The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 58, August, 1862

The common opinion that Las Casas asked permission for the colonists to draw negroes from Africa, in order to assuage the sufferings of the Indians, does not appear to be well-founded. For negroes were drawn from Guinea as early as 1511, and his proposition was made in 1517. The Spaniards were already introducing these substitutes for the native labor, regardless of the ordinance which restricted the possession of negroes in Hayti to those born in Spain. It is not improbable that Las Casas desired to regulate a traffic which had already commenced, by inducing the Government to countenance it. His object was undoubtedly to make it easier for the colonists to procure the blacks; but it must have occurred to him that his plan would diminish, as far as possible, the miseries of an irregular transfer of the unfortunate men from Africa. (See Bridge's Jamaica, Appendix, Historical Notes on Slavery. The Spaniards had even less scruple about their treatment of the negroes than of the Indians, alleging in justification that their own countrymen sold them to the traders on the Guinea coast!)

The horrors of a middle passage in those days of small vessels and tedious voyages would have been great, if the number of slaves to be transported had not been limited by law. There is no direct evidence, however, that Las Casas made his proposition out of any regard for the negro. Charles V. resolved to allow a thousand negroes to each of the four islands, Hayti, Ferdinanda, Cuba, and Jamaica. The privilege of importing them was bestowed upon one of his Flemish favorites; but he soon sold it to some Genoese merchants, who held each negro at such a high price that only the wealthiest colonists could procure them. Herrera regrets that in this way the prudent calculation of Las Casas was defeated.

This was the first license to trade in slaves. It limited the number to four thousand, but it was a fatal precedent, which was followed by French, Spanish, and Dutch, long after the decay of the Spanish part of Hayti, till all the islands, and many parts of Central America, were filled with negroes.

It is pleasanter to dwell upon those points in which the brave and humane Las Casas surpassed his age, and prophesied against it, than upon those which he held in common with it, as he acquiesced in its instinctive life. At first it seems unaccountable that the argument which he framed with such jealous care to protect his Indians and recommend them to the mercy of Government was not felt by him to apply to the negroes with equal force. Slavery uses the same pretexts in every age and against whatsoever race it wishes to oppress. The Indians were represented by the colonists as predestined by their natural dispositions, and by their virtues as well as by their vices, to be held in tutelage by a superior race: their vices were excuses for colonial cruelty, their virtues made it worth while to keep the cruelty in vigorous exercise. In refuting this interested party, Las Casa anticipates the spirit and reasoning of later time. He was the first to utter anti-slavery principles in the Western hemisphere. We have improved upon his knowledge, but have not advanced beyond his essential spirit, for equity and iniquity always have the same leading points to make through their advocates. When we see that such a man as Las Casas was unconscious of the breadth of his own philanthropy, we wonder less at the liability of noble men to admit some average folly of their age. This is the ridiculous and astonishing feature of their costume, the exceptional bad taste which their spiritual posterity learn to disavow.

The memory of Las Casas ought to be cherished by every true democrat of these later times, for he announced, in his quality of Protector of the Indian, the principles which protect the rights of all men against oppressive authority. He was eager to convince a despotic court that it had no legal or spiritual right to enslave Indians, or to deprive them of their goods and territory. In framing his argument, he applied doctrines of the universal liberty of men, which are fatal to courts themselves; for they transfer authority to the people, who have the best of reasons for desiring to be governed well. It is astonishing that the republicanism of Las Casas has not been more carefully noted and admired; for his writings show plainly, without forced construction or after-thought of the enlightened reader, that he was in advance of Spain and Europe as far as the American theory itself is. Our Declaration of the Rights of Man shows nothing which the first Western Abolitionist had not proclaimed in the councils and conferences of Seville.

