SLAVERY. EVENTS AT COURT.
As soon as Zuazo arrived, nearly three months after the Jeronymites, Las
Casas immediately lodged against members of the audiencia, an accusation
of having encouraged and shared in the man-hunts in the Lucayan islands
and the enslavement of the captured natives. The Jeronymites, whose every
act was now one of opposition to Las Casas, showed much annoyance at this
impeachment of the royal functionaries. They solicited divers opinions,
addressing themselves to the accused officials, who naturally exculpated
themselves, to the Franciscan monks, who were not over-friendly to the
Indians, and to the Dominicans, who were their warm advocates. Much
discussion ensued, and meanwhile the perplexed Jeronymites did nothing, so
that matters continued as they had been before their arrival, except that
the sufferings of the Indians were augmented by their owners, who feared
that the encomienda system was nearing its end and hence worked their
Indians to death, sparing neither women nor children, so as to get all the
profit they could out of them before they lost them. Charges and
counter-charges were sent to Spain, the Jeronymites complaining of Las
Casas and he in turn denouncing them to Cardinal Ximenez, though many of
his letters were intercepted and never reached their destination. Things
had come to such a pass that the only hope of remedy lay in Las Casas
returning to Spain to file complaints against the very men he had himself
caused to be sent to the Indies and in whose impartiality and humanity he
had placed all his hopes. Both the Dominicans and Franciscans, for once
in accord in this business, addressed letters to the King and the Cardinal
in defence of Las Casas, armed with which he sailed in May, 1517, for
Spain and within fifty days arrived at Aranda de Duero, where he found his
friend and protector, the Cardinal-regent, stricken with a serious
illness.
The arrival in Spain of the young King, Charles I.—better known in history
under his imperial title of Charles V.,—after repeated postponements was
now confidently expected. During his regency, Cardinal Ximenez had been
frequently embarrassed by the influences surrounding the King in his
distant Flemish court. He had written with characteristic frankness
advising the King not to bring a Flemish household with him into Spain,
and as soon as the date for the royal journey was fixed, the Cardinal set
out to meet his arriving sovereign, travelling as fast as his age and
infirmities would allow. He had arrived at Aranda de Duero, where he was
seized with an illness of such a mysterious character that his friends
hinted that he had been poisoned.
In the one interview which Las Casas obtained, he perceived that the
machinations of his enemies had not been entirely in vain, for he found
the Cardinal’s mind somewhat influenced by the representations which had
reached him from the Jeronymites and the agents of the colonists.
Charles V. landed at Villaviciosa in Asturias on September 13, 1517.
Among his first acts was the dispatch of a letter to the Cardinal, in
which the latter was dismissed to his diocese with a few perfunctory
expressions of regard and recognition for his services. Cardinal Ximenez
breathed his last a few hours after reading this heartless communication
and Las Casas was left to begin anew his life as a courtier and to
cultivate the good-will of the all-powerful Flemish favourites. He was
fortunate, at this time, in securing the friendship of a brother of Fray
Antonio de Montesinos, named Reginaldo, who was also a Dominican and
proved a staunch and resourceful ally.
[Illustration: Charles V.]
Charles V.
From an engraving by Ferdinand Slema, made in 1778 after the portrait by
Titian
Influences and arguments which sound strange enough in twentieth-century
ears were powerful, and likely to be employed with dangerous success in
Spain at that time. One of the members of the Council having asserted to
Fray Reginaldo that the Indians were incapable of conversion, the friar
submitted this proposition to the Prior of San Estéban in Salamanca, one
of the most learned and influential men in the Dominican order, asking him
to invite a body of theologians to determine whether or no such an
affirmation was in accordance with Catholic doctrine, and to send him a
copy of the decision. Thirteen doctors of theology and other
ecclesiastical authorities replied with four or five signed conclusions,
the last of which defined that all who held or propagated that error
should be condemned to the stake as heretics. This was a weapon in Las
Casas’s hands which circumstances might make formidable; it was no
trifling thing to be arraigned before the tribunal of the Inquisition on a
charge of holding heretical doctrines, for neither rank nor calling
availed to protect the offender, and it is somewhat astonishing that no
reference to use of this “opinion” being made by Las Casas in any given
case is found in the records of his struggle for the liberty of the
Indians.
