[1015] There is a variance in the dates assigned by historians for the visits of both Las Casas and his father to the Indians. Irving, following Navarrete, says that Antoine returned to Seville in 1498, having become rich (Columbus iii. 415). He also says that Llorente is incorrect in asserting that Bartholomew in his twenty-fourth year accompanied Columbus in his third voyage, in 1498, returning with him in 1500, as the young man was then at his studies at Salamanca. Irving says Bartholomew first went to Hispaniola with Ovando in 1502, at the age of about twenty-eight. I have allowed the dates to stand in the text as given by Llorente, assigning the earlier year for the first voyage of Las Casas to the New World as best according with the references in writings by his own pen to the period of his acquaintance with the scenes which he describes.

[1016] The administration of affairs in the Western colonies of Spain was committed by Ferdinand, in 1511, to a body composed chiefly of clergy and jurists, called “The Council for the Indies.” Its powers originally conferred by Ferdinand were afterward greatly enlarged by Charles V. These powers were full and supreme, and any information, petition, appeal, or matter of business concerning the Indies, though it had been first brought before the monarch, was referred by him for adjudication to the Council. This body had an almost absolute sway alike in matters civil and ecclesiastical, with supreme authority over all appointments and all concerns of government and trade. It was therefore in the power of the Council to overrule or qualify in many ways the will or purpose or measures of the sovereigns, which were really in favor of right or justice or humane proceedings in the affairs of the colonies. For it naturally came about that some of its members were personally and selfishly interested in the abuses and iniquities which it was their rightful function and their duty to withstand. At the head of the Council was a dignitary whose well-known character and qualities were utterly unfavorable for the rightful discharge of his high trust. This was Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, successively Bishop of Badajoz, Valencia, and Burgos, and constituted “Patriarch of the Indies.” He had full control of colonial affairs for thirty years, till near his death in 1547. He bore the repute among his associates of extreme worldliness and ambition, with none of the graces and virtues becoming the priestly office, the duties of which engaged but little of his time or regard. It is evident also that he was of an unscrupulous and malignant disposition. He was inimical to Columbus and Cortés from the start. He tried to hinder, and succeeded in delaying and embarrassing, the second westward voyage of the great admiral. (Irving’s Columbus, iii.; Appendix XXXIV.) He was a bitter opponent of Las Casas, even resorting to taunting insults of the apostle, and either openly or crookedly thwarting him in every stage and effort of his patient importunities to secure the intervention of the sovereigns in the protection of the natives. The explanation of this enmity is found in the fact that Fonseca himself was the owner of a repartimiento in Hispaniola, with a large number of native slaves.

[1017] There is an extended Note on Las Casas in Appendix XXVIII. of Irving’s Columbus. That author most effectively vindicates Las Casas from having first advised and been instrumental in the introduction of African slavery in the New World, giving the dates and the advisers and agents connected with that wrong previous to any word on the subject from Las Casas. The devoted missionary had been brought to acquiesce in the measure on the plausible plea stated in the text, acting from the purest spirit of benevolence, though under an erroneous judgment. Cardinal Ximenes had from the first opposed the project.

[1018] As will appear farther on in these pages, Las Casas stands justly chargeable with enormous exaggerations of the number or estimate of the victims of Spanish cruelty. But I have not met with a single case in any contemporary writer, nor in the challengers and opponents of his pleadings at the Court of Spain, in which his hideous portrayal of the forms and methods of that cruelty, its dreadful and revolting tortures and mutilations, have been brought under question. Mr. Prescott’s fascinating volumes have been often and sometimes very sharply censured, because in the glow of romance, chivalric daring, and heroic adventure in which he sets the achievements of the Spanish “Conquerors” of the New World he would seem to be somewhat lenient to their barbarities. In the second of his admirable works he refers as follows to this stricture upon him: “To American and English readers, acknowledging so different a moral standard from that of the sixteenth century, I may possibly be thought too indulgent to the errors of the Conquerors;” and he urges that while he has “not hesitated to expose in their strongest colors the excesses of the Conquerors, I have given them the benefit of such mitigating reflections as might be suggested by the circumstances and the period in which they lived” (Preface to the Conquest of Mexico).

It is true that scattered over all the ably-wrought pages of Mr. Prescott’s volumes are expressions of the sternest judgment and the most indignant condemnation passed upon the most signal enormities of these incarnate spoilers, who made a sport of their barbarity. But those who have most severely censured the author upon the matter now in view have done so under the conviction that cruelty unprovoked and unrelieved was so awfully dark and prevailing a feature in every stage and incident of the Spanish advance in America, that no glamour of adventure or chivalric deeds can in the least lighten or redeem it. The underlying ground of variance is in the objection to the use of the terms “Conquest” and “Conquerors,” as burdened with the relation of such a pitiful struggle between the overmastering power of the invaders and the abject helplessness of their victims.

