Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1875) is a painting by Félix Parra, and that was exhibited at the Centennial International Exposition of Philadelphia in 1876, shows his subject as a "Saviour" of the Indians. Félix Parra Hernández (1845 – 1919) was a Mexican painter who served as an inspiration for the later Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco who were particularly influenced by his images of the indigenous people of the Americas as the victims of conquest.
The Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, the first official World's Fair in the United States, was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from May 10 to November 10, 1876, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.
The Declaration justified the independence of the United States by listing 27 colonial grievances against King George III and by asserting certain natural and legal rights, including a right of revolution. Its original purpose was to announce independence, and references to the text of the Declaration were few in the following years. Abraham Lincoln made it the centerpiece of his policies and his rhetoric, as in the Gettysburg Address of 1863. Since then, it has become a well-known statement on human rights, particularly its second sentence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.This has been called "one of the best-known sentences in the English language", containing "the most potent and consequential words in American history". The passage came to represent a moral standard to which the United States should strive. This view was notably promoted by Lincoln, who considered the Declaration to be the foundation of his political philosophy and argued that it is a statement of principles through which the United States Constitution should be interpreted.
Memorial Hall is a Beaux-Arts style building in the Centennial District of West Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Built as the art gallery for the 1876 Centennial Exposition, it is the only major structure from that exhibition to survive.
Construction of the hall began on 6 July 1874 and was completed for the opening ceremonies on 10 May 1876. President Ulysses S. Grant dedicated the building with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Memorial Hall was designed to house the Centennial Exposition's art exhibits. The exposition received so many art contributions that a separate annex was built to house them all.
For Mexico, which was emerging from a long period of internal disorder and foreign invasions, the exposition was an opportunity for the Liberal regime of President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada to garner international recognition of his regime and to counter anti-Mexican public opinion in the United States. Prominent Mexican painters including José María Velasco, José Obregón, and Santiago Rebull exhibited there.
Félix Parra's painting of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas certainly fits well with the centennial memory of the declaration that;
"all men are created equal"as his subject Bartolomé de las Casas (c. 1484 – 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish colonist who has been considered, by some, as an early advocate for a concept of universal human rights and natural law, being among the first Europeans to develop a view of unity among humankind, stating that:
"All people of the world are humans"and that they had a natural right to liberty – a combination of Thomist rights philosophy with Augustinian political theology.
He acted as both an historian and social reformer before becoming a Dominican friar. He was appointed as the first president Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians". His extensive writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West Indies. He described the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples.
Arriving as one of the first Spanish (and European) settlers in the Americas, Las Casas initially participated in, but eventually felt compelled to oppose the abuses committed by colonists against the Native Americans. As a result, in 1515 he gave up his Indian slaves and encomienda, and advocated, before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on behalf of rights for the natives.
In his early writings, he advocated the use of African slaves instead of Natives in the West Indian colonies. In the 20th century, he has been criticized for being among the founders of the Atlantic slave trade. Later in life, he retracted this position, as he regarded both forms of slavery as equally wrong.
In 1522, he tried to launch a new kind of peaceful colonialism on the coast of Venezuela, but this venture failed. Las Casas entered the Dominican Order and became a friar, leaving public life for a decade. He traveled to Central America, acting as a missionary among the Maya of Guatemala and participating in debates among colonial churchmen about how best to bring the natives to the Christian faith.
Traveling back to Spain to recruit more missionaries, he continued lobbying for the abolition of the encomienda, gaining an important victory by the passage of the New Laws in 1542. He was appointed Bishop of Chiapas, but served only for a short time before he was forced to return to Spain because of resistance to the New Laws by the encomenderos, and conflicts with Spanish settlers because of his pro-Indian policies and activist religious stance.
He served in the Spanish court for the remainder of his life; there he held great influence over Indies-related issues. In 1550, he participated in the Valladolid debate, in which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued that the Indians were less than human and required Spanish masters in order to become civilized. Las Casas maintained that they were fully human and that forcefully subjugating them was unjustifiable.
Bartolomé de las Casas spent 50 years of his life actively fighting slavery and the colonial abuse of indigenous peoples, especially by trying to convince the Spanish court to adopt a more humane policy of colonization. Unlike other priests who sought to destroy the indigenous peoples' native books and writings, he strictly opposed this action. Although he failed to save the indigenous peoples of the Western Indies, his efforts did result in improvement of the legal status of the natives, and in an increased colonial focus on the ethics of colonialism. Las Casas is often considered to be one of the first advocates for a universal conception of human dignity (later human rights).