King Charles, even in his boyhood, was of a grave and thoughtful
temperament, reserved and observant in an unusual degree, but however
richly endowed with gifts which promised him a glorious reign, he
necessarily left the administration of his government very largely under
the direction of his advisers, of whom the two most influential were
William de Croy, commonly called Chièvres, or by the Spaniards, Xevres,
who had formerly been the King’s governor, and Jean Salvage, a learned
priest who was Dean of the University of Louvain. The latter’s name was
corrupted by the Spaniards into Juan Selvagio, and he held the office and
title of Grand Chancellor, both hitherto unknown in Spain. These Flemings
were odious to the Spaniards, who resented their high rank and influence
and looked upon them as rapacious foreigners, who were controlling
national affairs to the exclusion of those who had better claims, while
they enriched themselves out of the Spanish treasury: none of them so much
as spoke the national language and even the King’s first task was to
master Spanish in order to converse with his own subjects.
As the Grand Chancellor had control of the department of justice, it was
to him that Las Casas first got himself presented. He was well received
and afforded opportunities to state his case, and, as he produced letters
given him by some French Franciscans from Picardy, whom he had known in
the Indies and who were friends of the Chancellor, he soon found himself
upon terms of some friendliness with him. The Chancellor found great
interest in listening to all that Las Casas had to tell him, and it is not
to be doubted that the latter’s habitual earnestness when on this subject
was increased by the evident sympathy of his listener, upon whose support
the fate of his projects depended.
This friendship with the detested Flemings cost Las Casas dear with his
own people, and made him more unpopular than ever. His opponents were
obliged, however, to cease abusing him in their letters and official
papers, for not only did the Chancellor openly befriend him, but he handed
over to him most of the correspondence pertaining to Indian affairs. Las
Casas translated the contents into Latin, adding his own observations or
objections to the different reports or proposals, and then returned them
to the Chancellor, who was delighted to have such expert assistance in
dispatching complicated affairs, in which he was himself unpractised.
From the Chancellor’s favour to that of the King was but a step, and the
charge of reforming Indian legislation, which Las Casas had held from
Cardinal Ximenez, was renewed to him. This welcome news was given him one
day by the Chancellor remarking in Latin, which was their habitual tongue,
Rex dominus noster jubet quod vos et ego opponamus remedia Indiis;
faciatis vestra memorabilia. Las Casas was quick to obey this congenial
behest. (31)
It is indicative of the priority of importance which Las Casas habitually
gave to spiritual over temporal aids, that he first had recourse to the
priors of the religious orders, asking them to have their communities pray
unceasingly and with special earnestness, that his mind might be illumined
by divine grace to perceive what course he must follow. He next drew up
his plan, but perhaps in no act of his long career is there less evidence
of the action of divine guidance, for, in framing his project, he
committed an error which he himself sincerely and frankly deplored with
touching humility, and which has served all his detractors ever since as
ground on which to bring a grave charge against him.
In obedience to the King’s command conveyed to Las Casas through the
Chancellor, he drew up a plan in which he proposed that labourers should
be induced to emigrate to the Indies, by granting that each person,
whether man or child, should have his expenses paid as far as Seville, the
place of embarkation, at the rate of half a real per day. While waiting
in Seville to start, the India House (Casa de Contractacion) was to lodge
and feed them, their passage to Hispaniola was to be given them and their
food furnished for one year. Any of the emigrants who, at the expiration
of the first year, found themselves incapacitated on account of the
climate to support themselves, should be entitled to further assistance in
the form of a royal loan. Lands were to be given them gratis and also the
requisite farming implements for working them, in which their rights as
owners should be permanent and hereditary. A more liberal scheme of
assisted emigration could hardly be imagined. Other inducements were held
out to attract emigrants under the new regulations and Las Casas acceded
to the request of certain of the colonists in Santo Domingo to ask the
King’s consent to the importation of negro slaves to replace the Indians
who should be freed.