As I am writing this note, my eye falls upon the following extract from a private letter written in 1847 by that eminent and highly revered divine, Dr. Orville Dewey, and just now put into print: “I have been reading Prescott’s Peru. What a fine accomplishment there is about it! And yet there is something wanting to me in the moral nerve. History should teach men how to estimate characters; it should be a teacher of morals; and I think it should make us shudder at the names of Cortez and Pizarro. But Prescott does not; he seems to have a kind of sympathy with these inhuman and perfidious adventurers, as if they were his heroes. It is too bad to talk of them as the soldiers of Christ; if it were said of the Devil, they would have better fitted the character” (Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. p. 190).

[1019] Juan Ginez de Sepulveda, distinguished both as a theologian and an historian, was born near Cordova in 1490, and died in 1573. He was of a noble but impoverished family. He availed himself of his opportunities for obtaining the best education of his time in the universities of Spain and Italy, and acquired an eminent reputation as a scholar and a disputant,—not, however, for any elevation of principles or nobleness of thought. In 1536 he was appointed by Charles V. his historiographer, and put in charge of his son Philip. Living at Court, he had the repute of being crooked and unscrupulous, his influence not being given on the side of rectitude and progressive views. His writings concerning men and public affairs give evidence of the faults imputed to him. He was vehement, intolerant, and dogmatic. He justified the most extreme absolutism in the exercise of the royal prerogative, and the lawfulness and even the expediency of aggressive wars simply for the glory of the State. Melchior Cano and Antonio Ramirez, as well as Las Casas, entered into antagonism and controversy with his avowed principles. One of his works, entitled Democrates Secundus, seu de justis belli causis, may be pronounced almost brutal in the license which it allowed in the stratagems and vengefulness of warfare. It was condemned by the universities of Alcala and Salamanca. He was a voluminous author of works of history, philosophy, and theology, and was admitted to be a fine and able writer. Erasmus pronounced him the Spanish Livy. The disputation between him and Las Casas took place before Charles in 1550. The monarch was very much under his influence, and seems to some extent to have sided with him in some of his views and principles. Sepulveda was one of the very few persons whom the monarch admitted to interviews and intimacy in his retirement to the Monastery at Yuste.

It was this formidable opponent—a personal enemy also in jealousy and malignity—whom Las Casas confronted with such boldness and earnestness of protest before the Court and Council. It was evidently the aim of Sepulveda to involve the advocate of the Indians in some disloyal or heretical questioning of the prerogatives of monarch or pope. It seemed at one time as if the noble pleader for equity and humanity would come under the clutch of the Holy Office, then exercising its new-born vigor upon all who could be brought under inquisition for constructive or latent heretical proclivities. For Las Casas, though true to his priestly vows, made frequent and bold utterances of what certainly, in his time, were advanced views and principles.

[1020] Juan Antonio Llorente, eminent as a writer and historian, both in Spanish and French, was born near Calahorra, Aragon, in 1756, and died at Madrid in 1823. He received the tonsure when fourteen years of age, and was ordained priest at Saragossa in 1779. He was of a vigorous, inquisitive, and liberal spirit, giving free range to his mind, and turning his wide study and deep investigations to the account of his enlargement and emancipation from the limitations of his age and associates. He tells us that in 1784 he had abandoned all ultramontane doctrines, and all the ingenuities and perplexities of scholasticism. His liberalism ran into rationalism. His secret or more or less avowed alienation from the prejudices and obligations of the priestly order, while it by no means made his position a singular or even an embarrassing one under the influences and surroundings of his time, does at least leave us perplexed to account for the confidence with which functions and high ecclesiastical trusts were committed to and exercised by him. He was even made Secretary-General of the Inquisition, and was thus put in charge of the enormous mass of records, with all their dark secrets, belonging to its whole history and processes. This charge he retained for a time after the Inquisition was abolished in 1809. It was thus by a singular felicity of opportunity that those terrible archives should have been in the care, and subject to the free and intelligent use, of a man best qualified of all others to tell the world their contents, and afterward prompted and at liberty to do so from subsequent changes in his own opinions and relations. To this the world is indebted for a History of the Inquisition, the fidelity and sufficiency of which satisfy all candid judgments. He was restive in spirit, provoked strong opposition, and was thus finally deprived of his office. After performing a variety of services not clerical, and moving from place to place, he went to Paris, where, in 1817-1818, he courageously published the above-mentioned History. He was interdicted the exercise of clerical functions. In 1822, the same year in which he published his Biography and French translation of the principal works of Las Casas, he published also his Political Portraits of the Popes. For this he was ordered to quit Paris,—a deep disappointment to him, causing chagrin and heavy depression. He found refuge in Madrid, where he died in the following year.

[1021] Mr. Ticknor, however, says that these two treatises “are not absolutely proved” to be by Las Casas.—History of Spanish Literature, i. 566.