It is worth while to show this as fully as the purpose of this article will admit. One would expect to find that he counselled kings to administer their government with equal regard to the little and the great, the poor and the rich, the powerful and the miserable; for this the Catholic Church has always done, and has held a lofty theory before earthly thrones, not-withstanding its own ambitious derelictions. But Las Casas tells the Supreme Council of the Indies that no charge, no servitude, no labor can be imposed upon a people without its previous and voluntary consent; for man shares, by his origin, in the common liberty of all beings, so that every subordination of men to princes, and every burden imposed upon material things, should be inaugurated by a voluntary pact between the governing and the governed; the election of kings, princes, and magistrates, and the authority with which they are invested to rule and to tax, anciently owed their origin to a free determination of people who desired to establish thereby their own happiness; the free will of the nation is the only efficient cause, the only immediate principle and veritable source of the power of kings, and therefore the transmission of such power is only a representative act of a nation giving free expression to its own opinion. For a nation would not have recourse to such a form of government, except in accordance with its human instinct, to secure the advantage of all; nor does it, in thus delegating power, renounce its liberty, or have the intention of submitting to the domination of another, or of conceding his right to impose burdens and contributions without the consent of those who have to bear them, or to command anything that is contrary to the general interest. When a nation thus delegates a portion of its power to the sovereign, it is not done by subscribing any written contract or transaction, because primitive right presides, and there are natural reserves not expressed by men, such as that of preserving intact their individual independence, that of their property, and the right of never submitting to a privation of good or an establishment of taxes without a previous consent. People existed before kings and magistrates. Then they were free, and governed themselves according to their untrammelled intent. In process of time people make kings, but the good of the people is the final cause of their existence. Men do not make kings to be rendered miserable by their rule, but to derive from them all the good possible. Liberty is the greatest good which a people can enjoy: its rights are violated every time that a king, without consulting his people, decrees that which wounds the general interest; for, as the intention of subjects was not to grant a prince the ability to injure, all such acts ought to be considered unjust and altogether null. "Liberty is inalienable, and its price is above that of all the goods of this world."11

Las Casas follows the fashion of his time in resting all his glorious axioms upon the authority of men and councils. He quotes Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Aquinas, the different Popes, the Canons, and the Scriptures; but it is astonishing to find how democratic they all are to the enthusiastic Bishop, or rather, how the best minds of all ages have admitted the immutable principles of human nature into their theology and metaphysics. When will the Catholic Church, which has nourished and protected so many noble spirits, express in her average sentiment and policy their generous interpretations of her religion, and their imputations to her of being an embodiment of the universal religion of mankind?

Men complained of Las Casas for being severe and unsparing in his speech. In this respect, of calling the vices and enormities of Slavery by their simple names, and of fastening the guilt of special transactions not vaguely upon human nature, but directly upon the perpetrators who disgraced the nature which they shared, he also anticipated the privilege and ill-repute of American Abolitionists. He told what he saw, or what was guarantied to him by competent witnesses. His cheek grew red when it was smitten by some fierce outrage upon humanity, and men could plainly read the marks which it left there. Nor did they easily fade away; he held his branded cheek in the full view of men, that they might be compelled to interpret the disgrace to which they were so indifferent. Men dislike to hear the outcries of a sensitive spirit, and dread to have their heathenism called by Christian names. How much better it would be, they think, if philanthropy never made an attack upon the representatives of cruelty! they would soon become converted, if they were politely let alone. No doubt, all that the supporters of any tyranny desire is to be let alone. They delight in abstract delineations of the vices of their system, which flourishes and develops while moral indignation is struggling to avoid attacking it where only it is dangerous, in the persons of its advocates. If there were nothing but metaphysical wickedness in the world, how effective it would be never to allude to a wicked man! If Slavery itself were the pale, thin ghost of an abstraction, how bloodless this war would be! Fine words, genteel deprecation, and magnanimous generality are the tricks of villany. Indignant Mercy works with other tools; she leaps with the directness of lightning, and the same unsparing sincerity, to the spot to which she is attracted. What rogue ever felt the clutch of a stern phrase at his throat, with a good opinion of it? Shall we throttle the rascal in broad day, or grope in the dark after the impersonal weasand of his crime?

