The king not only forbade, he enforced: there were laws passed that made it a death sentence to be caught with a rich man’s property, but Gideon Franklin was tired of hearing his mother and siblings whimper in hunger. His father rubbing his powerless hands. One night Gideon took a bow and arrow to the lands of a rich earl who delighted in serving his equally rich friends venison, for it had become more succulent with the knowledge that it was forbidden to the poverty-stricken. When Gideon was arrested two days after he killed the earl’s deer, Gideon was consoled that at least his parents, brothers, and sisters had already eaten the meat. The bones had already been buried. The only evidence had been the skin that his mother had begun to cure, in hopes of making rough coverings for the feet of her children. When the earl’s men burst through the weak-hinged door of his home, Gideon had readily stepped forward. Even after the justice of the peace had sentenced him to death, Gideon did not believe this was how it would end. He was a cheerful, optimistic lad of nineteen, and he believed that God watched over him. And indeed, five days after his sentencing, the justice gave him a choice: execution for theft, or transport to His Majesty’s lands, over the ocean. Naturally, Gideon chose the latter.
On the Anne, James Oglethorpe had brought others of his own elite class. When he emerged from his cabin in his extravagant clothes and shiny boots, he smiled vaguely at his own cohort, and ignored those his project had saved from death. Yet Gideon met other new colonists like himself. Like him, they vomited over the side of the ship, or in buckets below in the tight, filthy quarters, and ate the sometimes-spoiled food. But when Gideon arrived in the land that was called Georgia, he discovered that, after his seven-year term of indentured servitude was up, he would be given his own parcel of fifty acres of land. Our land.
Gideon did not question whom the land had been taken from. He saw it as a free boon, as free as the deer, and Gideon had developed a permanent taste for roasted venison. The master who owned his indenture was mild-mannered, and not a nobleman. For him, Gideon performed menial labor, clearing off land, and helping to build a cabin that he was not allowed to sleep in—Gideon slept in a lean-to shed—but he was proud that he had work to do. And the master allowed Gideon to make a bow and arrow and kill as many deer as he wished, so long as he shared a portion of the meat with his master. In his first year, Gideon glutted himself on the venison and learned to sew clothes from the cured skin. He found blackberries in the forest during the summer and picked buckets for himself and his master. And by the end of his indenture, Gideon had gained weight, and had forgotten his outrage at men in power, for he was now a white Georgian with property of his own, instead of a hungry lad gaping at the well-fed rich. And the people—our people—whom the English called Indians were now beneath Gideon. Finally, Gideon Franklin could look down on someone else, instead of being the most despised himself.
As a landowner, Gideon was no longer close to power, he possessed it, and even more so when Oglethorpe’s wish of a colony without slavery was violated. And as the years passed, and enslaved Negroes were brought into the colony, though Gideon remained poor, he had pride in his freedom. His optimism grew, as well as his belief that God had blessed him with special grace. And why not? On our land, which the English had stolen from our people, Gideon was a white man. And even the poorest of white men was better than the Indian and the slave.
This optimism was transferred to Gideon’s children, when he married and propagated with a young woman who had been accused of prostitution, a charge that she’d spiritedly negated. His youngest son would marry another young woman who’d been forced to choose between debtors’ prison in England and transport to Georgia. But by the time this youngest son’s children reached adulthood, the original parcel of land allotted to Gideon had been sliced into mere strips. And one of Gideon’s many adult grandchildren, the man named Aidan, decided to make his own way. Aidan entered the Georgia land lottery, won by the grace of his god, and took his second wife, his many children, and his inherited optimism across the Oconee River. Along the way, he met Samuel Pinchard.
Yet that Franklin optimism would die with Aidan. Only the sense of superiority would remain, that being white was a blessing in Georgia. And this superiority would combine with the hopelessness of poverty to breed a distinct ruthlessness. And it would be so with other white men who had arrived in the years of Oglethorpe’s worthy project as well. Those who killed too many deer and stuffed themselves with the meat.