This recommendation cost Las Casas dearly enough and later exposed his
reputation to unjustifiable attacks, some of which even represented him as
having _introduced_ negro slavery into America; others as having been
betrayed by blind zeal in favour of the Indians into promoting the
slave-trade at the expense of the Africans. No one more sincerely
deplored his course in this matter than he himself when he realised the
significance of what he had done, and the sincerity and humility of his
compunction should have sufficed to disarm his detractors. The most
formal accusation made by a reputable historian against Las Casas is found
in Robertson’s _History of America_, vol. iii., Year 1517, in which he
charges the apostle of the Indians with having proposed to Cardinal
Ximenez to purchase a sufficient number of negroes from the Portuguese
settlements on the coast of Africa and to transport them to America in
order that they might be employed as slaves in working in the mines and
tilling the ground. Cardinal Ximenez however, when solicited to encourage
the commerce, peremptorily rejected the proposition because he perceived
the iniquity of reducing one race of men to slavery when he was consulting
about the means of restoring liberty to another. But Las Casas, from the
inconsistency natural to men who hurry with headlong impetuosity towards a
favourite point, was incapable of making the distinction. While he
contended earnestly for the liberty of the people born in one quarter of
the globe, he laboured to enslave the inhabitants of another region and in
the warmth of his zeal to save the Americans from the yoke, pronounced it
to be lawful and expedient to impose one still heavier on the African.
Language could hardly more completely travesty the facts, for Las Casas
neither “laboured to enslave the inhabitants of another region” nor did he
“pronounce it lawful” to increase slavery amongst the Africans. The moral
aspect of the question of slavery was not under consideration and the
recommendation of Las Casas is seen upon examination to reduce itself to
this: he advised that Spanish colonists in America should be allowed the
privilege, common in Spain and Portugal, of employing negro slave labour
on their properties. Since Spaniards might hold African slaves in Spain,
it implied no approval of slavery as an institution, to permit them to do
the same in the colonies. Las Casas was engaged in defending a hitherto
free people from the curse of a peculiarly cruel form of slavery, but had
he regarded the institution as justifiable in itself, he would have
modified the ardour of his opposition to its extension.
The truth plainly appears in the chronicles of the times and establishes
beyond cavil exactly what Las Casas did, and under what circumstances and
for what purposes he made the recommendation which he never afterwards
ceased to deplore. Retributive justice has followed these attempts of
several lesser contemporaries of Robertson to asperse the character of one
of the purest, noblest, and most humane of men, and while discredit has
overtaken the inventors and publishers of these falsehoods, the
investigations of impartial historians, provoked by their enormity, have
resulted in banishing such fables from historical controversy.
The original basis of the charge that Las Casas favoured the introduction
of negro slavery into America is a passage in Herrera’s _Historia de las
Indias Occidentals_, written in 1598, thirty-two years after the death of
Las Casas, and which reads as follows:
“As the licentiate Las Casas encountered much opposition to the plan he
had formed for helping the Indians and seeing that the opinions he had
published had produced no result, in spite of the extraordinary credit he
enjoyed with the Flemish chancellor, Juan Selvagio, he had recourse to
other means to attain the same ends. He asked in 1517 that the
importation of Africans be permitted to the Spaniards settled in the
Indies, in order to diminish the labour and sufferings of the Indians in
the mines and on the plantations, and that a good number of labourers be
enrolled in Spain who would emigrate to the Indies upon the conditions and
with the advantages which he proposed. This new proposition was approved
by the Cardinal of Tortosa, Adrian, by the Grand Chancellor, and the
Flemish ministers. The Chamber of Commerce at Seville was consulted to
learn what number of Africans, Cuba, Santo Domingo, San Juan [Puerto
Rico], and Jamaica would require. It was replied that it would be
sufficient to send four thousand. This answer being almost immediately
made known by some intriguer to the Flemish governor of Bressa, this
courtier obtained the monopoly of the trade from the sovereign and sold it
to some Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats on condition that during
eight years no other license should be granted by the King. This
arrangement was extremely harmful to the Population of the islands,
especially to the Indians for whose benefit it had been granted; in fact
had the trade been free, all the Spaniards might have engaged in it, but
as the Genoese sold their right at a very high price few Spaniards were
able to pay, and the importation of blacks was almost nil. The King was
counselled to pay back the twenty-five thousand ducats from his treasury
to the governor and recover his rights, which would pay him well and be of
great advantage to his subjects. Unfortunately the King had little money
then and, as he was left in ignorance of much concerning the affairs of
the Indies, nothing of what was most important was done.”
