In a speech upon West-Indian affairs, which Lord Brougham delivered in the House of Commons in 1823, there is some account of the religious instruction of the slaves as conducted by the curates. He alludes in particular to the testimony of a worthy curate, who stated that he had been twenty or thirty years among the negroes, "and that no single instance of conversion to Christianity had taken place during that time,--all his efforts to gain new proselytes among the negroes had been in vain; all of a sudden, however, light had broken in upon their darkness so suddenly that between five and six thousand negroes had been baptized in a few days. I confess I was at first much surprised at this statement. I knew not how to comprehend it; but all of a sudden light broke in upon my darkness also. I found that there was a clue to this most surprising story, and that these wonderful conversions were brought about, not by a miracle, as the good man seems himself to have really imagined, and would almost make us believe, but by a premium of a dollar a head paid to this worthy curate for each slave that he baptized!"
We return to Las Casas once more, to state precisely his complicity in the introduction of the race whose sorrows have been so fearfully avenged by Nature in every part of the New World. Many of the writers who have treated of these transactions, as Robertson, for instance, have accused Las Casas, on the strength of a passage in Herrera, of having originated the idea that the blacks could be profitably substituted for the Indians. It is supposed, that, in his eagerness to save the Indians from destruction, he sought also to save colonial interests, by procuring still a supply of labor from a hardier and less interesting race. Thus his indignation at the rapid extinction of the Indians appears sentimental; to indulge his fancy for an amiable race, he was willing to subject another, with which he had no graceful associations, to the same liabilities. We have seen, however, that the practice of carrying negroes to Hayti was already established, seven years before Las Casas suggests his policy. The passage from Herrera has been misunderstood, as Llorente, Schoelcher, the Abbé Grégoire, and others, conclusively show. That historian says that Las Casa, disheartened by the difficulties which he met from the colonists and their political and ecclesiastical friends at home, had recourse to a new expedient, to solicit leave for the Spaniards to trade in negroes, "in order that their labor on the plantations and in the mines might render that of the natives less severe." This proposition, made in 1517, has been wrongly supposed to signalize the first introduction of blacks into America. Nor was Las Casas the first to make this proposition; for another passage of Herrera discloses that three priests of St. Jerome, who had been despatched to the colony by Cardinal Ximenes, for the experiment of managing it by a Board instead of by a Governor, recommended in 1516 that negroes should be sent out to stock the plantations, in order to diminish the forced labor of the natives. This was a concession by the Jeromites to the public opinion which Las Casas had created.[18] Negroes already existed there; the priests perceived their value, and that the introduction of a greater number would both improve the colony and diminish the anti-slavery agitation of the Dominicans. The next year this project was taken up by Las Casas, borrowed from the Jeromites as the only alternative to preserve a colony, to relieve the natives, and to keep the people interested in the wholesome reforms which he was continually urging upon the colonial administration.
He had no opportunity to become acquainted with the evils of negro slavery, but it is strange that he did not anticipate them. It was taken for granted by him that the blacks were enslaved in Africa, and he accepted too readily the popular idea that their lot was improved by transferring them from barbarous to Christian masters. Their number was so small in Hayti, and the island fell so suddenly into decay, that no formidable oppression of them occurred during his lifetime to replace his recollections of the horrors of Indian servitude. His plan did not take root, but it was remembered. Thus the single error of a noble man, committed in the fulness of his Christian aspirations, and at the very moment when he was representing to a generation of hard and avaricious men the divine charity, betrayed their victims to all the nations that sought wealth and luxury in the West, and pointed out how they were to be obtained. His compromise has the fatal history of all compromises which secure to the present a brief advantage, whose fearful accumulation of interest the future must disgrace, exhaust, and cripple itself to pay.
