marriage to Nina Pratt of South Carolina in 1885, William Archibald--known as Billy--settled down with his bride in the little community of Rowena in Calhoun County, just north of the Early County line. At that homestead site in 1894, James Earl--father of Jimmy Carter--was born.

Business was good for Billy, so good that he began buying a few buildings around town. According to Alton, his father had "three sawmills when he died," the most in the county. One building he bought included a commissary store, which he rented in 1902 to a merchant descended from French Huguenots named Will Taliaferro (pronounced "Tolliver"). This business agreement quickly ran amok when Billy heard that Taliaferro was using the store for Sunday evening liquor bashes and dice shooting in violation of the recently imposed county blue laws; he asked his heathen renter to pack up and vacate. Livid at being ousted by a holier-than-thou landlord, Taliaferro ventured to Rowena and opened his own general store, bringing with him Billy's small commissary desk, a thread case used for writing in the gin. Seldom, if ever, has a desk been the cause of such tragedy. "I went after the blamed thing" then-fifteen-year-old Alton Carter recalled years later,

   but this fellow said he bought it from my Daddy. So I went on back home and
   when Daddy came in that night, I told him the man claimed he had bought the
   desk. Well, Daddy--he said he didn't know anything about that and he said
   he'd just go over there to Rowena in the morning and get it himself, since
   I hadn't done the job. (quoted in Wooten 1978, 68; also see Shannon 1977,
   21)

At sunrise the next morning, Billy and his teenage son Alton walked over to Taliaferro's general store--which was only a quarter mile away--to bring home the desk. Alton, the only eyewitness to the event, vividly recalled the following:

   They got into a terrible argument--screaming and shouting at each
   other--and then they got to scuffling and wrestling around and there were
   some blows exchanged and then they were both bleeding by then and all of a
   sudden that fellow came up with a gun, a little pistol. (Shannon 1977,
   21-22)

The fight moved out to the street, and broken beer bottles were being used as weapons. "I was no more than fifteen or twenty feet away when he shot Daddy. Shot Daddy in the head, the back of the head." Taliaferro immediately dropped the .32 caliber Smith and Wesson and stumbled away in shock from the sight of William Archibald Carter, who lay in a pool of blood. "There wasn't much I could do," Alton recalled, still emotionally distraught from the event seventy years after it occurred. "I cried, of course, and ran to help him and tried to take care of him, but there wasn't much I could do. Daddy was in bad shape." For two days, William Archibald Carter stayed, as the Ear[y County Times reported on September 3, 1903, "barely alive," but that evening at 7:30 p.m., the hardworking Henry Grady "New South" believer and father of four died. Will Taliaferro was apprehended and charged with manslaughter. After three mistrials, he was freed. According to Alton, Taliaferro was acquitted because "my Daddy went over there in his place of business and that went against him" (Shannon 1977, 21; Wooten 1978, 68). Another factor was the fact that the Carters had moved away to Plains while the Taliaferros stayed put. Murder had once again played a chilling role in Carter family history. As New York Times journalist James Wooten put it, "In three successive generations, the Carters killed and had been killed over what they considered to be their property--a human being, a merry-go-round and a desk" (Shannon 1977, 21; Wooten 1978, 69.)

At fifteen, Alton--Jimmy Carter's Uncle Buddy--was the male provider for the Carter household, responsible for his mother Nina, three sisters, and ten-year-old James Earl. Billy's brother, Calvin Carter, the executor of the estate, moved to Americus with his five children. "As an agriculturist Mr. Carter has met with exceptional good success, owning upwards of sixteen hundred acres in Sumter County, Georgia and having valuable tracts of land in both Orange and Gadsden Counties in Florida" a newspaper story at the time said of Calvin Carter, who in 1900 built a cigar factory in Americus using his own homegrown Florida tobacco.(30) Uncle Calvin convinced Alton to sell his father's cotton gin, sawmills, and land parcels and move the family to Sumter County, where real estate was still cheap and where he would be available to keep a watchful eye on them. Alton, after consulting his mother, readily agreed and, after liquidating their financial assets, brought this still grief-stricken family to a tiny farming village nine miles west of Americus in 1904. "I brought my mother and three sisters and my brother to Plains," Alton later recalled. "My brother Earl, Jimmy's daddy, was ten years old" (quoted in Shannon 1977, 22).

