Prologue xiii
There have always been dispossessed. Those in America today—the
underprivileged, minorities, poor, children, and immigrants—were the same
people 400, 300, and 200 years ago.
These were people who lost what they had the God-given right to possess,
the basic sense of dignity, wellness, security, and freedom to have sufficient
food to ward off hunger, shelter to stave off cold, clothing for protection from
the elements, security in knowing that their daily needs would be met, inner
contentment in knowing that they could live and thrive without feeling
insufficient and a failure, able to live appropriately because the future is not a
recurring question mark. The dispossessed in colonial America were most
frequently servants, people who through an act of desperation gave up their
freedom of movement, decision making, and choice, to bind themselves to
another, a master, who would thenceforth, during a time specified by con-
tract, have almost total power over them.
Humans live in society, not in the state of nature; society dispossesses by
means of institutions, class structure, presuppositions and assumptions,
failed morality, distorted sense of humanness, and a distorted understanding
of Christian morality. Expediency, not love, drove people to acquire wealth
at the expense of the poor. The Christian principles of love, mercy, and for-
giveness were rarely extended to the poor and servants, those who com-
prised the lower class in colonial America. They were the product of the
Enclosure Movement (enclosure of farm and grazing land in England), which
displaced the English agricultural population, resulting in impoverishment;
wars, such as the Thirty Years War in Europe and the Wars for Empire in
America, which displaced people, leading to poverty and desperation; fam-
ine, the result of periods of climatic change, war, and crop failures, and the
inadequate response of society, which led to hunger, malnourishment, and
starvation; changes in family and community, which led to orphans without
adequate care, widows and widowers with no one to help, the disabled,
physically and mentally ill—and unconditional impoverishment became
their fate, binding themselves into service their only option, brought by cir-
cumstances within or outside of their control.
Humans—children, women, men, young, strong, weak, sick, disabled,
immigrants, migrants, elderly, widowed, orphaned, ignorant, unemployed,
hungry, foreign, imprisoned, weary, meek, insane, conquered, enslaved,
exploited—became dispossessed by chance, by the unfortunate choice of
occupation of their father or grandfather, the unavoidable racial, ethnic, or
social condition of their birth, their want of education, their lack of money,
their particular beliefs, and the political, social, and religious institutions to
which they were born and raised.
Who were they? Impoverished people of England, Scotland, Wales, and
Ireland who immigrated to all 13 of the British colonies as well as British
Caribbean colonies. Many were children, as described in Chapter 1, “The
