Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings

by Francis Augustus MacNutt

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 [pg 98] 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 [pg 99] 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 [pg 102] 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 [pg 103] 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 [pg 104] 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 [pg 105] 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.”