The most resolute and effective opponents which Las Casas found at the Spanish Court were Oviedo and Sepulveda, representatives of two different classes of those who from different motives and by different methods stood between him and the King. Oviedo had held high offices under Government both in Spain and in various places in the New World. He wrote a history of the Indies, which Las Casas said was as full of lies almost as of pages. He also had large interests in the mines and in the enslaving of the natives. Sepulveda[1019] was distinguished as a scholar and an author. Las Casas charges that his pen and influence were engaged in the interest of parties who had committed some of the greatest ravages, and who had personal advantages at stake. Sepulveda in his opposition to the Clerigo makes two points or “Conclusions,”—1. That the Spaniards had a right to subjugate and require the submission of the Indians, because of their superior wisdom and prudence; and that, therefore, the Indians were bound to submit and acquiesce. 2. That in case of their refusal to do so they might justly be constrained by force of arms. It was the proceeding on these assumptions that, as Las Casas pleaded, had led to the entire depopulation of vast territories. With high professions of loyalty Sepulveda urged that his motive in writing was simply to justify the absolute title of the King of Spain to the Indies. In offering his book to the Royal Council he importunately solicited its publication; and as this was repeatedly refused, he engaged the urgency of his friends to bring it about. Las Casas, well knowing what mischief it would work, strongly opposed the publication. The Council, regarding the matter as purely theological, referred Sepulveda’s treatise for a thorough examination to the universities of Salamanca and Alcala. They pronounced it unsound in doctrine and unfit to be printed. Sepulveda then secretly sent it to Rome, and through his friend, the Bishop of Segovia, procured it to be printed. The Emperor prohibited its circulation in Spain, and caused the copies of it to be seized.
Las Casas resolved to refute this dangerous treatise, and Sepulveda was personally cited to a dispute, which was continued through five days. As a result, the King’s confessor, Dominic de Soto, an eminent divine, was asked to give a summary of the case. This he did in substance as follows:—
“The prime point is whether the Emperor may justly make war on the Indians before the Faith has been preached to them, and whether after being subdued by arms they will be in any condition to receive the light of the Gospel, more tractable, more docile to good impressions, and ready to give up their errors. The issue between the disputants was, that Sepulveda maintained that war was not only lawful and allowable, but necessary; while Las Casas insisted upon the direct contrary,—that war was wholly unjust, and offered invincible obstacles to conversion. Sepulveda presented four arguments on his side: 1. The enormous wickedness and criminality of the Indians, their idolatry, and their sins against nature. 2. Their ignorance and barbarity needed the mastery of the intelligent and polite Spaniards. 3. The work of conversion would be facilitated after subjugation. 4. That the Indians treat each other with great cruelty, and offer human sacrifices to false gods. Sepulveda fortifies these arguments by examples and authorities from Scripture, and by the views of doctors and canonists,—all proceeding upon the assumed exceeding wickedness of the Indians. In citing Deuteronomy xx. 10-16, he interprets ‘far-off cities’ as those of a different religion. Las Casas replies that it was not simply as idolaters that the seven nations in Canaan were to be destroyed,—as the same fate, on that score, might have been visited upon all the inhabitants of the earth, except Israel,—but as intruders upon the Promised Land. The early Christian emperors, beginning with Constantine, did not make their wars as against idolaters, but for political reasons. He cites the Fathers as giving testimony to the effect of a good example and against violent measures. The Indians under the light of Nature are sincere, but are blinded in offering sacrifices. They are not like the worst kind of barbarians, to be hunted as beasts; they have princes, cities, laws, and arts. It is wholly unjust, impolitic, and futile to wage war against them as simply barbarians. The Moors of Africa had been Christians in the time of Augustine, and had been perverted, and so might rightfully be reclaimed.”
The Royal Council, after listening to the dispute and the summary of its points, asked Las Casas to draw up a paper on the question whether they might lawfully enslave the Indians, or were bound to set free all who were reduced to bondage. He replied that the law of God does not justify war against any people for the sake of making them Christians; so the whole course of treatment of the Indians had been wrong from the start. The Indians were harmless; they had never had the knowledge or the proffer of Christianity: so they had never fallen away, like the Moors of Africa, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. No sovereign prince had authorized the Spaniards to make war. The Spaniards cannot pretend that their reason for making war was because of the cruelty of the Indians to each other. The slaughter of them was indiscriminate and universal. They were enslaved and branded with the King’s arms. The monarch never authorized these execrable artifices and shocking atrocities, a long catalogue of which is specified.