And those amiable people who think to regenerate the world by radiating amenity are the choice accomplices of the villains. They keep everything quiet, hush up incipient disturbances, and mislead the police. No Pharisee shall be called a Devil's child, if they can help it: they say "Fie!" to the scourge of knotted cord in the temple, or eagerly explain that it was used only upon the cattle, who cannot, of course, rebel. "These people who give the fine name of prudence to their timidity, and whose discretion is always favorable to injustice!"12

"I have decided to write this history," says Las Casas, in his "Memoir upon the Cruelty of the Spaniards," "by the advice of many pious and God-fearing persons, who think that its publication will cause a desire to spring up in many Christian hearts to bring a prompt remedy to these evils, as enormous as they are multiplied." He designates the guilty governors, captains, courtiers, and connects them directly with their crimes. He does not say that they were gentlemen or Christians: "these brigands," "executioners," "barbarians," are his more appropriate phrases. If he had addressed them as gentlemen, the terrible scenes would have instantly ceased, and the system of Repartimientos would have been abandoned by men who were only waiting to be converted by politeness! He calls that plan of allotting the natives, and reducing them to Spanish overseership, "atrocious." Yet for some time it was technically legal: it was equivalent to what we call constitutional. So that it was by no means so bad as the anarchical attack which Las Casas made upon it! He tells where an infamous overseer was still living in Spain,–or at least, he says, "his family was living in Seville when I last heard about him." What a disgraceful attack upon an individual! how it must have hurt the feelings of a respectable family!–"How malignant!" cried the hidalgos; "How coarse!" the women; and "How ill-judged!" the clergy. He speaks of Cortés with contempt: why should he not? for he was only the burglar of a kingdom. But we read these sincere pages of Las Casas with satisfaction. The polished contemporaries of Abolitionists turn over the pages of antique denunciation, and their lymph really quickens in their veins as they read the prophetic vehemence of an Isaiah, the personality of a Nathan, the unmeasured vernacular of Luther, the satire and invective of all good upbraiders of past generations, until they reach their own, which yet waits for a future generation to make scripture and history of its speech and deeds. Time is the genial critic that effaces the contemporary glosses of interested men. It rots away the ugly scaffolding up which the bold words climbed, and men see the beautiful and tenacious arch which only genius is daring enough and capable to build. It is delightful to walk across the solid structure, with gratitude and taste in a glow. We love to read indictments of an exploded crime which we have learned to despise, or which we are committing in a novel form.

Charlevoix takes up this complaint of the imprudence of Las Casas, and, to illustrate it, thinks that he could not have anticipated the bad effects of the publication of his "Memoir upon the Cruelty of the Spaniards," for it appeared during the war with the revolted Netherlands, and was translated into Dutch by a Frenchman. "Nothing," he says, "so animated those people to persist in their rebellion, as the fear, that, if they entered into any accommodation with Spain, they would be served as the natives had been in the American Provinces, who were never so badly oppressed as when they felt most secure upon the faith of a treaty or convention." If the book of Las Casas really lent courage and motive to that noble resistance, as it undoubtedly did by confirming the mistrust of Spanish rule in the Low Countries, the honorable distinction should be preserved by history.

While a bad institution is still vigorous and aggressive, the divine rage of conscientious men is not so exhilarating. A different style of thought, like that which prevailed among the French missionaries to the Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is more acceptable to colonial susceptibility. A South-side religion is a favorable exposure for delicate and precarious products like indigo, sugar, coffee, and cotton. Las Casas had not learned to wield his enthusiastic pen in defence of the negro; but when the islands became well stocked with slaves, later Catholics eagerly reproduced the arguments of the Spanish encomiendas, and vindicated afresh the providential character of Slavery. "I acknowledge," says one, "and adore with all humility the profound and inconceivable secrets of God; for I do not know what the unfortunate nation has committed to deserve that this particular and hereditary curse of servitude should be attached to them, as well as ugliness and blackness." "It is truly with these unfortunates that the poet's saying is verified,–

"'Dimidium mentis Jupiter illis aufert,'–

"as I have remarked a thousand times that God deprives slaves of half their judgment, lest, recognizing their miserable condition, they should be thrown into despair. For though they are very adroit in many things which they do, they are so stupid that they have no more sense of being enslaved than if they had never enjoyed liberty. Every land becomes their country, provided they find enough to eat and drink, which is very different from the state of mind of the daughters of Zion, who cried, on finding themselves in a foreign country,–'Quomodo cantabimus canticum Domini in terra aliena?'"13

Another missionary, in describing his method of administering baptism, says: "After the customary words, I add, 'And thee, accursed spirit, I forbid in the name of Jesus Christ ever to dare to violate this sacred sign which I have just made upon the forehead of this creature, whom He has bought with His blood.' The negro, who comprehends nothing of what I say or do, makes great eyes at me, and appears confounded; but to reassure him, I address to him through an interpreter these words of the Saviour to St. Peter: 'What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.'"