Meanwhile . . .
Nicolás de Ovando was Governor of the Indies (Hispaniola) from 1502 until 1509, sent by the Spanish crown to investigate the administration of Francisco de Bobadilla and re-establish order. The backstory is that Santo Domingo, officially Captaincy General of Santo Domingo was the first colony established in the New World under Spain. The island was named "La Española" (Hispaniola) by Christopher Columbus. When Columbus departed on another exploration, Francisco de Bobadilla became governor. Meanwhile, at the Spanish Court as Commander of Lares de Guahaba Ovando had become a favorite of the Spanish Catholic Monarchs, particularly of the pious Queen Isabella I. Consequently, in response to complaints from Christopher Columbus and others about Francisco de Bobadilla the Spanish monarch on September 3, 1501, appointed Ovando to replace Bobadilla.
Arriving in Hispaniola in 1502, Nicolás de Ovando replaced de Bobadilla as governor, with an ambitious plan to expand Spanish influence in the region. It was he who dealt most brutally with the Taíno people. Ovando had become the third Governor of the Indies, the Islands, and the Province of Tierra Firme, or the Mainland province, in other words, the Spanish main.
He had sailed from Spain with a fleet of thirty ships, in the largest fleet that had ever sailed to the New World. These thirty ships carried around 2,500 colonists, but unlike Columbus's earlier voyages, this group of colonists had been deliberately selected to represent an organized cross-section of Spanish society. The Spanish Crown intended to develop the West Indies economically and thereby expand Spanish political, religious, and administrative influence in the region. Along with Ovando came Francisco Pizarro, who would later explore western South America and conquer the Inca Empire. Hernán Cortés, a family acquaintance and distant relative, was supposed to sail to the Americas in this expedition, but was prevented from making the journey by an injury he sustained while hurriedly escaping from the bedroom of a married woman of Medellín.
Another ship carried Bartolomé de las Casas, who became known much later as the 'Protector of the Indians' for exposing atrocities committed by Ovando and his subordinates. He had arrived in Hispaniola with his father, having come to the island to become a hacendado and slave owner, receiving a piece of land in the province of Cibao. He participated in slave raids and military expeditions against the native Taíno population of Hispaniola, but, in the end, chose to become a prime witness testifying to these atrocities.
When Ovando arrived in Hispaniola in 1502, he found the once-peaceful natives in revolt. Ovando and his subordinates ruthlessly suppressed this rebellion through a series of bloody campaigns, including the Jaragua Massacre and Higüey Massacre.
Ovando's administration in Hispaniola became notorious for its cruelty toward the native Taíno. Estimates of the Taino population at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards in 1492 vary, with Anderson Córdova giving a maximum of 500,000 people inhabiting the island. By the 1507 census, according to Bartolomé de las Casas battlefield slaughter, enslavement and disease had reduced the native population to 60,000 people, and the decline continued. By 1535, only a few dozen were still alive.
After the conquests made by his lieutenants including Juan Ponce de León and Juan de Esquivel, Ovando founded several cities on Hispaniola. He also developed the mining industry, introduced the cultivation of sugar cane with plants imported from the Canary Islands, and commissioned expeditions of discovery and conquest throughout the Caribbean. Ovando allowed Spanish settlers to use the natives in forced labor, to provide food for the colonists as well as ships returning to Spain. Ovando also allowed the Taíno to be exploited for their labor, and hundreds of thousands died while forced to extract gold from the nearby mines.
During his time as Governor Ovando had ordered the first importation of Spanish-speaking black slaves into the Americas. Many Spanish aristocrats ordered slaves to work as servants in their homes. However, most slaves were sent to work in the sugar cane fields, which produced the valuable cash crop.
In 1501 the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, allowed the colonists of the Caribbean to import African slaves. This permission was granted in the form of the Asiento, the official contract for trading in slaves in the vast Spanish territories was a major engine of the Atlantic slave trade. The asiento was the license issued by the Spanish crown, by which a set of merchants received the monopoly on a trade route or product. They were included in some peace treaties. An example of it was the payment of a fee, granting legal permission to sell a fixed number of enslaved Africans in the Spanish colonies. They were usually sold to foreigners, mainly Portuguese. They were also considered a tangible asset, comparable to tax farming, and a source of profit for the Spanish crown.
