The Clerigo found his remonstrances and appeals to his own nominally Christian fellow-countrymen wholly ineffectual in restraining or even mitigating the oppressions and cruelties inflicted upon the wretched natives. There was something phenomenal, as has been said, in the license yielded to the ingenuity of Spanish barbarity. It combined all the devices of inquisitorial torturing with the indulgence of the bestial ferocities of the bullfight. At times it seemed as if the heartless oppressors were seeking only for a brutal mirth in inventing games in which their victims should writhe and yell as for their amusement. Then, as opportunity suggested or served, a scheme of the most cunning treachery and malice would turn an occasion of revelry or feasting, to which the natives had been invited or been beguiled by their tormentors, into a riot of fury and massacre. The utter aimlessness and recklessness of most of these horrid enormities impress the reader in these days as simply the indulgence of a wanton spirit in giving free license in human passions to those mocking employments of grinning devils in the old church paintings as they inflict retributions on the damned spirits in hell. The forked weapons, the raging flames, and the hideous demoniac delights exhibited in paintings, with which the eyes of the Spaniards were so familiar, found their all-too-faithful counterparts in the tropical zones and valleys of our virgin islands. The only pretences offered, not for justifying but for inflicting such wanton barbarities on the natives, were such as these,—that they refused to make known or to guide their oppressors to rich mines, or to work beyond their powers of endurance, or to bear intolerable burdens, or to furnish food which they had not to give. Touching and harrowing it is to read of many instances in which the simple diplomacy of the natives prompted them to neglect the little labor of husbandry required to supply their own wants, in order that the invaders might with themselves be brought to starvation. Whenever the Clerigo accompanied a body of Spaniards on the way to an Indian village, he always made an effort to keep the two people apart by night and by day, and he employed himself busily in baptizing infants and little children. He could never be too quick in this service, as these subjects of his zeal were the victims of the indiscriminate slaughter. The only consolation which this tender-hearted yet heroic missionary could find, as his share in the enterprise of his people, was in keeping the reckoning on his tablets of the number of those born under the common heathen doom whom he had snatched, by a holy drop, from the jaws of hell.
Baffled in all his nearly solitary endeavors to check the direful havoc and wreck of poor humanity on the scenes which were made so gory and hateful, Las Casas returned again to Spain in 1515, buoyed by resolve and hope that his dark revelations and bold remonstrances would draw forth something more effective from the sovereign. He was privileged by free and sympathizing interviews with Ferdinand at Placentia. But any hope of success here was soon crushed by the monarch’s death. Las Casas was intending to go at once to Flanders to plead with the new King, Charles I., afterward Emperor, but was delayed by sympathetic friends found in Cardinal Ximenes and Adrian, the Regents.
It may seem strange and unaccountable that Las Casas should have encountered near the Court of a benignant sovereign a most malignant opposition to all his endeavors from first to last in securing the simply humane objects of his mission. But in fact he was withstood as resolutely at home as abroad, and often by a more wily and calculating policy. He found enemies and effective thwarters of his influence and advice in the order of the Jeronymites. Of the grounds and methods of their harmful activity, as well as of some of the more ostensible and plausible of the motives and alleged reasons which made him personal enemies both in Spain and in the Indies, we must speak with some detail farther on. It may be well here to follow him summarily in his frequent alternation between his missionary fields and his homeward voyages, to ply his invigorated zeal with new and intenser earnestness from his fuller experiences of the woes and outrages which he sought to redress. With some, though insufficient, assurances of regal authority in support of his cause, he re-embarked for the Indies, Nov. 11, 1516, and reached Hispaniola in December, fortified with the personal title of the “Universal Protector of the Indians.” He sailed again for Spain, May 7, 1517. His plainness of speech had in the interval increased the animosity and the efforts to thwart him of the local authorities on the islands, and had even induced coldness and lack of aid among his Dominican friends. He had many public and private hearings in Spain, stirring up against himself various plottings and new enemies. In each of these homeward visits Las Casas of course brought with him revelations and specific details of new accumulations of iniquity against the natives; and with a better understanding of himself, and also of all the intrigues and interests warring against him, his honest soul assured him that he must at last win some triumph in his most righteous cause. So he heaped the charges and multiplied the disclosures which gave such vehemence and eloquence to his pleadings. Having during each of his home visits met some form of misrepresentation or falsehood, he would re-embark, furnished as he hoped with some new agency and authority against the evil-doers. But his enemies were as ingenious and as active as himself. Perhaps the same vessel or fleet which carried him to the islands, with orders intended to advance his influence, would bear fellow-passengers with documents or means to thwart all his reinforced mission. He left Spain again in 1520, only to cast himself on a new sea of troubles soon inducing him to return. His sixth voyage carried him this time to the mainland in Mexico, in 1537. He was in Spain once more in 1539. While waiting here for the return of the Emperor, he composed six of his many essays upon his one unchanging theme, all glowing with his righteous indignation, and proffering wise and plain advice to the monarch. Yet again he crossed the now familiar ocean to America, in 1544, it being his seventh western voyage, and returned for the seventh and last time to Spain in 1547. Here were fourteen sea-voyages, with their perils, privations, and lack of the common appliances and comforts shared in these days by the rudest mariners. These voyages were interspersed by countless trips and ventures amid the western islands and the main, involving twofold, and a larger variety of harassments and risks, with quakings, hurricanes, and reefs, exposures in open skiffs, and the privilege of making one’s own charts. But one year short of fifty in the count out of his lengthened life were spent by this man of noble ardor, of dauntless soul, and of loving heart in a cause which never brought to him the joy of an accomplished aim.
