xii Prologue
colonies were established in America in the 16th and 17th centuries, pur-
chased American Indian slaves from Indian tribes. The enslavement of war
captives was consistent with the European Christian mind-set, for Chris-
tians had long interpreted their religion, according to the tenets of “just war,”
as enabling the attack upon, killing of, imprisoning of, and capture of peo-
ples for the sake of defensive or valid offensive war. The Spanish enslaved
captives in America beginning in the late 15th century, as did the French
and English in the 16th and 17th centuries. The English of the Tudor and
Stuart periods were willing to put their own people into bondage because of
birth, status, and crime, and they were willing to extend this system to ­
others—the Irish and Scotch, Europeans, Africans, and American Indians.
Like many cultures of the time and during previous centuries, bondage often
came about through war. The English put people—prisoners of war—in
bondage because of domestic and foreign conflicts.
Human bondage was well known in America for centuries, then, involv-
ing Indians, Africans, and whites. Few people among the different races of
America seemed to have troubled themselves with its validity or morality
before the 18th-century Enlightenment and its ideals of the rights of humans
and human equality and the inherent liberty and freedom of each individual.
By this time, it was beginning to be realized that those in bondage were dis-
possessed of their inherent human rights.
People who by their actions wittingly or unwittingly were bound in ser-
vice to another were dispossessed of liberty, rights, and self-respect. The dis-
possessed servants of America included thousands of people—English,
Europeans, Germans, French, Africans, Indians, adults, children, sane,
insane, peaceful, violent, condemned criminals, disabled—who were inden-
tured, apprenticed, transported as political prisoners or felons, or kidnapped
or served as redemptioners; some, already in America, such as Indians,
Freedmen, and poor whites, placed themselves into the service of others for
food, clothing, shelter, and security. The numbers of voluntary and involun-
tarily immigrants in bondage are presently indeterminable. Perhaps over
50,000 convicts and prisoners of war arrived in the colonies during the 17th
and 18th centuries. Perhaps 200,000 people voluntarily bound themselves
in service to cross the Atlantic Ocean.1
The numbers hardly matter compared to the individual experiences of
these dispossessed people who served, either voluntarily or involuntarily,
as agricultural, domestic, skilled, and unskilled laborers in the northern,
middle, and southern British American colonies as well as British Carib-
bean colonies and Canada before and after 1763. Poverty—in Europe, Eng-
land, and America—drove people to this desperate act. Poverty in colonial
America was relentless, and servitude was the voluntary and involuntary
means by which the poor adapted, or tried to adapt, to their miserable
conditions.
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