He complains that they do not appear to value the mystery of the Trinity as a necessary means of salvation: the negro does not understand what he is made to repeat, any more than a parrot. And here the knowledge of the most able theologian will go a very little ways. "Still, a missionary ought to think twice before leaving a man, of whatever kind, to perish without baptism; and if he has scruples upon this point, these words of the Psalmist will reassure his mind: 'Homines et jumenta salvabis, Domine': 'Thou, Lord, shall save both man and cattle!'"14

Father Labat is scandalized because the English planters refused to have their slaves baptized. Their clergymen told him, in excuse, that it was unworthy of a Christian to hold in slavery his brother in Christ. "But may we not say that it is still more unworthy of a Christian not to procure for souls bought by the blood of Jesus Christ the knowledge of a God to whom they are responsible for all that they do?" This idea, that the negroes had been first bought by Christ, must have been consoling and authoritative to a planter. The missionary has not advanced upon the Spanish theory, that baptism introduced the natives into a higher life.15 "However," says Labat, "this notion of the English does not affect them, whenever they can get hold of our negroes. They know very well that they are Christians, they cannot doubt that they have been made by baptism their brothers in Christ, yet that does not prevent them from holding them in slavery, and treating them like those whom they do not regard as their brothers."16 This English antipathy to baptizing slaves, for fear of recognizing them as men by virtue of that rite, appears to have existed in the early days of the North-American Colonies. Bishop Berkeley, in his "Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations," etc., alludes to the little interest which was shown in the conversion of negroes, "who, to the infamy of England and scandal of the world, continue heathen under Christian masters and in Christian countries; which could never be, if our planters were rightly instructed and made sensible that they disappointed their own baptism by denying it to those who belong to them." This receives an explanation in a sermon preached by the Bishop in London, where he speaks of the irrational contempt felt for the blacks in the Plantation of Rhode Island, "as creatures of another species, who had no right to be instructed or admitted to the sacraments. To this may be added an erroneous notion that the being baptized is inconsistent with a state of slavery. To undeceive them in this particular, which had too much weight, it seemed a proper step, if the opinion of his Majesty's attorney and solicitor-general could be procured. This opinion they charitably sent over, signed with their own hands; which was accordingly printed in Rhode Island, and dispersed throughout the Plantation. I heartily wish it may produce the intended effect."17

In a speech upon West-Indian affairs, which Lord Brougham delivered in the House of Commons in 1823, there is some account of the religious instruction of the slaves as conducted by the curates. He alludes in particular to the testimony of a worthy curate, who stated that he had been twenty or thirty years among the negroes, "and that no single instance of conversion to Christianity had taken place during that time,–all his efforts to gain new proselytes among the negroes had been in vain; all of a sudden, however, light had broken in upon their darkness so suddenly that between five and six thousand negroes had been baptized in a few days. I confess I was at first much surprised at this statement. I knew not how to comprehend it; but all of a sudden light broke in upon my darkness also. I found that there was a clue to this most surprising story, and that these wonderful conversions were brought about, not by a miracle, as the good man seems himself to have really imagined, and would almost make us believe, but by a premium of a dollar a head paid to this worthy curate for each slave that he baptized!"