The Clerigo then warms into an earnest dissertation on natural and Christian equity. He quotes some beautiful sentences from the will of Isabella, enjoining her own humanity on her husband and daughter. He makes a strong point of the fact that Isabella first, and then a council of divines and lawyers at Burgos, and Charles himself in 1523, had declared that all the inhabitants of the New World had been born free. Only Las Casas’ earnestness, his pure and persistent purpose, relieve of weariness his reiteration of the same truths and appeals to the King. He insists over and over again that the delegating of any portion of the King’s own personal authority to any Spaniard resident in the New World, or even to the Council of the Indies, opens the door to every form and degree of abuse, and that he must strictly reserve all jurisdiction and control to himself.
In a second treatise, which Las Casas addressed to Charles V., he states at length the practical measures needful for arresting the wrongs and disasters consequent upon the enslaving of the Indians. Of the twenty methods specified, the most important is that the King should not part with the least portion of his sovereign prerogative. He meets the objection artfully raised by Sepulveda, that if the King thus retains all authority to himself he may lose the vast domain to his crown, and that the Spaniards will be forced to return to Europe and give up the work of Gospel conversion.
Las Casas wrote six memorials or argumentative treatises addressed to the sovereigns on the one same theme. The sameness of the information and appeals in them is varied only by the increasing boldness of the writer in exposing iniquities, and by the warmer earnestness of his demand for the royal interposition. His sixth treatise is a most bold and searching exposition of the limits of the royal power over newly discovered territory, and within the kingdoms and over the natural rights of the natives. A copy of this paper was obtained by a German ambassador in Spain, and published at Spire, in Latin, in 1571. It is evident that for a considerable period after the composition—and, so to speak, the publication—of these successive protests and appeals of the Clerigo, only a very limited circulation was gained by them. Artful efforts were made, first to suppress them, and then to confine the knowledge of the facts contained in them to as narrow a range as possible. His enemies availed themselves of their utmost ingenuity and cunning to nullify his influence. Sometimes he was ridiculed as a crazy enthusiast,—a visionary monomaniac upon an exaggerated delusion of his own fancy. Again, he would be gravely and threateningly denounced as an enemy to Church and State, because he imperilled the vast interests of Spain in her colonies.
The principal and most important work from the pen of Las Casas, on which his many subsequent writings are based and substantially developed, bears (in English) the following title: A Relation of the First Voyages and Discoveries made by the Spaniards in America. With an Account of their Unparalleled Cruelties on the Indians, in the Destruction of above Forty Millions of People; together with the Propositions offered to the King of Spain to prevent the further Ruin of the West Indies. By Don Bartholomew de las Casas, Bishop of Chiapa, who was an Eye-witness of their Cruelties. It was composed in Spanish, and finished at Valencia, Dec. 8, 1542, near the beginning of the reign of Philip II., to whom it is dedicated. This was about fifty years after the discovery of America; and during the greater part of the period Las Casas had lived as an observer of the scenes and events which he describes. He makes Hispaniola his starting-point, as the navigators usually first touched there. The reader will at once be struck by the exaggeration, the effect of a high-wrought and inflamed imagination, so evident in the words of the title, which set the number of the victims of Spanish cruelty at forty millions. Of this weakness of Las Casas in over-estimate and exaggeration of numbers, we shall have to take special notice by and by. It is enough to say here that his license in this direction is confined to this one point, and is by no means to be viewed as discrediting his integrity, fidelity, and accuracy in other parts of his testimony. He certainly had been deeply impressed with the density of the population in some of the islands, for he says: “It seems as if Providence had amassed together the greatest part of mankind in this region of the earth.” He tells us that his motives for writing and publishing his exposure of iniquities were,—the call made upon him by pious and Christian people thus to enlist the sympathies and efforts of the good to redress the wrong; and his sincere attachment to his King and Master, lest God should avenge the wrong on his kingdom. For this purpose he has followed the Court with his pleadings, and will not cease his remonstrances and appeals. At the time of completing his work savage cruelties were prevailing over all the parts of America which had been opened, slightly restrained for the time in Mexico, through the stern intervention of the King. An addition to his work in 1546 recognized many new ordinances and decrees made by his Majesty at Barcelona since 1542, and signed at Madrid in 1543. But nevertheless a new field for oppression and wickedness had been opened in Peru, with exasperations from civil war and rebellion among the natives; while the Spaniards on most frivolous pretexts defied the orders of the King, pretending to wait for his answers to their pleas in self-justification. The period was one in which the rapacity of the invaders was both inflamed and gratified by abundance of spoil, which sharpened the avarice of the earlier claimants, and drew to them fresh adventurers.