Las Casas shared, with a few other men of the most fervent and self-sacrificing religious zeal, an experience of the deepest inward conviction, following upon, not originally prompting to, the full consecration of his life to his devoutest aim. Though he had been ordained to the priesthood in 1510, he was afterward made to realize that he had not then been the subject of that profound experience known in the formulas of piety as true conversion. He dates this personal experience, carrying him to a deeper devotional consciousness than he had previously realized, to the influence over him of a faithful lay friend, Pedro de la Renteria, with whom he became intimate in 1514. To the devout conversation, advice, and example of this intimate companion he ascribed his better-informed apprehension of the radical influences which wrought out the whole system of wrong inflicted upon the natives. Las Casas himself, like all the other Spaniards, had a company of Indian servants, who were in effect slaves; and he put them to work, the benefit of which accrued to himself. A form of servitude which exceeded all the conditions of plantation slavery had been instituted by Columbus under the system of so-called repartimientos. It was founded on the assumption that the Spanish monarch had an absolute proprietary right over the natives, and could make disposals and allotments of their services to his Christian subjects, the numbers being proportioned to the rank, standing, and means of individuals, the meanest Spaniard being entitled to share in the distribution of these servitors. This allowance made over to men of the lowest grade of intelligence, character, and humanity, the absolute and irresponsible power over the life and death of the natives intrusted to the disposal of masters. Under it were perpetrated cruelties against which there were no availing remonstrances, and for which there was no redress. The domestic cattle of civilized men are to be envied above the human beings who were held under the system of repartimientos,—tasked, scourged, tormented, and hunted with bloodhounds, if they sank under toils and inflictions beyond their delicate constitutions, or sought refuge in flight.
The slavery which afterward existed in the British Colonies and in these United States had scarce a feature in common with that which originated with the Spanish invaders. Las Casas thinks that Ferdinand lived and died without having had anything like a full apprehension of the enormities of the system. This, however, was not because efforts were lacking to inform him of these enormities, or to engage his sovereign intervention to modify and restrain, if not positively to prohibit, them. As we shall see, the system was so rooted in the greed and rapacity of the first adventurers here, who were goaded by passion for power and wealth, that foreign authority was thwarted in every attempt to overrule it. The most favored advisers of Ferdinand endeavored at first to keep him in ignorance of the system, and then, as he obtained partial information about it, to lead him to believe that it was vitally indispensable to conversion, to colonization, and to remunerative trade. The Dominican missionaries had, as early as 1501, informed the monarch of the savage cruelties which the system imposed. All that they effected was to induce Ferdinand to refer the matter to a council of jurists and theologians. Some of these were even alleged to have personal interests in the system of repartimientos; but at any rate they were under the influence and sway of its most selfish supporters. As the result of their conference, they persuaded the monarch that the system was absolutely necessary,—as, first, the Spaniards themselves were incapable of bodily labor under a debilitating climate; and second, that the close and dependent relation under which the natives were thus brought to their masters could alone insure the possibility of their conversion to the true faith. Ferdinand was so far won over to the allowance of the wrong as to issue an ordinance in its favor; while he sought to limit, restrain, and qualify it by injunctions which, of course, were futile in their dictation, for operating at a distance, in islands where sordid personal interests were all on the side of a defiance of them.