We return to Las Casas once more, to state precisely his complicity in the introduction of the race whose sorrows have been so fearfully avenged by Nature in every part of the New World. Many of the writers who have treated of these transactions, as Robertson, for instance, have accused Las Casas, on the strength of a passage in Herrera, of having originated the idea that the blacks could be profitably substituted for the Indians. It is supposed, that, in his eagerness to save the Indians from destruction, he sought also to save colonial interests, by procuring still a supply of labor from a hardier and less interesting race. Thus his indignation at the rapid extinction of the Indians appears sentimental; to indulge his fancy for an amiable race, he was willing to subject another, with which he had no graceful associations, to the same liabilities. We have seen, however, that the practice of carrying negroes to Hayti was already established, seven years before Las Casas suggests his policy. The passage from Herrera has been misunderstood, as Llorente, Schoelcher, the Abbé Grégoire, and others, conclusively show. That historian says that Las Casa, disheartened by the difficulties which he met from the colonists and their political and ecclesiastical friends at home, had recourse to a new expedient, to solicit leave for the Spaniards to trade in negroes, "in order that their labor on the plantations and in the mines might render that of the natives less severe." This proposition, made in 1517, has been wrongly supposed to signalize the first introduction of blacks into America. Nor was Las Casas the first to make this proposition; for another passage of Herrera discloses that three priests of St. Jerome, who had been despatched to the colony by Cardinal Ximenes, for the experiment of managing it by a Board instead of by a Governor, recommended in 1516 that negroes should be sent out to stock the plantations, in order to diminish the forced labor of the natives. This was a concession by the Jeromites to the public opinion which Las Casas had created.18 Negroes already existed there; the priests perceived their value, and that the introduction of a greater number would both improve the colony and diminish the anti-slavery agitation of the Dominicans. The next year this project was taken up by Las Casas, borrowed from the Jeromites as the only alternative to preserve a colony, to relieve the natives, and to keep the people interested in the wholesome reforms which he was continually urging upon the colonial administration.

He had no opportunity to become acquainted with the evils of negro slavery, but it is strange that he did not anticipate them. It was taken for granted by him that the blacks were enslaved in Africa, and he accepted too readily the popular idea that their lot was improved by transferring them from barbarous to Christian masters. Their number was so small in Hayti, and the island fell so suddenly into decay, that no formidable oppression of them occurred during his lifetime to replace his recollections of the horrors of Indian servitude. His plan did not take root, but it was remembered. Thus the single error of a noble man, committed in the fulness of his Christian aspirations, and at the very moment when he was representing to a generation of hard and avaricious men the divine charity, betrayed their victims to all the nations that sought wealth and luxury in the West, and pointed out how they were to be obtained. His compromise has the fatal history of all compromises which secure to the present a brief advantage, whose fearful accumulation of interest the future must disgrace, exhaust, and cripple itself to pay.

In 1519 the colony had already begun to decay, though all the external marks of luxury and splendor were still maintained. That was the date of a famous insurrection of the remnant of Indians, who occupied the mountains, and defended themselves for thirteen years against all the efforts of the Spaniards to reduce them. It was hardly worth while to undertake their subjection. Adventurers and emigrants were already leaving San Domingo to its fate, attracted to different spots of the Terra Firma, to Mexico and Peru, by the reported treasures. That portion of the colony which had engaged in agriculture found Indians scarce and negroes expensive. There was no longer any object in fitting out expeditions to reinforce the colony, and repair the waste which it was beginning to suffer from desertion and disease. The war with the natives was ignominiously ended by Charles V. in 1533, who found that the colony was growing too poor to pay for it. He despatched a letter to the cacique who had organized this desperate and prolonged resistance, flattered him by the designation of Dom Henri19 and profuse expressions of admiration, sent a Spanish general to treat with him, and to assign him a district to inhabit with his followers. Dom Henri thankfully accepted this pacification, and soon after received Las Casas himself, who had been commissioned to assure the sole surviving cacique and representative of two million natives that Spain was their friend! At last the Protector of the Indians has the satisfaction of meeting them with authoritative messages of peace. And this was the first salutation of Dom Henri, after his forty years' experience of Spanish probity, and thirteen years of struggle for existence: "During all this war, I have not failed a day to offer up my prayers, I have fasted strictly every Friday, I have watched with care over the morals and the conduct of my subjects, I have taken measures everywhere to prevent all profligate intercourse between the sexes";20 thus nobly trying to recommend himself to the good Bishop, who had always believed in their capacity for temporal and spiritual elevation. He retired to a place named Boya, a dozen leagues from the capital. All the Indians who could prove their descent from the original inhabitants of the island were allowed to follow him. A few of them still remained in 1750; their number was only four thousand when Dom Henri led them away from Spanish rule to die out undisturbed.21