"ARE THEY NOT MEN?"
LAS CASAS AND THE PRO-INDIAN MOVEMENT IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Reverend Stafford Poole, C.M.
Archbishop Gerety Lecture at Seton Hall University, December 8, 1987
It all began on the fourth Sunday of Advent in the year 1511. The Place
was the island called Espanola, which today comprises Haiti and the
Dominican Republic. For almost twenty years the Spanish conquistadores
and settlers had lived in the comfortable belief that God had given them
the Indies for their own personal pleasure and enrichment. Even as
exploitation, enslavement, overwork, and European diseases began the
inevitable process of decimating, and eventually exterminating, the
native population, the Spanish were looking for new worlds to conquer
and subdue. The horizons seemed limitless. Hitherto, nothing had
seriously shaken their complacency, at least until that fateful Sunday
in Advent when the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos ascended the
pulpit in the small thatched church.
The sermon for the fourth Sunday of Advent had been set down in writing
and signed by the three Dominicans who served in the parish. Montesinos
was delegated to deliver it. After the gospel, he announced the text for
the day, "I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness." After having
said a few words about the Advent season, he began a blistering attack
on his congregation and their treatment of the Indians.
In order to make this known to you, I have come up here, for I am the
voice of Christ crying in the wilderness of this island, and therefore
you had better listen to me, not with indifference but with all your
heart and with all your senses. For this voice will be the strangest you
have ever heard, the harshest and the hardest, the most terrifying that
you ever thought that you would hear... This voice says that you are in
mortal sin and live and die in it because of the cruelty and tyranny
that you use against these innocent peoples. Tell me, by what right or
justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By
what authority do you wage such detestable wars on these peoples, who
lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, in which you have
destroyed countless numbers of them with unheard of murders and ruin ...
Are they not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to
love them as you love yourselves? Don't you understand this? Don's you
feel this? ... Be sure that in your present state you can no more be
saved than the Moors or Turks, who do not have and do not want the faith
of Jesus Christ.1
When Montesinos finished his sermon, he descended from the pulpit with
his head held high and his eyes blazing. The chronicler of these events
tells us that it was almost impossible to finish the mass because of the
murmuring and arguments that followed the sermon.
The peace had been broken, the battle joined. The pro-Indian movement,
which had been vaguely stirring for almost twenty years, had found its
first truly vocal spokesman. For the next century the controversy
generated by a sermon by an obscure friar on a remote tropical island
would reverberate throughout the Spanish empire. Montesinos had fired
the first salvo in what Lewis Hanke has aptly called "The Spanish
Struggle for justice in the Conquest of America".2 In the lecture that
follows, I would like to present a general outline of that struggle,
especially as it was personified in one man, Bartolome de las Casas. I
am going to talk about the principles and theories that entered into the
struggle. In substance, they are as valid today as they were four
hundred years ago.
Montesinos' attack did not go unanswered. A delegation of Spaniards went
to see the governor and demanded a retraction of the slanders that the
friars had inflicted on them. Montesinos and his confreres assured both
the governor and the colonists that on the following Sunday they would
receive a proper explanation of what had been said. Not unexpectedly,
this turned out to be an even more furious denunciation of the crimes
committed in the colony. The Spaniards, following a practice common in
that century, appointed a delegation to go to Spain and demand the
recall or silencing of the Dominicans. The Dominicans, observing the
same practice, appointed their own delegation, including Montesinos, to
present the Indians' case before the crown.
The principal question, as it was to be throughout most of the century,
was that of forced labor. Despite lurid tales of Spanish cruelty and
wanton destruction, the real curse of the Spanish Antilles was a
crushing system of compulsory labor and tribute payment that had arrived
with Columbus. It was called the encomienda, from the Spanish word
meaning to entrust or hand over. It was a means of rewarding the
conquistadores by allotting them Indian villages "to have Indians" was
the phrase that was used. This allotment gave the Spaniards two rights:
(1) to receive a regular tribute and (2) to demand labor from the
Indians. In return the colonials had to provide for the religious good
of the natives, especially by founding and endowing churches, and to
answer the call to arms in times of emergency. The Spaniards, of course,
lost little time in converting the encomienda into uncontrolled
exploitation, demanding higher and higher tributes, more and more labor
(especially in the gold and silver mines), until they threatened to
destroy the very economic base on which their newfound wealth was built.