Las Casas gives a very winning description of the natives under his observation and in his ever-kindly and sympathetic relations with them. He says they are simple, humble, patient, guileless, submissive, weak, and effeminate; incapable of toil or labor, short-lived, succumbing to slight illnesses; as frugal and abstemious as hermits; inquisitive about the Catholic religion, and docile disciples. They were lambs who had encountered tigers, wolves, and lions. During the lifetime of Las Casas Cuba had been rendered desolate and a desert; then St. John and Jamaica; and in all thirty islands had come to the same fate. A system of deportation from one island to another had been devised to obtain new supplies of slaves. The Clerigo deliberately charges that in forty years the number of victims counted to fifty millions. Enslaving was but a protracted method of killing,—all in the greed for gold and pearls. The sight of a fragment of the precious metal in the hands of a native was the occasion for demanding more of him, as if he had hidden treasure, or for his guiding the Spaniards to some real or imagined mines. Las Casas follows his details and examples of iniquity through the islands in succession, then through the provinces of Nicaragua, New Spain, Guatemala, Pannco, Jalisco, Yucatan, St. Martha, Carthagena, the Pearl Coast, Trinidad, the River Yuya-pari, Venezuela, Florida, La Plata, and Peru,—being in all seventeen localities,—repeating the similar facts, hardly with variations. Against the Spaniards with their horses, lances, swords, and bloodhounds, the natives could oppose only their light spears and poisoned arrows. The victims would seek refuge in caves and mountain fastnesses, and if approached would kill themselves, as the easiest escape from wanton tortures. Las Casas says: “I one day saw four or five persons, of the highest rank, in Hispaniola, burned by a slow fire.” Occasionally, he tells us, a maddened Indian would kill a Spaniard, and then his death would be avenged by the massacre of a score or a hundred natives. Immediately upon the knowledge of the death of Isabella, in 1504, as if her humanity had been some restraint, the barbarous proceedings were greatly intensified. The Spaniards made the most reckless waste of the food of the natives. Las Casas says: “One Spaniard will consume in a day the food of three Indian families of ten persons each for a month.” He avows that when he wrote there were scarce two hundred natives left in St. John and Jamaica, where there had once been six hundred thousand. For reasons of caution or prudence—we can hardly say from fear, for never was there a more courageous champion—Las Casas suppresses the names of the greatest offenders. The following are specimens of his method: “Three merciless tyrants have invaded Florida, one after another, since 1510.” “A Spanish commander with a great number of soldiers entered Peru,” etc. “In the year 1514 a merciless governor, destitute of the least sentiment of pity or humanity, a cruel instrument of the wrath of God, pierced into the continent.” “The fore-mentioned governor,” etc. “The captain whose lot it was to travel into Guatemala did a world of mischief there.” “The first bishop that was sent into America imitated the conduct of the covetous governors in enslaving and spoiling.” “They call the countries they have got by their unjust and cruel wars their conquests.” “No tongue is capable of describing to the life all the horrid villanies perpetrated by these bloody-minded men. They seemed to be the declared enemies of mankind.” The more generous the presents in treasures which were made by some timid cacique to his spoilers, the more brutally was he dealt with, in the hope of extorting what he was suspected of having concealed. Las Casas stakes his veracity on the assertion: “I saw with my own eyes above six thousand children die in three or four months.”
To reinforce his own statements the Clerigo quotes letters from high authorities. One is a protest which the Bishop of St. Martha wrote in 1541 to the King of Spain, saying that “the Spaniards live there like devils, rather than Christians, violating all the laws of God and man.” Another is from Mark de Xlicia, a Franciscan friar, to the King, the General of his Order, who came with the first Spaniards into Peru, testifying from his eyesight to all enormities, in mutilations, cutting off the noses, ears, and hands of the natives, burning and tortures, and keeping famished dogs to chase them.