The Clerigo affirms that his own conscience was more startlingly aroused to a full sense of the wrongs and iniquities of the system of the repartimientos by his religious friend Renteria. He had previously, of course, so far as he was himself made the master or guardian in this relation of any number of the natives, brought his humanity and his ardor for justice into full exercise. But he was quickened by his friend to the duty of private and also of bold public protest against the system, and most plainly to offenders in proportion to the number of the victims which they enthralled and to the cruelty inflicted upon them. It was not his wont to allow any timidity or personal regards or temporizing calculations to compel his silence or to moderate his rebukes. His infirmity rather led him to excess in impatience and passion in his remonstrances. His bold and denunciatory preaching—though it appears that in this, and, as we shall note, on other occasions of speech and writing, he restrained himself from using the name of conspicuous offenders—caused an intense consternation and excitement. His clerical character barely saved him from personal violence. He found his hearers obdurate, and utterly beyond the sway of his protests and appeals. Again, therefore, he turned his face toward Spain, sustained by the fond assurance that he could so engage the King’s intervention by his disclosures and rehearsals, that the royal authority should at this time be effectually exerted against a giant iniquity. This was his homeward errand in 1515. That even his presence and speech had had some restraining influence in Cuba, is signified by the fact that after his withdrawal and during his absence all the wrongs and miseries of which the natives, wholly impotent to resist, were the victims, ran into wilder license. The Spaniards kept bloodhounds in training and in hunger, to scour the woods and thickets and wilderness depths for the despairing fugitives. Whole families of the natives took refuge in voluntary and preferred self-destruction.
Two Dominicans of like mind with Las Casas accompanied him on his errand. Pedro de Cordova, prelate of the Dominicans, was his stanch friend. The Clerigo reached Seville in the autumn of 1515, and at once addressed himself to Ferdinand. He found the monarch old and ailing. The most able and malignant opponent with whose support, enlisted upon the side of the wrong and of the wrongdoers, Las Casas had to contend, was the Bishop of Burgos, Fonseca, whose influence had sway in the Council for the Indies.[1016] After the King’s death, Jan. 23, 1516, Las Casas enjoyed the countenance, and had hope of the effectual aid, of the two Regents, previously mentioned, during the minority of Charles, the heir to the throne. The earnestness and persistency of the Clerigo so far availed as to obtain for him instructions to be carried to those in authority in the islands for qualifying the repartimiento system, and with penalties for the oppressions under it. Some Jeronymites were selected to accompany him on his return, as if to reinforce the objects of his mission, and to insure the efficacy of the title conferred upon him as the “Protector of the Indians.” The Jeronymites, however, had been corrupted by the cunning and intrigues of the wily and exasperated enemies of Las Casas, who effected in secrecy what they could not or dared not attempt publicly against the courageous Clerigo and his purposes backed by authority. Already alienated during the voyage, they reached San Domingo in December, 1516. Perhaps candor may induce the suggestion that while the Jeronymites, from motives of prudence, temporized and qualified their activity in their errand, Las Casas was heady and unforbearing in his uncompromising demand for instant redress of wrong. At any rate he was wholly foiled in the exercise of his delegated authority; and so, with a fire in his blood which allowed no peace to his spirit, he was again in Spain in July, 1517. Here he found Cardinal Ximenes, his friendly patron, near to death. He was, however, encouraged with the hope and promise of patronage from high quarters. For a season his cause presented a favorable aspect. He had become sadly assured that upon the Spaniards in the islands, whose hearts and consciences were smothered by their greed and inhumanity, no influence, not even that of ghostly terrorism, which was tried in the refusal of the sacraments, would be of the least avail. His only resource was to engage what force there might be in the piety and humanity of the Church at home, in the sense of justice among high civil dignitaries, and in such sympathetic aid as he might draw from his countrymen who had no interest in the mining or the commerce sustained by the impositions upon the natives. The young King had wise councillors, and they made with him some good plans for means of relieving the natives from severities in their tasks of labor, from cruel inflictions in working the mines, and from exorbitant taxes exacting of them produce and commodities enormously exceeding their possible resources, however willing they might be in yielding. It was at this time and under its emergency, that Las Casas unfortunately gave something more than his assent, even his countenance and advice, to a proposition the effect of which was to root in pure and free soil an enormity whose harvesting and increase were a sum of woes. He certainly did advise that each Spaniard, resident in Hispaniola, should be allowed to import a dozen negro slaves. He did this, as