The Spanish crown was never at ease with the encomienda and not just for
humanitarian reasons. Though the encomienda was not a true feudal grant
(it did not, for example, grant any judicial rights), it was close
enough that the crown, which had spent decades in subjugating the feudal
nobility of Spain, was understandably wary of it. After the death of
Queen Isabella in 1504, however, her husband Ferdinand became regent of
Castile and thus effective ruler of all Spain. The crown needed money
for its European adventures, and that money came from the New World.
Ferdinand, together with his chief counselor, Juan de Fonseca, the
cynical and ambitious bishop of Burgos, was not of a mind to stop the
exploitation of the natives nor alienate the Spanish settlers. As
Fonseca put it in a moment of appalling realism, after Las Casas had
described to him the slaughter of thousands of Indians, "How does that
concern me and how does it concern the king?"3
The two delegations that arrived from Espanola laid their cases before
the crown. Ferdinand turned the matter over to a commission of
theologians. The result was an attempt to compromise two apparently
irreconcilable principles: the freedom of the Indians and the need for
some sort of compulsory labor system, both to reward the conquistadores
and provide income for the crown. The compromise took the form of the
Laws of Burgos, which were issued in 1512 and amended in 1513. In
delineating those things that were to be forbidden, the laws painted a
dreadful picture of native life and labor in the Caribbean. Worse still,
from the reformers' point of view, they gave legal status to the
encomienda and fixed it on the colony as the economic underpinning of
society.
The Laws of Burgos did not stop the spread of conquest nor the numerous
slave raiding expeditions. The clamor of churchmen against these focused
attention on new areas of debate: by what right were Spaniards in the
Indies? what was the morality of conquest? what were the bases in law
for forcible enslavement? Many of these questions had been asked before
and the answers had always been in favor of the Spaniards. In the case
of enslavement, Spanish practice, following Roman law, held that such
servitude was justified in the cases of criminals, rebels, and captives
taken in a just war. But what constituted a just war? One opinion held
that stubborn refusal to hear the gospel or to admit the preachers of
the gospel was one such justification. Rebels were those who refused to
accept the rule of Spain, based as it was on Pope Alexander VI's famous
bull Inter Caetera of 1493, which had given papal approval to Spanish
rule over the newly discovered lands.
Out of all this came one of the strangest documents in Spanish history,
the Requirement, which was probably written by the Spanish jurist Juan
Lopez de Palacios Rubios. It contained a synopsis of the history of
salvation and the right of Spain to rule, together with a warning to the
as yet unconquered Indians that they must accept these or be subject to
conquest. Theoretically, the document was to be read to the Indians
through interpreters so that they would have the opportunity to submit
peacefully and avoid enslavement. If they failed to do so, then the war
against them would be just. It takes little imagination to guess what
happened in practice. Bartolome de las Casas said that when he read the
Requirement for the first time, he did not know whether to laugh or cry.
Most Spaniards laughed. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo recounted how,
during an expedition to South America in 1514 led by Pedrarias Davila,
one of the most loathsome of the conquistadores, the Spaniards came upon
an empty village, where they were later attacked by the Indians.