In August 1518, King Charles I authorized Spain to ship enslaved people directly from Africa to the Americas.
The edict marked a new phase in the transatlantic slave trade in which the numbers of enslaved people brought directly to the Americas—without going through a European port first—rose dramatically.
The original impetus to import enslaved Africans was to relieve the indigenous inhabitants of the colonies from the labor demands of the Spanish colonists. Dutch merchants became involved in the slave trade. In 1713, the British were awarded the right to the asiento in the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. The British government passed its rights to the South Sea Company. The British asiento ended with the 1750 Treaty of Madrid between Great Britain and Spain.
Opponents of this slave trade cited the weak Christian faith of the Africans and their penchant for escaping to the mountains. Proponents argued that the rapid decline of the Native American population required a consistent supply of reliable workers. In addition, the first years of Spanish presence in the Americas were marked by an outbreak of a tropical epidemic influenza that decimated both the native and Spanish populations. It was argued that the population would never be large enough to carry out all the labour needed to assure the economic viability of the Spanish colonies. In 1501, a first shipment of African-born slaves was sent to the West Indies (Hispaniola). The Spaniards chiefly purchased the slaves from the Portuguese and English traders in Africa. They did not engage directly in the trade and overall imported fewer slaves to the New World than did the Portuguese, British, or French.
The Spanish used enslaved Africans as workers to develop their agriculture and settlements. They also used them in defense of the colonies. Originally the Crown relied on private initiative and resources to protect colonial shipping and settlements. In some cases, colonists hired out their slaves or donated them for this purpose; in other cases, the Crown bought the slaves. Building forts and defense works relied on slave labor, but most were privately owned.
The slave populations were extremely low on Cuba and Puerto Rico until the 1760s, when the British took Havana, Cuba, in 1762. After that, the British imported more than 10,000 slaves to Havana, a number that would have taken 20 years to import on other islands. They used it as a base to supply the Caribbean and the lower Thirteen Colonies. This change is almost directly related to the opening of Spanish slave trade to other powers in the 18th century. Spain and Great Britain made a contract in 1713 by which the British would provide the slaves. The Spanish outlawed its own slave trade of Africans.
While historians have studied the production of sugar on plantations by enslaved workers in nineteenth-century Cuba, they have sometimes overlooked the crucial role of the Spanish state before the 1760s. Cuba ultimately developed two distinct but interrelated sources using enslaved labor, which converged at the end of the eighteenth century. The first of these sectors was urban and was directed in large measure by the needs of the Spanish colonial state, reaching its height in the 1760s. As of 1778, it was reported by Thomas Kitchin that "about 52,000 slaves" were being brought from Africa to the West Indies by Europeans, with approximately 4,000 being brought by the Spanish.
The second sector, which flourished after 1790, was rural and was directed by private slaveholders/planters involved in the production of export agricultural commodities, especially sugar. After 1763, the scale and urgency of defense projects led the state to deploy many of its enslaved workers in ways that were to anticipate the intense work regimes on sugar plantations in the nineteenth century. Another important group of workers enslaved by the Spanish colonial state in the late eighteenth century were the king's laborers, who worked on the city's fortifications.
The Spanish colonies were late to exploit slave labor in the production of sugarcane, particularly on Cuba. The Spanish colonies in the Caribbean were among the last to abolish slavery. While the British colonies abolished slavery completely by 1834, Spain abolished slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1886. On the mainland of Central and South America, Spain ended African slavery in the eighteenth century. Peru was one of the countries that revived the institution for some decades after declaring independence from Spain in the early 19th century.
Las Casas conversion?
In September 1510, a group of Dominican friars arrived in Santo Domingo led by Pedro de Córdoba; appalled by the injustices they saw committed by the slaveowners against the Indians, they decided to deny slave owners the right to confession.
Las Casas was among those denied confession for this reason. In December 1511, a Dominican preacher Fray Antonio de Montesinos preached a fiery sermon that implicated the colonists in the genocide of the native peoples. He is said to have preached:
"Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dealt quietly and peacefully on their own lands? Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before. Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day."Las Casas himself argued against the Dominicans in favour of the justice of the encomienda. The colonists, led by Diego Columbus, dispatched a complaint against the Dominicans to the King, and the Dominicans were recalled from Hispaniola.