he afterward affirmed and confessed, under the lure of a deep mist and delusion. So painful was the remorse which he then experienced for his folly and error, that he avows that he would part with all he had in the world to redress it. He says that when he gave this advice he had not at all been aware of the outrages perpetrated by the Portuguese dealers in entrapping these wretched Africans. Besides this, he had been promised by the colonists that if they might be allowed to have negroes, whose constitutions were stronger for endurance, they would give up the feeble natives. We may therefore acquit Las Casas in his confessed sin of ignorance and willing compromise in an alternative of wrongs. But he is wholly guiltless of a charge which has been brought against him, founded upon this admitted error, of having been the first to propose and to secure the introduction of African slavery into the New World. As has already been said, the wrong had been perpetrated many years before Las Casas had any agency in it by deed or word. While the young King was still in Flanders negro slaves had been sent by his permission to Hispaniola. The number was limited to a thousand for each of the four principal islands. As there was a monopoly set up in the sale of these doleful victims, the price of them was speedily and greatly enhanced.[1017]
Las Casas devised and initiated a scheme for the emigration of laboring men from Spain. Thwarted in this purpose, he formed a plan for a colony where restrictions were to be enforced to guard against the worst abuses. Fifty Spaniards, intended to be carefully selected with regard to character and habits, and distinguished by a semi-clerical garb and mode of life, were his next device for introducing some more tolerable conditions of work and thrift in the islands. Ridicule was brought to bear, with all sorts of intrigues and tricks, to baffle this scheme. But the Clerigo persevered in meeting all the obstructions thrown in his way, and sailed for San Domingo in July, 1520. He established his little Utopian colony at Cumana; but misadventures befel it, and it came to a melancholy end. It seemed for a season as if the tried and patient Clerigo was at last driven to complete disheartenment. Wearied and exhausted, he took refuge in a Dominican convent in San Domingo, receiving the tonsure in 1522. Here he was in retirement for eight years, occupying himself in studying and writing, of which we have many results. During this interval the work of depopulation and devastation was ruinously advancing under Cortés, Alvarado, and Pizarro, in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru. There is some uncertainty about an alleged presence of Las Casas at the Court in Spain in 1530. But he was in Mexico in 1531, in Nicaragua in 1534, and in Spain again in 1539, in behalf of a promising work undertaken in Tuzulutlan, from which all lay Spaniards were to be excluded. Having accomplished, as he hoped, the object of his visit, he would have returned at once to the American main; but was detained by the Council of the Indies as the person best able and most trustworthy to give them certain information which they desired. It was at this period that he wrote his remarkable work, The Destruction of the Indies. This bold and daring product of his pen and of the righteous indignation which had heretofore found expression from his eloquent and fervid speech, will soon be examined in detail. It may be said now that this work, afterward so widely circulated and translated into all the languages of Europe,—perhaps with some reductions from the original,—was not at first allowed to be published, but was submitted to the Emperor and his ministers. As the shocking revelations made in this book state in round numbers the victims of the Spaniards in different places, it is at once observable that there are over-statements and exaggerations. This, however, applies only to the numbers, not at all to the acts of barbarity and iniquity.[1018] The book was published twelve years after it was written, and was dedicated to Philip, the heir to the throne.
It may be as well here to complete the summary of the career of Las Casas. While detained by the Council he was engaged in the advice and oversight of a new code of laws for the government of the colonies and the colonists. Up to this time he had crossed the ocean to the islands or the main twelve times, and had journeyed to Germany four times to confer with the Emperor. He was offered the bishopric of Cusco, in Toledo, but was not thus to be withdrawn from his foreign mission. In order, however, to secure authority to enforce the new laws, he accepted the foreign bishopric of Chiapa, was consecrated at Seville in 1544, embarked on July 4, with forty-four monks, and arrived at Hispaniola. He bore the aversion and hate which his presence everywhere provoked, was faithful to the monastic habits, and though so abstemious as to deny himself meat, he kept the vigor of his body. He resolutely forbade absolution to be given to Spaniards holding slaves contrary to the provisions of the new laws. Resigning his bishopric, he returned to Spain for the last time in 1547,—engaging in his bold controversy with Sepulveda, to be soon rehearsed. He resided chiefly in the Dominican College at Valladolid. In 1564, in his ninetieth year, he wrote a work on Peru. On a visit to Madrid in the service of the Indians, after a short illness, he died in July, 1566, at the age of ninety-two, and was buried in the convent of “Our Lady of Atocha.”