I should have preferred to have the requirement explained to the Indians
first, but no effort was made to do so, apparently because it was
considered superfluous or inappropriate. And just as our general on this
expedition failed to carry out this pious proceeding with the Indians,
as he was supposed to do before attacking them, the captains of many
later expeditions also neglected the procedure and did even worse things
... Later, in 1516, I asked Doctor Palacios Rubios ... if the
consciences of the Christians were satisfied with the requirement and he
said yes, if it were done as the proclamation required. But I recall
that he often laughed when I told him of that campaign and of others
that various captains later made.4
It was at this point that a new figure entered the controversy: a
stormy, turbulent, angry man who eventually embodied the most prophetic
and extreme elements of the pro-Indian movement. This was Bartolome de
las Casas. Las Casas was born in Seville in 1484.5 His father was a
merchant of modest means. The young Bartolome received his early
education in his home city and was old enough to recall Columbus' return
in 1493 from the first voyage of discovery. In hope of bettering their
fortunes, his father and three uncles accompanied Columbus on his second
voyage. When his father returned, he presented Bartolome with a young
Indian slave who was later freed because of a royal edict in 1500. In
1501 his father, still trying to better his financial situation,
accompanied Nicolas de Ovando, the first governor of Espanola, to that
island and took his son with him. Prior to leaving, Bartolome received
tonsure and thus became a clerigo or member of the clerical state.
They arrived at Espanola in 1502. Some four or five years later
Bartolome journeyed to Rome, where he was ordained to the priesthood,
though he did not celebrate his first mass until 1512, he always took
pride in the fact that he was the first newly-ordained priest to say his
first mass in the New World. In 1508, the year in which the Spaniards
discovered that Cuba was an island, not part of the mainland, he was
granted an encomienda on Espanola and became comparatively prosperous.
In 1513 he served as chaplain to the expedition that conquered Cuba,
during which he witnessed at first hand the atrocities committed by the
Spaniards and tried to prevent or moderate them. He was given a large
encomienda on Cuba and settled down to the comfortable life of a
gentleman farmer and landowning cleric. He always maintained that he
treated his Indians well, although he neglected their religious
instruction.
Las Casas was by nature a choleric, aggressive personality. He loved to
argue and was an instinctive dialectician. He tended toward extremes. He
was a single-minded person and might even be accused of fanaticism. At
least one major Spanish author has accused him of being paranoid and
having a split personality.6 Benjamin Keen's apt phrase, "God's angry
man" is perhaps the best brief description.7 He is as influential and
controversial today as he was in his lifetime -and his impact has
outlasted that of his more moderate contemporaries.
In the years between 1508 and 1515, on both Espanola and Cuba, Las Casas
apparently saw little contradiction between his life as an encomendero
and his commitment as a Christian and priest. Once, when a Dominican to
whom he wished to go to confession declined to hear it because he was an
encomendero, Las Casas argued vehemently with him. He eventually yielded
out of respect for the Dominican's holiness and reputation, but he did
not change his way of life.
Like other influential people in history, however, such as Saint
Augustine or Martin Luther, he found his life changed by the words of
scripture. One day in August, 1514, he began preparation for the
following Sunday's sermon. Looking through scripture in order to find an
appropriate text, he chanced on a passage in Sirach (then called
Ecclesiasticus), 34:18, "The sacrifice of an offering unjustly acquired
is a mockery; the gifts of impious men are unacceptable". A few days of
meditation on these words, his memories of the teachings of the
Dominicans, and his own experiences brought about a conversion. The
following Sunday he announced from the pulpit that he had divested
himself of his encomienda and was beginning a life of advocacy on behalf
of the oppressed Indians.
The following year, 1515, he joined Antonio de Montesinos on a voyage to
Spain, where he intended to act as the Indians' advocate at court. He
had one interview with King Ferdinand, but it availed little. In 1516
Ferdinand died and the throne passed to his grandson, the sixteen year
old Charles I (later Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire). During the
young king's absence from Spain, the country was governed by a regent,
Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, a Franciscan who had once been
confessor to Queen Isabella. The anti-Indian leaders, including Bishop
Fonseca, were fired and a plan was formulated for investigating the
situation in the Indies with an eye to future reform. The investigation
was entrusted to three reluctant Jeronymite friars, who were sent to
Espanola to gather information on the scene. Las Casas received, or
appropriated, the title of "Protector of the Indians" and followed the
Jeronymites shortly after to act as their advisor. This so-called
"Jeronymite Interrogatory" produced volumes of testimony but
accomplished almost nothing, being frustrated by conditions on the scene
and the obstructionism of the bureaucracy in Spain.
