The novel begins quite charmingly in Philadelphia in 1763, with a whirlwind courtship (his naïve and apolitical lovers marry seven pages into Chapter 1, in the middle of a paragraph; so much for suspense). Ethan and Epsey Pratt then drift southward to North Carolina, where the Battle of Alamance Creek (1771), between British authorities and a group of colonial protesters known as Regulators, leads to the hanging of Ethan's firebrand older brother. The Pratts, tilting now toward the Revolutionary side, migrate still farther south, like Carter's own forebears, to a settlement near Augusta, Ga.

Here the stoic Ethan falls slowly in love with the wife of his neighbor, Kindred Morris (Pratt and Kindred are Carter family names). And here too the great historical tides of the Revolution eventually sweep him away from his homestead and into the command of the notorious rebel partisan Elijah Clarke, who will hector and slaughter his way to the book's bloody climax at the Battle of Kings Mountain (1780) in South Carolina. It is a little-known battle, as Carter says, yet it becomes the turning point of the war in the South.

There is something very congenial in Carter's voice as he lines up Ethan and Epsey and Kindred, sits them down on their hard 18th-century benches and has them utter paragraph after paragraph of earnest, good-natured, faintly implausible dialogue. And there is something quite incisive about his writing when the subject is farming, or woodwork, or the concrete details of daily life in colonial America: ''The soft leather for the upper shoe was stretched into proper shape, holes were punched with an awl, and strong linen or flax thread was used for sewing. Although steel needles were available, everyone preferred to use stiff hog bristles. . . . All the toes were square, and the shoes could be worn on either foot.''

Still, apart from such lovingly reconstructed particulars, Carter gives little guidance to the reader as to what is historically true in his story and what is invented. Only a specialist will know that Elijah Clarke was an actual person, for example, or recognize real-life soldiers like Lachlan McIntosh, Augustine Prevost and Patrick Ferguson. Carter is very good on the long-forgotten tar-and-feathers episode that transforms the Tory Thomas Brown into Clarke's archenemy. And in a highly imaginative twist on the Battle of Savannah (1778), he takes an elderly slave known to historians as Quash Dolly and, with a novelist's license, changes him into a beautiful young slave girl who has been raped by her white overseer. (We occasionally encounter language here not heard from presidential lips since the Watergate tapes.)

Even so, for long stretches in the middle of the book the complex background material of Revolutionary politics and strategy completely displaces the Pratts and the Morrises. The schoolteacher's voice takes over. The author seems determined to put down on paper every single fact he has gathered in his seven years of preparation. (Historical novelists call this ''research rapture.'') Until the last quarter, when Ethan abandons the wounded Kindred to the British and then redeems himself in the American way, through violence, the human interest of the story goes slack and the narrative deteriorates into blocks of exposition.