There is not a word in this passage which even refers to the
_introduction_ of negro slavery and Herrera in another passage (tom. i.,
dec. i., lib. iv., cap. xii.) states that a royal ordinance given on
September 3, 1500, to Don Nicholas de Ovando, the Governor of Hispaniola,
permitted the importation of negro slaves. This was two years before Las
Casas made his first voyage as a young man of twenty-eight to America, and
in 1503, the same Ovando asked that no more negro slaves be sent to
Hispaniola because they escaped and lived amongst the natives whom they
corrupted. (32) The number of negroes continued, nevertheless, to increase
and repeated mention of their presence in the colonies is found in
different passages throughout the history of Herrera and in other early
writers.
Since the first half of the fifteenth century (about 1440) (33) the
Portuguese had been engaged in bringing negroes from the west coast of
Africa and selling them in Lisbon and Seville, so that during half a
century before Las Casas appeared on the scene where he was destined to
play so distinguished a part, Andalusia and the southern provinces of
Spain were well provided with slaves and a flourishing trade was carried
on. The condition of such slaves was not a particularly hard one and the
children born in Spain of slave parents were Christians. Since this
system was recognised by the laws of the kingdom, and indeed by those of
all Christendom at that time, no additional injury would be done to the
negroes by permitting Spaniards who might own them in Spain, to take them
also to the colonies. Las Casas was a man of such humane temperament that
oppression and injustice everywhere of whatever kind revolted him, but it
can hardly be required, even of him, to be several centuries in advance of
his times in denouncing a commonly accepted usage which presented, as far
as we know, few crying abuses. Toleration of an established order, even
though an essentially evil one, is a very different thing from the
extension of its worst features in regions where it is unknown and amongst
people ill-fitted to support its burdens. A small group of men, chiefly
Dominican monks, with Las Casas at their head, courageously championed the
cause of freedom and humanity in a century and amongst a people hardened
to oppression and cruelty; they braved popular fury, suffered calumny,
detraction, and abuse; they faced kings, high ecclesiastics, and all the
rich and great ones of their day, incessantly and courageously
reprimanding their injustice and demanding reform. Since the memorable
day when Fray Antonio de Montesinos proclaimed himself “vox clamantis in
deserto” before the astonished and incensed colonists of Hispaniola, the
chorus of rebuke had swelled until it made itself heard, sparing none
amongst the offenders against equity and humanity. The development of the
collective moral sense of a people is only slowly progressive, and the
betterment of racial conditions is more safely accomplished by evolution
than revolution, hence if the moral vision of Las Casas did not detect the
injustice practised on the negroes, simultaneously with his keen
perception of that which was being perpetrated on the Indians, his failure
cannot be justly attributed either to indifference to the lot of one race
of people or to wilful inconsistency in seeking to benefit another at its
expense. That his action was not understood in any such sense at the
time, is conclusively proven by the fact that inconsistency was never
alleged against him, nor employed as a polemical weapon in the heated
controversies in which he was engaged during all his life with the keenest
and most determined opponents to his views. Far afield indeed did his
enemies wander, seeking for weapons both of attack and defence, and
nothing that could be twisted into an offence against the public
conscience or national interests escaped the keen eyes of the searchers.