For several years Las Casas lobbied in favor of one of his pet projects:
that of colonization and christianization by peaceful means alone. After
several years of agitation, he was given permission to make an
experiment at Cumana on the northern coast of Venezuela in 1518-19. He
hoped to colonize the area with farmers and religious who together would
attract the Indians to a settled, Christian way of life by kindness and
good example. Knowing the Spanish love for titles and dignities, he even
created a knighthood for the immigrants, the Knights of the Golden Spur,
but the project failed because the missionaries were dispersed by a
storm and because of the hostility of the Spaniards. In addition, slave
raiding expeditions by the Spaniards caused the Indians to resist any
further intrusions. Las Casas later saw that his project had two basic
flaws. First, he had not had total control over it. Secondly, in any
effort to make it palatable to the crown, he had promised profits from
the experiment, that is, the crown would be the sole encomendero.
This failure caused Las Casas to go through a period of soul searching
and meditation on the direction of his life. This led him in 1522 to
join the Dominican order. The Spanish colonials were relieved by his
decision because they believed that he was now out of their hair, it was
a classic miscalculation.
Initially, however, the colonists seemed to be right. Las Casas spent
the next few years studying theology and law, most of it in a way that
would support his ideas. He gathered materials for his History of the
Indians, one of the most valuable sources that we have for the early
discovery and colonization of the New World. He also began a second
history, called the Apologetic History, which is a landmark in the
history of anthropology. About the year 1530, he began writing a Latin
treatise with the title De Unico Vocationis Modo Omnium Infidelium ad
Veram Religionem (The Only Way of Attracting all Unbelievers to the True
Religion). Though only a few chapters have survived, they mark it as one
of the most important missionary tracts in the history of the Church,
and one whose lessons the Church still had not learned some four and a
half centuries later. Basically, it was a blueprint for his own later
missionary experiments: the spread of the gospel by peaceful means
alone, the need for understanding of doctrine and clear catechesis to
precede conversion, the need to respect and utilize native cultures as
part of the missionary enterprise.
In 1536, together with Bishop Juan de Zumarraga of Mexico City and
Bishop Julian Garces of Tlaxcala, Las Casas drew up some petitions on
behalf of the Indians to be forwarded to the pope. Out of these came the
landmark papal bull Sublimis Deus of Pope Paul III (1537), which
proclaimed the Indians to be truly men and capable of christianization.
The bull became a powerful weapon in the hands of the pro-Indian forces,
although it was never formally published in the Spanish dominions.
In that same year, 1537, Las Casas was given a major opportunity to put
his missionary theories into practice at Tuzulutlan in modern Guatemala.
The Indians there were hostile and so the Spaniards, according to their
custom, referred to the area as the tierra de guerra or land of war. Las
Casas promptly christened it the tierra de vera paz or land of true
peace. Many Spaniards considered this the perfect opportunity to
demonstrate the futility of Las Casas' ideas; he saw it as a God-given
opportunity to prove the opposite. He used truly ingenious methods. The
Aztecs of pre-Hispanic times had often used traveling merchants, called
pochteca, as spies or as means of penetrating hostile territory. Las
Casas used traveling tradesmen in the same way. He and other friars
composed songs in the native language that summarized Christian doctrine
and taught these to Christian traders. In the course of visiting the
more important villages, after the day's trading was done, the songs
were sung as part of the evening's entertainment. When the interest of
the non- Christians was aroused, the traders would tell them about the
friars who would teach them the rest of the doctrine without demanding
anything for themselves. The experiment proved remarkably successful at
first, to the chagrin of many a colonial. Ultimately, however, it failed
because of the hostility of neighboring tribes, opposition by the
Spaniards, and the death of some of the missionaries. By 1550 it was all
over, but its memory remains as one of the most fascinating missionary
experiments of modern times.