Jimmy Carter turned seventy-five-years of age this past October, and his interest in his family tree has only heightened over the years. Whenever his busy schedule permits, he visits local libraries and courthouses looking for new genealogical information about the Carter clan. A couple years ago, he signed a contract with Random House/Times Books to write a novel about the Revolutionary War in Georgia, with members of his family serving as characters; when completed, he will become the first president to ever publish fiction. "It's fun," Carter maintains. "I'm getting to do what you historians do, understand the details and intricacies of the past and write fiction about it."(31)

(1.) See Hershey (1977). Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage published by the association of British Directory Publishers of London and is updated periodically The report's findings can be found in the Lake Blackshear Regional Library, Special Collections, Carter Family Genealogy File, Americus, Georgia, and have been accepted as correct in Roberts (1989, 133-34). For the best published Carter genealogical chart, beginning with Kindred Carter (c. 1750-1800), see Thomas (1976, 40). Also, author's interview of Reverend Silas Emmett Lucas, June 2, 1993 (the founder and president of the Georgia Genealogical Society). Rev. Lucas was a walking encyclopedia of the history of Georgia families. Sadly, he died at his Greenville, North Carolina, home on May 4,1994, at the age of 62. Back issues of Georgia Genealogical Magazine were also consulted.

(2.) Author's interview of Chip Carter, January 21,1995 (Decatur, Georgia). The New York Times article of August 12, 1977, commented on Chip's "roots trip" to England.

(3.) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The New York Times Book Review, June 5,1977, p. 1. Professor Schlesinger was reviewing Jimmy Carter's selected speeches as Georgia governor, which had been compiled by speechwriter Patrick Anderson under the title A Government As Good As Its People.

(4.) Author's interview of Jimmy Carter, October 16, 1993, Plains, Georgia.

(5.) Hugh Carter, as told to Frances Spatz Leighton; see Carter (1978, 5). Alton Carter died on January 18,1978.

(6.) Author's interview of Hugh Carter, Jr., January 17,1995.

(7.) Alton Carter to Jas. Deriso, December 16,1967, the Personal Papers of John and Betty Pope, Americus, Georgia.

(8.) Author's interview of Betty Pope, January 8,1995, Americus, Georgia.

(9.) See Currer-Briggs (1979). James M. Black, research specialist, Genealogical Department, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (reported in Carter Family Genealogy File, Lake Blackshear Regional Library, Special Collections, Americus, Georgia). Also, New, York Times, August 12, 1977.

(10.) Currer-Briggs is quoted in evaluation of Debrett's Peerage (report in Carter Family Genealogy File, Special Collections Department, Lake Blackshear Regional Library, Americus, Georgia). Also see Thomas (1980, 40).

(11.) For information on the Creeks, see Cotterill (1954) and Swanton (1922). People had lived in the Sumter County (Plains, Georgia) area for ten thousand years before white settlers, including such groups as the Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, Mississippian, and historic Native Americans.

(12.) Author's interview of Hugh Carter, Jr.,January 17,1995, Plains, Georgia. Also see Shannon (1977, 8).

(13.) For the Wiley Carter murder incident, see Warren County Court Records (1843) in Warrenton, Georgia. These have been quoted in Wooten (1978, 65-66), Shannon (1977, 8), Carter (1978,166-68), and Glad (1980, 23).

(14.) For information on Wiley Carter, see Wooten (1978, 65-68), Carter (1978, 166-72), Glad 0980, 23-24), and Shannon 0977). The quote about "fanning" is from author's interview of Ms. Virginia Williams, June 3,1993, Plains Georgia.

(15.) Author's interview of Betty Pope, January 9, 1995, Plains, Georgia, and James Battle, January 16,1995, Ellaville, Georgia, whose father purchased the farm from Charles Carter in 1914. Battle kindly went with me to look at the Wiley Carter land deeds in a bank safety deposit box in Ellaville. The Wiley Carter farm is now referred to as "the Battle Place." See also Jordan (1922).

(16.) See Wooten (1978, 64). At the time of his death, his six slaves were sold: Green for $1,106; Solomon for $1,261; Frank for $1,200; Titus for $900; May and her baby Joe for $1,225.

(17.) Author interview with Hugh Carter, Jr., January 14,1995, Plains, Georgia.