He was himself the first to perceive the error and contradiction into
which he had inadvertently fallen, and forty years before Herrera’s work
was published, he had expressed his contrition for his failure to
appreciate the conditions of African slavery, in the following passage,
which occurs in the fourth volume (page 380) of his _Historia General_:
“The cleric Las Casas first gave this opinion that license should be
granted to bring negro slaves to these countries [the Indies] without
realising with what injustice the Portuguese captured and enslaved them,
and afterwards, not for everything in the world would he have offered it,
for he always held that they were made slaves by injustice and tyranny,
the same reasoning applying to them as to the Indians.”
Fuller and more mature consideration of the entire question of slavery in
all its aspects, of the right of one man or of nations to hold property in
the flesh and blood of their fellow-men, conducted Las Casas directly to
the necessary and generous conviction that the whole system must be
everywhere condemned; for again in Chapter 128 he says of this advice
which the cleric gave,
“that he very shortly after repented, judging himself guilty of
inadvertence; and as he saw—which will be later perceived—that the
captivity of the negroes was quite as unjust as that of the Indians, the
remedy he had counselled, that negroes should be brought so that the
Indians might be freed, was no better, even though he believed they had
been rightfully procured; although he was not positive that his ignorance
in this matter and his good intention would exculpate him before the
divine justice.”
As has been noted, the transfer of his monopoly by the Governor of Bressa
to Genoese merchants, instead of increasing the exportation of negroes to
America, resulted in almost stopping the nefarious trade, hence no
considerable amount of mischief is traceable to the adoption of Las
Casas’s suggestion, which was only one of many enumerated in his scheme.
Had the project as he framed it been accepted in its entirety and loyally
carried out, no increased injustice would have been done to the negroes,
for it was the frightful mortality amongst the cruelly driven Indians that
rapidly reduced the numbers of labourers and made gaps which could only be
filled by the importation of others from elsewhere. Under a more humane
system, the Indians might still have laboured, but not in excess of their
powers; their lives would not have been sacrificed or rendered
unendurable, while the colonists would have become rich less rapidly;
there would have been no shortage of workmen and little need for the
importation of Africans at a high price, even though one negro did the
work of four Indians, according to the popular estimate. While many
admirable suggestions of Las Casas were rejected, this blamable one
concerning the permission to import negroes was accepted, and thus by a
singular irony of fate, this good man, whose whole life was a
self-sacrificing apostolate in favour of freedom, actually came to be
aspersed as a promoter of slavery.
The controversy on this passage in the life of Las Casas has been touched
upon here because it furnished at one time material for much discussion,
(34) but the light of historical research has long since dispersed the
artificial clouds which misrepresentation caused to gather about the fame
of the Protector of the Indians, and there now neither is, nor can be, any
doubt concerning the sentiments and intentions of one whose noble figure
is too clearly defined on the horizon of history ever again to be blurred
or obscured.
Another part of the plan for colonisation on the moral basis of benefiting
the Indians as well as the Spaniards, was the foundation of fortified
places at intervals along the coast of the territory to be granted. In
each of these settlements, some thirty men should be stationed with a
provision of various articles, such as the Indians prized, for trading
purposes; also several missionary priests, whose occupation would be
teaching and converting the Indians. It was maintained that by kind
treatment the Indians could be attracted to the Spaniards and thus, little
by little, become civilised, profitable, and voluntary subjects of the
King.
Unfortunately for the prosperous development of these benevolent projects,
the mischievous Bishop of Burgos and his brother, who, since the latter
part of Cardinal Ximenez’s regency, had been excluded from active
participation in Indian affairs, began once more to exercise an influence,
partly, perhaps because long experience had equipped them with a practical
knowledge of details which the Grand Chancellor found useful, and partly,
so Las Casas hints, because they had succeeded, by spending important sums
of money, in recovering their former offices. At first the Bishop’s
opposition was mild enough, and he contented himself with pointing out
that he had never been able to induce emigrants to go to the Indies and
that Las Casas’s scheme was unworkable. Las Casas, however, affirmed that
he could easily find three thousand workmen as soon as he was authorised
to assure them of the King’s conditions, and that the Bishop had not
succeeded in finding men because he had treated the islands as a penal
colony, whereas now, on the contrary, the severest punishment, after the
death penalty, with which a colonist in the Indies could be threatened,
was that of being shipped back to Spain.