In 1540 Las Casas returned to Spain where, together with other churchmen
and laymen, he began to lobby in favor of the Indians at the court of
Charles V. As a result of all these efforts, the crown issued the famous
New Laws of 1542, a striking combination of political reality and
humanitarian idealism. The laws forbade all further enslavement of
Indians for any reason whatever. The encomienda was condemned to
ultimate extinction. "Henceforth no encomienda is to be granted to
anyone, and when the present holders of encomiendas die, their Indians
will revert to the crown."8 The extinction, it will be noticed, worked
in favor of the crown, which now set itself up as eventually the only
encomendero. For the colonials, the most appalling prospect was that of
not being able to leave their encomiendas to their children and hence of
being unable to establish family fortunes, something of surpassing
importance to Spaniards of that age.
The reactions of the colonists were predictably stormy. In Peru a revolt
temporarily overthrew royal authority and offered the unnerving
spectacle of a conquistador strolling about, swinging the severed head
of the viceroy at the end of a string. The royal official who was sent
to implement the New Laws in New Spain thought better of it and invoking
a time-honored Spanish tradition, he suspended them. Within a few years
the more stringent of the laws had been repealed. Still, enough remained
on the books to spell the virtual, though not total, end of the
encomienda as an important economic institution. As happened so often in
that century, economics came to the aid of humanitarianism. The growing
capitalist economy of New Spain left little room for the encomienda,
from which the majority of later settlers was excluded. In addition,
catastrophic epidemics, especially one in 1576, which depopulated entire
areas and villages, devalued the encomienda and brought many
encomenderos to the poverty level.
Despite all the turbulence that he had caused, Las Casas did not fall
from royal favor. The crown sought to make him bishop of the rich city
of Cuzco but he steadfastly refused. Eventually he had to yield to the
crown's determination to give him a miter and he accepted the recently
created and very poor diocese of Chiapas in the south of modern Mexico,
near the Guatemalan border. Not surprisingly, his brief tenure as bishop
was anything but peaceful, as he ordered priests not to absolve
encomenderos and launched his familiar attacks on Spanish exploitation.
In 1545 he narrowly avoided assassination. After attending a meeting of
bishops and church leaders in Mexico City, he returned to Spain for the
last time in 1547. He later resigned his bishopric.
In Spain he founded that the controversies over the Spanish conquest and
the treatment of the Indians had entered a new phase. The arguments were
now to be carried out on a vastly different level from that of the past.
The person responsible for this was a famed Renaissance humanist, Juan
Gines de Sepulveda, who was encouraged to enter the fray by Cardinal
Garcia de Loaysa, the archbishop of Seville and an opponent of the New
Laws. As a result, Sepulveda published a scholarly Latin treatise in
dialogue form called The Second Democrates or Reasons That Justify War
Against the Indians, which circulated in manuscript copies. Among the
reasons cited by Sepulveda as justifying war were the practice of human
sacrifice and cannibalism-. the Spaniards, he wrote, had an obligation
to come to the aid of the oppressed victims - and the refusal of the
natives to accept the universal rule of emperor and pope. Christianity,
he wrote, could be introduced by force, the famous compelle intrare of
the gospel as elaborated by Saint Augustine. Since Sepulveda was one of
the foremost classical scholars of his time, it was only natural that he
should also fall back on Aristotle's theory of natural slavery as
elaborated in the fifth book of the Politics, that is, that some
peoples, by reason of their superior intellect and endowments, are
naturally fitted to rule while others, because of their brutishness and
limited reasoning, are apt only for subordinate or servile roles. What
Aristotle actually meant by this is a matter of dispute today, but there
can be no doubt that for Sepulveda and the Spanish colonials, it was
perfectly tailored to their concept of the Indians' place in society.
At the basis of all of Sepulveda's theories, and explicitly stated in
his work, was the assumption of Spanish cultural and intellectual
superiority. He has been called the first ethnocentric Spanish
nationalist. Whether he was the first or not can be disputed, but
ethnocentric and nationalist he certainly was. Supelveda did not go so
far as to deny the humanity of the Indians, he admitted that they were
not quite on the same level as monkeys, but he clearly placed them in an
inferior order. This was an interesting position for a man who had
probably never seen an Indian.