In 1513, as a chaplain, Las Casas participated in Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar's and Pánfilo de Narváez' conquest of Cuba. He participated in campaigns in Bayamo and Camagüey and in the massacre of Hatuey.
Las Casas witnessed many atrocities committed by Spaniards against the native Ciboney and Guanahatabey peoples. He later wrote: "I saw here cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see." Las Casas and his friend Pablo de la Rentería were awarded a joint encomienda which was rich in gold and slaves, located on the Arimao River close to Cienfuegos. During the next years, he divided his time between being a colonist and his duties as an ordained priest.
In 1514, Las Casas was studying a passage in the book Ecclesiasticus
for a Pentecost sermon and pondering its meaning:
"If one sacrifices from what has been wrongfully obtained, the offering is blemished; the gifts of the lawless are not acceptable. ... Like one who kills a son before his father's eyes is the man who offers sacrifice from the property of the poor. The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a man of blood." 34:18–22Las Casas was finally convinced that all the actions of the Spanish in the New World had been illegal and that they constituted a great injustice. He made up his mind to give up his slaves and encomienda, and started to preach that other colonists should do the same. When his preaching met with resistance, he realized that he would have to go to Spain to fight there against the enslavement and abuse of the native people. Aided by Pedro de Córdoba and accompanied by Antonio de Montesinos, he left for Spain in September 1515, arriving in Seville in November.
Protector of the Indians?
Arriving in Seville in November 1515, Bartolomé de las Casas had made the long sea voyage from Santo Domingo to Spain because he realized that it was there that he might be more effective in his fight against the enslavement and abuse of the native people in the Spanish "New World".
Having given up his own slaves and encomienda, he arrived with the idea of convincing the King to end the encomienda system. Encomienda was a Spanish labour system that rewarded conquerors with the labour of particular groups of subject people. It was first established in Spain following the Christian conquest of Muslim territories. It was applied on a much larger scale during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Philippines. Conquered peoples were considered vassals of the Spanish monarch. It was the Spanish Crown that awarded an encomienda as a grant to a particular individual, and in the conquest era of the sixteenth century, theses grants were considered to be a monopoly controlling the slave labour of particular groups of Indians (indigenous peoples), held in perpetuity by the grant holder, the encomendero, and his descendants.
Hi plan was easier thought than executed, as most of the people who were in positions of power were themselves either encomenderos or otherwise profiting from the influx of wealth from the Indies. Nevertheless, he put his faith in his coming audience with the king, but it never came, for King Ferdinand died on January 25, 1516. The regency of Castile passed on to Ximenez Cisneros and Adrian of Utrecht who were guardians for the under-age Prince Charles. Las Casas was resolved to see Prince Charles who resided in Flanders, but on his way there he passed Madrid and delivered to the regents a written account of the situation in the Indies and his proposed remedies. This was his "Memorial de Remedios para Las Indias" of 1516.
In this early work, Las Casas advocated importing Black slaves from Africa to relieve the suffering Indians, a stance he later retracted, becoming an advocate for the Africans in the colonies as well.
This shows that Las Casas's first concern was not to end slavery as an institution, but to end the physical abuse and suffering of the Indians. In keeping with the legal and moral doctrine of the time Las Casas believed that slavery could be justified if it was the result of Just War, and at the time he assumed that the enslavement of Africans was justified.
Worried by the visions that Las Casas had drawn up of the situation in the Indies, Cardinal Cisneros decided to send a group of Hieronymite monks to take over the government of the islands. Three Hieronymite monks, Luis de Figueroa, Bernardino de Manzanedo and Alonso de Santo Domingo, were selected as commissioners to take over the authority of the Indies. Las Casas had a considerable part in selecting them and writing the instructions under which their new government would be instated, largely based on Las Casas's memorial.
Las Casas himself was granted the official title of "Protector of the Indians", and given a yearly salary of one hundred pesos. In this new office Las Casas was expected to serve as an advisor to the new governors with regard to Indian issues, to speak the case of the Indians in court and send reports back to Spain.