(18.) Author's interview with John Pope, January 15,1995, Americus, Georgia.

(19.) See Williford (1982, 26). Also, author's interview of Henry King Stanford, former president of the University of Georgia, January 20,1995, Americus, Georgia.

(20.) MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville (New York, 1956) is written as a novel.

(21.) See Marvel (1994) for a superb revisionist account that humanizes Wirz and the other Confederates at the prison camp.

(22.) Author's interview of Fred Boyles, U.S. National Park Superintendent of Site, May 4, 1994, Andersonville, Georgia.

(23.) Author's interview of Jimmy Carter, October 29,1993, Plains, Georgia.

(24.) Ibid. The book that influenced Carter is Stevenson (1876).

(25.) Author's interview of Jimmy Carter, October 29,1993, Plains, Georgia.

(26.) Author's interview of Jimmy Carter, October 29, 1993, Plains, Georgia.

(27.) Jimmy Carter to Jeanie Bruce, January 6,1994, Lake Blackshear Regional Library, Division of Special Collections, Carter Family Genealogy File, Americus, Georgia.

(28.) Alton Carter, quoted in Shannon (1977, 21). See also author's interview of Hugh Carter, October 27, 1993, Plains, Georgia.

(29.) Author's interview of Jimmy Carter, October 16, 1993.

(30.) The Americus Times-Recorder quote on Calvin Carter is located in the Carter Family Genealogical File, Special Collections, Lake Blackshear Regional Library, Americus, Georgia. For the statistic on cotton production, see History of Plains, Georgia 1885-1985. Compiled by Mrs. C. L. Walters.

(31.) Telephone conversation with Jimmy Carter, February 1999.

References

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Bartley, Numen V. 1990. The creation of modern Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Borns, Steve. 1978. People of Plains. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Brown, Joseph E. 1910. Special message, November 7, 1860. In The Confederate Records of the State of Georgia, compiled by Allen D. Candler, 5 vols. Atlanta, Georgia: State Printer.

Carter, Hugh. 1978. Cousin Beedie and Cousin Hot: My life with the Carter family of Plains, Georgia. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Cash, W. J. 1941. The mind of the South. New York: Knopf.

Cotterill, R. S. 1954. The Soutehre Indians: The story of the civilized tribes before removal. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

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Currer-Briggs, Noel. 1979. The Carters of Virginia: Their English Ancestry. Chichester, England: Phillimore.

Futch, Ovid L. 1968. History of Andersonville. Tallahassee: University of Florida Press

Genovese, Eugene. 1972. Roll Jordan roll: The world that slaves made. New York: Pantheon.

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Grady, Henry W. 1938. The South and her problem. In Henry W. Grady: Writings and speeches, edited by Joel Chandler Harris. New York: Cassell.

Grant, Donald L. 1993. The way it was in the South: The black experience in Georgia. New York: Birch Lane.

Harris, Joel Chandler, ed. 1938. Henry W. Grady: Writings and speeches, New York: Cassell.

Hershey, Robert D., Jr. 1977. Carter's family linked to royalty by British publication on peerage. New York Times, August 12.

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Just in case Carter gets close. 1976. Atlanta Constitution, February 27.

Lane, Milled, ed. 1973. The rambler in Georgia. Savannah, GA: Beehive.

Luraghi, Raimondo. 1978. The rise and fall of the plantation South. New York: Viewpoints.

Marvel, William. 1994. Andersonville. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Mitchell, Margaret. 1936. Gone with the wind. New York: Macmillan.

Nixon, Raymond B. 1969. Henry W. Grady: Spokeman of the New South. New York: Russell and Russell.

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Roberts, Gary Boyd. 1989. Ancestors of American presidents. Santa Clarita, CA: New England Historic Genealogical Society.

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Sheppard, Peggy. 1987. Andersonville Georgia USA. Andersonville, GA: Sheppard.

Stevenson, R. Randolph. 1876. The southern side or Andersonville prison. Baltimore: Turnball Brothers.

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Williford, William Bailey. 1982. Americus through the years: The story of a Georgia town and its people 1832-1975. Atlanta: Cherokee.

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Douglas Brinkley is the Stephen E. Ambrose Professor of History at the University of New Orleans and the director of the Eisenhower Center. He is the author of The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal, and Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-1971.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY University of New Orleans3