Las Casas, of course, counterattacked immediately. It was now that his
years of selective study of the classics, scripture, the fathers of the
Church, and canon and civil law stood him in good stead. He was able to
meet Sepulveda on his own grounds.
The Second Democrates made the rounds of the universities, where it was
almost universally condemned. The uproar that followed caused the
Emperor Charles V to convoke a junta of theologians to hear the
protagonists and arrive at some sort of conclusion. In preparation for
this, he ordered that all further raids and expeditions into Indian
lands be halted. As Lewis Hanke has pointed out, "Probably never before
or since has a mighty emperor... in the full tide of his power ordered
his conquests to cease until it could be decided whether they were
just".9
The result of all this was the famous junta of Valladolid of 1550-1551.
The judges were a panel of fourteen distinguished religious and laity,
of whom four were fellow Dominicans of Las Casas. Sepulveda appeared on
the first day and gave a three hour summary of the doctrine of The
Second Democrates. Las Casas appeared on the following day and proceeded
to read the entire Latin text of his defense, the Argumentum Apologiae,
for five full days. He systematically refuted Sepulveda's accusations.
Even if the Indians were guilty of human sacrifice and cannibalism, he
said, this could be explained as a rational step in the development of
religious thought. He strongly defended the right of pagan rulers to
have jurisdiction in their lands without interference by Christians,
whether ecclesiastic or lay. Peaceful persuasion was the only
permissible means of evangelization. If Aristotle believed in natural
slavery, then Aristotle was to be rejected. The pope had no right to
parcel out pagan lands to Christian rulers. Ruling authority in any
nation came from God, but it came through the consent of the governed
-no ruler could be imposed on them against their will. The domestic
crimes of a nation, no matter how heinous, were not justification for
invasion or subjugation by an outside power.
The judges then recessed either, as Las Casas claimed, because they were
convinced of the truth of his arguments, or, as Sepulveda claimed, out
of sheer exhaustion. There is some evidence of correspondence among the
judges, but apparently they were unable or unwilling to come to a final
judgment. So far as is known, nothing specific came from the junta or
its discussions. One senses here a great tragedy. The judges at
Valladolid had an opportunity to have a positive impact on crown policy
in a matter of surpassing moral importance and in some way they failed
to measure up to it.
In one sense the colonists had the victory. Yet in another Las Casas was
the victor. The Second Democrates was not published in Sepulveda's
lifetime, in fact it did not see the press until 1892. And yet in 1552,
Las Casas was able to publish his most famous, or perhaps notorious
work, The Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, an angry,
inflammatory, exaggerated tract that has provided grist for the Black
Legend of Spanish cruelty and exploitation in the New World. Remarkably,
it was published without a royal license.
Las Casas still had another fifteen years to life. He spent most of that
time as a champion and lobbyist for the Indians at court. There is
disagreement among historians as to his effectiveness during this time.
For some he was a burnt-out comet, a sort of doddering old man humored
by the crown but ultimately ineffective. According to this school of
thought, the "American Reality" and the policies of Philip II
(1556-1598) spelled the end of the humanitarian movement. Others see Las
Casas at the zenith of his work, still keeping the movement alive, and
creating a school of followers who would continue his work after his
death. Whichever may be the more accurate, it is remarkable that he
enjoyed such incredible freedom in criticizing the crown and its
policies. Despite his alienation from, and even hostility to so many of
his countrymen, he was never silenced.
Equally notable is the fact that as he grew older, he became more
radical. By the end of his life, he was advocating the wholesale
withdrawal of all Spaniards from the Indies-unrealistic, but consistent
to the end.
Las Casas died at Valladolid in 1566 and was eventually buried in the
Dominican chapel of Atocha in Madrid. There, alas, his tomb was lost in
the course of various reconstructions. In his last will he prophesied
divine wrath against his country for its crimes against the Indians.
