The story of the successive devastation of the Reductions is long. The Jesuits were compelled to retreat southward from one place to another with their wretched neophytes. The magistrates and governors gave them no aid, for they entertained no good-will towards them; and they were, even in the central ground between the Parana and Uruguay, compelled to train their people to arms, and defend themselves. It is not only a long but sorrowful recital, both of the injuries received from the Paulistas and from their own countrymen—we must therefore pass it over, and merely notice the manner of their final expulsion.
The court of Spain ordered the banishment of the Jesuits, and the authorities, only too happy to execute the order, surrounded their colleges in the night with soldiers, seized the persons of the missionaries,—their libraries and manuscripts, which in time became destroyed, an irreparable loss to historical literature. Old men in their beds even were not suffered to remain and die in peace, but were compelled to accompany the rest, till they died on their mules in the immense journey from some of the settlements, and across the wildest mountains to the sea. The words of Mr. Southey may well close this strange and melancholy history.
“Bucarelli shipped off the Jesuits of La Plata, Tucuman, and Paraguay, one hundred and fifty-five in number, before he attacked the Reductions. This part of the business he chose to perform in person; and the precautions which he took for arresting seventy-eight defenceless missionaries, will be regarded with contempt, or with indignation, as they may be supposed to have proceeded from ignorance of the real state of things, or from fear, basely affected for the purpose of courting favour by countenancing successful calumnies. He had previously sent for all the Caciques and Corregidores to Buenos Ayres, and persuaded them that the king was about to make a great change for their advantage. Two hundred soldiers from Paraguay were ordered to guard the pass of the Tebiquary; two hundred Corrientines to take post in the vicinity of St. Miguel; and he defended the Uruguay with threescore dragoons, and three companies of grenadiers. They landed at the Falls; one detachment proceeded to join the Paraguay party, and seize the Parana Jesuits; another incorporated itself with the Corrientines, and marched against those on the eastern side of the Uruguay; and the Viceroy himself advanced upon Yapeyen, and those which lay between the two rivers. The Reductions were peaceably delivered up. The Jesuits, without a murmur, followed their brethren into banishment; and Bucarelli was vile enough to take credit in his dispatches for the address with which he had so happily performed a dangerous service; and to seek favour by loading the persecuted Company with charges of the grossest and foulest calumnies.”
The American Jesuits were sent from Cadiz to Italy, where Faenza and Ravenna were assigned for their places of abode. Most of the Paraguay brethren settled at Faenza. There they employed the melancholy hours of age and exile in preserving, as far as they could from memory alone (for they had been deprived of all their papers), the knowledge which they had so painfully acquired of strange countries, strange manners, savage languages, and savage man. The Company originated in extravagance and madness; in its progress it was supported and aggrandized by fraud and falsehood; and its history is stained by actions of the darkest dye. But it fell with honour. No men ever behaved with greater equanimity, under undeserved disgrace, than the last of the Jesuits; and the extinction of the order was a heavy loss to literature, a great evil to the Catholic world, and an irreparable injury to the tribes of South America.
“Bucarelli replaced the exiled missionaries by priests from the different Mendicant orders; but the temporal authority was not vested in their hands—this was vested in lay-administrators.... Here ended the prosperity of these celebrated communities—here ended the tranquillity and welfare of the Guaranies. The administrators, hungry ruffians from the Plata, or fresh from Spain, neither knew the language nor had patience to acquire it. It sufficed for them that they could make their commands intelligible by the whip. The priests had no authority to check the enormities of these wretches; nor were they always irreproachable themselves. A year had scarce elapsed before the Viceroy discovered that the Guaranies, for the sake of escaping from this intolerable state of oppression, were beginning to emigrate into the Portuguese territories, and actually soliciting protection from their old enemies. Upon the first alarm of so unexpected an occurrence, Bucarelli displaced all the administrators; but the new administrators were as brutal and rapacious as their predecessors; the governor was presently involved in a violent struggle with the priests, touching their respective powers, and the confusion which ensued, evinced how wisely the Jesuits had acted in combining the spiritual and temporal authorities.... The Viceroy then instituted a new form of administration. The Indians were declared exempt from all personal service, not subject to the Encomienda system, and entitled to possess property—a right of which, Bucarelli said, they had been deprived by the Jesuits; for this governor affected to emancipate the Guaranies, and talked of placing them under the safeguard of the law, and purifying the Reductions from tyranny! They were to labour for the community under the direction of the administrators; and as an encouragement to industry, the Reductions were opened to traders during the months of February, March, and April. The end of all this was, that compulsory and cruel labour left the Indians neither time nor inclination—neither heart nor strength—to labour for themselves. The arts which the Jesuits had introduced, were neglected and forgotten; their gardens lay waste; their looms fell to pieces; and in these communities, where the inhabitants for many generations had enjoyed a greater exemption from physical and moral evil than any other inhabitants of the globe, the people were now made vicious and miserable. Their only alternative was to remain, and to be treated like slaves, or fly to the woods, and take their chance as savages.”
Here we must close our review of the Spaniards in the New World. Our narrative has been necessarily brief and rapid, for the history of their crimes extends over a vast continent, and through three centuries; and would, related at length, fill a hundred volumes. We have found them, however, everywhere the same—cruel, treacherous, and regardless of the feelings of humanity and the sense of justice. They have wreaked alike their vengeance on the natives of every country they have entered, and on those of their own race who dared to espouse the cause of the sufferers. This spirit continued to the last. In all their colonies, the natives, whether of Indian blood, or the Creoles descended of their own, were carefully excluded from the direction of their own affairs, and the emoluments of office. Spaniards from the mother country were sent over in rapacious swarms, to fatten on the vitals of these vast states, and return when they had sucked their fill. The retribution has followed; and Spain has not now left a single foot of all these countries which she has drenched in the blood, and filled with the groans of their native children.
Mr. Ward, in his “Mexico in 1827,” says that in 1803, the number of Indians remaining in Mexico was two millions and a half; but that their history is everywhere a blank. Some have become habituated to civil life, and are excellent artizans, but the greater portion are totally neglected. That, during the Revolution, the sense of the injuries which the race had received from the Spaniards, and which seemed to have slumbered in their bosoms for three centuries, blazed up and shewed itself in the eager and burning enthusiasm with which they flocked to the revolutionary standard to throw off the yoke of their ancient oppressors. He adds, “Whatever may be the advantages which they may derive from the recent changes, and the nature of these time alone can determine, the fruits of the introduction of boasted civilization into the New World have been hitherto bitter indeed. Throughout America the Indian race has been sacrificed; nor can I discover that in New Spain any one step has been taken for their improvement. In the neighbourhood of the capital nothing can be more wretched than their appearance; and although under a republican form of government, they must enjoy, in theory at least, an equality of rights with every other class of citizens, they seemed practically, at the period of my first visit, to be under the orders of every one, whether officer, soldier, churchman, or civilian, who chose to honour them with a command.”—vol. ii. p. 215.