In 1519 the colony had already begun to decay, though all the external marks of luxury and splendor were still maintained. That was the date of a famous insurrection of the remnant of Indians, who occupied the mountains, and defended themselves for thirteen years against all the efforts of the Spaniards to reduce them. It was hardly worth while to undertake their subjection. Adventurers and emigrants were already leaving San Domingo to its fate, attracted to different spots of the Terra Firma, to Mexico and Peru, by the reported treasures. That portion of the colony which had engaged in agriculture found Indians scarce and negroes expensive. There was no longer any object in fitting out expeditions to reinforce the colony, and repair the waste which it was beginning to suffer from desertion and disease. The war with the natives was ignominiously ended by Charles V. in 1533, who found that the colony was growing too poor to pay for it. He despatched a letter to the cacique who had organized this desperate and prolonged resistance, flattered him by the designation of Dom Henri[19] and profuse expressions of admiration, sent a Spanish general to treat with him, and to assign him a district to inhabit with his followers. Dom Henri thankfully accepted this pacification, and soon after received Las Casas himself, who had been commissioned to assure the sole surviving cacique and representative of two million natives that Spain was their friend! At last the Protector of the Indians has the satisfaction of meeting them with authoritative messages of peace. And this was the first salutation of Dom Henri, after his forty years' experience of Spanish probity, and thirteen years of struggle for existence: "During all this war, I have not failed a day to offer up my prayers, I have fasted strictly every Friday, I have watched with care over the morals and the conduct of my subjects, I have taken measures everywhere to prevent all profligate intercourse between the sexes";[20] thus nobly trying to recommend himself to the good Bishop, who had always believed in their capacity for temporal and spiritual elevation. He retired to a place named Boya, a dozen leagues from the capital. All the Indians who could prove their descent from the original inhabitants of the island were allowed to follow him. A few of them still remained in 1750; their number was only four thousand when Dom Henri led them away from Spanish rule to die out undisturbed.[21]
After its passionate and blood-thirsty life, the colony was sinking to sleep, not from satiety nor exhaustion, for the same race was holding its orgies in other countries, but from inability to gather fuel for its excesses. A long list of insignificant governors is the history of the island for another century. They did nothing to improve the condition of the inhabitants, whose distress was sometimes severe; but they continued to embellish the capital, which Oviedo described to Charles V. as rivalling in solidity and beauty any city in Spain. He wrote in 1538, and possessed a beautiful residence in the plain of St. John. The private houses were built substantially, in several stories, of stone, embowered in charming gardens; the public edifices, including the cathedral, displayed all the strength and rich ornamentation which had been common for a hundred years in the Spanish cities. There were several well-endowed convents, and a fine hospital. When Sir Francis Drake took possession of San Domingo in 1586, he attempted to induce the inhabitants, who had fled into the country, to pay an enormous ransom for their city, by threatening to destroy a number of fine houses every day till it was paid. He undertook the task, but found that his soldiers were scarcely able to demolish more than one a day, and he eventually left the city not materially damaged.
Antonio Herrera, in his "Description of the West Indies," gives the number of inhabitants of the city in 1530 as six hundred, and says that there were fourteen thousand Castilians, many of them nobles, who carried on the different interests of the colony. He has a list of seventeen towns, with brief descriptions of them.
It appears by this that the island had speedily recovered from the ill reports of the early emigrants, many of whom returned to Spain broken in purse and person, with excesses of passion and climate chronicled in their livid faces[22]. There was a period when everybody who could get away from the colony left it in disgust, and with the expectation that it would soon become extinct. It was to prevent such a catastrophe, which would have effectually terminated the explorations of Columbus, that he proposed to the Government, in 1496, to commute the punishments of all criminals and large debtors who were at the time in prison to a perpetual banishment to the island, persons convicted of treason or heresy being alone excepted. The advice was instantly adopted, without a thought of the consequences of reinforcing the malignant ambition of the colony with such elements. Persons capitally convicted were to serve two years without wages; all others were to serve on the same terms for one year; and they went about with the ingenious clog of a threat of arrest for the old crimes in case they returned to Europe.
The Government improved upon the hint of Columbus by decreeing that all the courts in Spain should condemn to the mines a portion of the criminals who would in the course of nature have gone to the galleys.[23] Thus a new country, which invited the benign organization of law and religion, and held out to pure spirits an opportunity richer than all its crops and mines, was poisoned in its cradle. What wonder that its vigor became the aimless gestures of madness, that a bloated habit simulated health, and that decrepitude suddenly fell upon the uneasy life?
At the same time it was expressly forbidden to all commanders of caravels to receive on board any person who was not a born subject of the crown of Castile. This was conceived in the exclusive colonial policy of the time. It was a grotesque idea to preserve nationality by insisting that even criminals must respect the Spanish birthright. History counts the fitful pulses of this bluest blood of Europe, and hesitates to declare that such emigrants misrepresented the mother-country.
But after the middle of the sixteenth century, the inhabitants were pillaged by the public enemies of the mother-country, and by private adventurers of all lands. And yet, in 1587, the year after Drake's expedition, their fleet carried home 48 quintals of cassia, 50 of sarsaparilla, 134 of logwood, 893 chests of sugar, each weighing 200 pounds, and 350,444 hides of every kind. There is no account of indigo, and the cultivation of cotton had not commenced. Coffee was first introduced at Martinique during the reign of Louis XIV., who died in 1715. Its cultivation was not commenced in Jamaica till 1725.[24]