And I believe that because of these impious and criminal and infamous
deeds, so unjustly and tyrannically and barbarously done to and against
them (the Indians) that God will unleash his fury and wrath on Spain ...
unless it does great penance; and I fear it will do it too late or never
because of the blindness that God, because of our sins, has permitted in
great and small alike.10
He believed that if men ever needed to know the reasons for this
visitation of divine vengeance, they could find them in his writings.
Conclusions
1) It is necessary to remember that Las Casas was not a solitary figure,
but part of a general movement within the Spanish empire in the
sixteenth century. It was not a monolithic or homogeneous movement. Many
different people played important roles in it and represented a wide
range of approaches to the questions involved. These include Toribio de
Benavente, known as Motolinia, one of the first twelve Franciscans to
come to New Spain and an important figure both as missionary and
historian in the sixteenth century. Yet he opposed Las Casas and his
methods and in 1555 wrote a condemnation of him that was worthy of any
encomendero. Other Franciscans, such as Geonimo de Mendieta, were more
apocalyptic in their condemnations of Spanish exploitation. On the one
hand there were the "root and branch" schools of reformers and on the
other those who believed that European control and some system of
compulsory labor were necessary for the proper functioning of a new
society.
2) Las Casas was an extremist, there is no doubt about that. He was a
prophetic figure, with all that this implies. He wrote and spoke in
superlatives. He never gave his enemies credit for good faith. One was
either with him or against him. Whether because of this or in spite of
it, he is the one who has left the strongest impression. In this century
alone there have been more than two thousand books and articles about
him. He has become something of a patron saint for liberation theology.
To use an often overworked phrase, he was a force of nature and whether
one agrees with him or not, it is impossible to ignore him.
3) It is a tribute to the Spanish crown and psychology of the sixteenth
century that Las Casas and his fellow reformers had such freedom of
speech and action. The Spanish concept of kingship was the medieval one
of a dispenser of justice rather than an author of legislation. Spanish
government was a careful balancing act among pressure groups, and the
crown often showed an amazing readiness to alter policy in response to
these groups. At the same time one can feel a certain sympathy for the
crown, faced as it was not only with differing demands but a veritable
flood of contradictory reports. It is also a tribute to Las Casas'
position that he was able to prevent the publication of works by his
enemies, such as Sepulveda and Oviedo. Can one visualize a similar
situation in the England of that time, the England of Henry VIII and
Elizabeth I?
4) The key question, of course, is: how effective was all this? Las
Casas' life was filled with failure, contradiction, and bitter
compromise. Let us grant that the humanitarian movement lost momentum
toward the end of the sixteenth century. Let us grant also that
throughout the colonial period the Indian was the exploited, often
overworked, and even despised base on which colonial society and economy
were built. Permit me, however, to point out something equally
important. It is an insight of Lesley Byrd Simpson's, who declared that
there has been a tendency to read back into the colonial period the
condition of the Indian under the Mexican republics. However much the
Indian may have suffered under Spanish rule, he was still surrounded by
a network of laws and preferential legislation that gave him a special
legal status and a certain degree of protection. It is rash to presume
good treatment simply on the basis of written laws, but at least the
laws were there. The Indian, it is true, was viewed as a ward of the
crown, a political adolescent waiting to reach manhood at some vague and
indefinite future. However inadequate, there was still a measure of
protection.
The position of the Indian began its worse decline since the sixteenth
century when that network of laws was removed. This was done, not by an
oppressive, conservative, or clerical Spanish regime, but by the liberal
governments of independent Mexico. The liberals sought to make the
Indians equal with the whites, not mere wards or legal adolescents. The
theory was noble but it exposed the adolescents to the cruel,
competitive world of nineteenth century liberalism without any
preparation for it. Nor did it do anything to alter the prejudices
inherited from colonial times. The Laws of the Reform, culminating in
the Constitution of 1857, enlightened as they may have seemed in theory,
forced the sale of corporate property that was not actually being used
for civil or charitable purposes. Though aimed primarily at the Church,
these laws exposed the Indian villages to the loss of their common lands
(ejidos). One of the authors of these laws was Benito Juarez, a full
blooded Zapotec who was Mexico's first and only Indian president. Of him
it has been said, "Of the whites who determined the history of the
country ... Juarez was the whitest of them all".12
All of this came to fruition during the long dictatorship of Porfirio
Diaz (1876- 1880; 1884-1911), particularly during its last twenty years.