The King had left Valladolid(35) on his way to take formal possession of
the kingdom of Aragon and these negotiations were being carried on at
Aranda de Duero, where a halt had been made. Las Casas fell ill and the
court moved on without him, but it is indicative of the favour he had
already acquired with the King that frequently the monarch exclaimed: “Oh,
I wonder how Micer Bartolomé is getting on!” Micer was the title the
Flemings gave to ecclesiastics, and Charles V., who was the reverse of
demonstrative, commonly used this familiar appellation in speaking of Las
Casas. Before the court reached Zaragoza, the invalid was on his legs
again and had rejoined the others, being received with great joy by the
Grand Chancellor, (36) who was almost as enthusiastic as Las Casas himself
in pushing forward the Indian reforms. Delay, however, was again caused at
Zaragoza, where the King and court were established, by the illness of the
ever-contrary Bishop of Burgos; while waiting there to resume business, a
letter was sent to Las Casas from Seville by his friend Fray Reginaldo,
containing a full account of the ruthless cruelties of one of the captains
of Pedro Arias, named Espinosa, which cost the lives of forty thousand
Indians. This ghastly chronicle, which was supplied by a Franciscan, Fray
Francisco Roman, who wrote as an eye-witness of the atrocities, was
immediately laid before the Chancellor by Las Casas; the former was much
impressed by the report and directed Las Casas to go to the Bishop on his
behalf and read him the letter.
The Bishop took the news coolly enough and merely observed that he had
long since advised the recall of Pedro Arias.(37)
With the recovery of the Bishop, everything seemed ready for the
resumption of business, when fate dealt Las Casas one of the hardest blows
he had had to sustain. The Grand Chancellor, who owned to feeling
indisposed on a Friday, became worse on Saturday, so that he had to keep
his room; his illness persisted on Sunday with signs of fever and, as Las
Casas tersely puts it, “they buried him on Wednesday.”
With the death of the Fleming died all hope of any immediate action in
behalf of the Indians; in the absence of any other as familiar with the
business of the Indian department as himself, the Bishop of Burgos found
himself once more omnipotent, or as Las Casas puts it, “he seemed to rise
to the heavens while the cleric [himself] sank to the depths.” The
Chancellor’s successor, named by the King pro tempore, was the Dean of
Bisancio, a heavy, phlegmatic man who slept peacefully all through the
sessions of the Council and only had sufficient perception to commend Las
Casas for the zeal with which he pestered him day and night, remarking on
one occasion with a dull smile: Commendamus in Domino, domine Bartholomeo,
vestram diligentiam. Two such ill-assorted characters as this bovine dean
and the fiery Las Casas only succeeded in tormenting one another to no
purpose, though, as the latter observes, in this case “it did not kill the
Dean for all that.”
The India Council, over which the Bishop of Burgos presided, was composed
at that time of Hernando de la Vega, Grand Commander of Castile, Don
Garcia de Padilla, the licentiate Zapata, Pedro Martyr de Angleria, and
Francisco de los Cobos who was then just rising into prominence. Las Casas
was excluded, and though he was as busy as ever in laying petitions and
memorials before the Council, he had no friends or protectors inside and
consequently obtained nothing, save what they were obliged for very
shame’s sake to concede him. Discouragement was too alien to his sanguine
temperament, else he might, with some show of reason, have abandoned all
hope of struggling successfully against such odds. The first decisive
measure of the Bishop was to recall the Jeronymite fathers from their
mission in the Indies, of which he had from the outset been the determined
opponent. It has often been justly observed that the vicissitudes of
politics make strange bed-fellows, and it was certainly a singular
regrouping of the persons in this historical situation, to find the
Jeronymites now reduced to seeking out Las Casas to whom to pour out their
woes against the mutual enemy, the Bishop of Burgos.