A new breed of thinkers, the scientificos, imbued with positivism and
social Darwinism, proclaimed the Indian an inferior being who hindered
the progress of the nation. The laws of the Reform, together with other
later enactments, paved the way for the full-fledged seizure of Indian
lands. Entire villages vanished into vast cattle and sugar haciendas. In
his brilliant biography of Emiliano Zapata, John Womack has pointed out
that the decisive factor that drove Zapata to revolt was the threatened
destruction of his village, "the end of a human community some seven
centuries old".13
It is generally accepted among historians today that the Mexican Indian
was in a better economic situation in 1810 than he was in 1910.14 If
this is true, then certainly much of the credit is due to men like Las
Casas and their strong appeals to the Spanish conscience.
5) Let us conclude with some reflections closer to home. We Americans,
true to our English background, tend to be complacent and
self-righteous. We have grown up on the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty
and oppression. Yet Anglo-America never produced anything remotely
comparable to the Spanish humanitarian movement of the sixteenth
century. There is no Las Casas in the history of the United States,
either before or after independence. Helen Hunt Jackson hardly fits the
role. The record in this country- genocide, internment on reservations,
broken treaties, forced removal, stolen lands -is all the more grim
because there were no voices, like that of Montesinos, crying in the
wilderness. When the English came to these shores, they brought nothing
comparable to the vigor, intellectual vitality, or prophetic mission of
the Spanish church of the sixteenth century. What they lacked, and what
Spain had, was an institutionalized conscience with an acknowledged role
within the framework of society. Perhaps the greatest tribute to Las
Casas, and to the movement of which he was such a fiery spokesman, is
that it has been only within recent times that the Church, and some
segments of civil society, have begun to catch up with his ideas and to
advocate the same things that he did four centuries ago. Marcel
Bataiflon has warned against trying to make a twentieth century
anti-colonialist out of Las Casas.15 I disagree. Let us hope and pray
that the voice crying in the wilderness is now being heard. We still
need to learn the basic lesson of Las Casas when he wrote. All the
peoples of the world are men ... All mankind is one."
Reverend Stafford Poole, C.M.
St. John's Seminary College
Camarillo, California
Bartolome de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, book 3, chapter 4,
quoted in Marcel Bataillon and Andre Saint-Lu, El Padre Las Casas y la
defensa de los indios (Barcelona, 1976, 81). Translation by the
lecturer.
Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America
(Boston, 1964).
Las Cases, Historia, book 3, chapter 84, in Batadlon-Saint-Lu, El Padre
Las Casas, 114-15.
Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, Historia general y natural de las
Indias, VII, 131-32, in Benjamin Keen, ed., Readings in Latin-American
Civilization: 1492 to the Present (New York 1967), 88-89. Translation by
Professor Keen.
Most texts still give the year as 1474. The correct date has been
established by Helen Rand Parish with Harold Wiedman, S.J., "The Correct
Birthdate of Bartolome de las Casas", Hispanic American Historical
Review 56 (1976), 385-403.
Ramon Menendez Pidal, El Padre Las Casas: su doble personalidad (Madrid,
1963). It has been reported by the author later regretted most of the
assertion made in his book.
Keen, Readings, 89.
Quoted in Hanke, Struggle, 92.
Hanke, Struggle, 92.
Quoted in Bataillon-Saint-Lu, El Padre Las Casas, 300. Translation by
lecturer.
Lesley Byrd Simpson, Many Mexicos (Berkeley, 1959), 94-95.
Quoted by Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans
(New York, 1986), 289.
John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York 1968), 64.
William Sherman and Michael Meyer, The Course of Mexican History (New
York, 1983), 460-61.
Bataflion-Saint Lu, El Padre Las Casas, 57