Las Casas and the commissioners traveled to Santo Domingo on separate ships, and Las Casas arrived two weeks later than the Hieronimytes. During this time the Hieronimytes had time to form a more pragmatic view of the situation than the one advocated by Las Casas; their position was precarious as every encomendero on the Islands was fiercely against any attempts to curtail their use of native labour. Consequently, the commissioners were unable to take any radical steps towards improving the situation of the natives. They did revoke some encomiendas from Spaniards, especially those who were living in Spain and not on the islands themselves; they even repossessed the encomienda of Fonseca, the Bishop of Burgos. They also carried out an inquiry into the Indian question at which all the encomenderos asserted that the Indians were quite incapable of living freely without their supervision. Las Casas was disappointed and infuriated. When he accused the Hieronymites of being complicit in kidnapping Indians, the relationship between Las Casas and the commissioners broke down.
Las Casas had become a hated figure by Spaniards all over the islands, and he had to seek refuge in the Dominican monastery. The Dominicans had been the first to indict the encomenderos, and they continued to chastise them and refuse the absolution of confession to slave owners, and even stated that priests who took their confession were committing a mortal sin. In May 1517, Las Casas was forced to travel back to Spain to denounce to the regent the failure of the Hieronymite reforms.
Las Casas suggested a plan where the encomienda would be abolished and Indians would be congregated into self-governing townships to become tribute-paying vassals of the king.
He still suggested that the loss of Indian labour for the colonists could be replaced by allowing importation of African slaves.
A new kind of sustainable colonization?
Another important part of the plan was to introduce a new kind of sustainable colonization, and Las Casas advocated supporting the migration of Spanish peasants to the Indies where they would introduce small-scale farming and agriculture, a kind of colonization that didn't rely on resource depletion and Indian labor. Las Casas worked to recruit a large number of peasants who would want to travel to the islands, where they would be given lands to farm, cash advances, and the tools and resources they needed to establish themselves there.
The recruitment drive was difficult, and during the process the power relation shifted at court when Chancellor Sauvage, Las Casas's main supporter, unexpectedly died. In the end a much smaller number of peasant families were sent than originally planned, and they were supplied with insufficient provisions and no support secured for their arrival. Those who survived the journey were ill-received, and had to work hard even to survive in the hostile colonies.
Sustainable colonization of the "Spanish" mainland of South America?
Las Casas was devastated by the tragic result of his peasant migration scheme, which he felt had been thwarted by his enemies. He decided instead to undertake a personal venture which would not rely on the support of others, and fought to win a land grant on the American mainland which was in its earliest stage of colonization.
Following a suggestion by his friend and mentor Pedro de Córdoba, Las Casas petitioned a land grant to be allowed to establish a settlement in northern Venezuela at Cumaná. Founded in 1515, there was already a small Franciscan monastery in Cumana, and a Dominican one at Chiribichi, but the monks there were being harassed by Spaniards operating slave raids from the nearby Island of Cubagua.
To make the proposal economically palatable to the king, Las Casas had to incorporate the prospect of profits for the royal treasury. He suggested fortifying the northern coast of Venezuela, establishing ten royal forts to protect the Indians and starting up a system of trade in gold and pearls. All the Indian slaves of the New World should be brought to live in these towns and become tribute paying subjects to the king.
In order to secure the grant Las Casas had to go through a long fight in court against Bishop Fonseca and his supporters Gonzalo de Oviedo and Bishop Quevedo of Tierra Firme. Las Casas's supporters were Diego Columbus and the new chancellor Gattinara. Las Casas's enemies slandered him to the king, accusing him of planning to escape with the money to Genoa or Rome. In 1520 Las Casas's concession was finally granted, but it was a much smaller grant than he had initially proposed; he was also denied the possibilities of extracting gold and pearls, which made it difficult for him to find investors for the venture.
Las Casas committed himself to producing 15,000 ducats of annual revenue, increasing to 60,000 after ten years, and to erecting three Christian towns of at least 40 settlers each. Some privileges were also granted to the initial 50 shareholders in Las Casas's scheme. The king also promised not to give any encomienda grants in Las Casas's area. That said, finding fifty men willing to invest 200 ducats each and three years of unpaid work proved impossible for Las Casas. He ended up leaving in November 1520 with just a small group of peasants, paying for the venture with money borrowed from his brother in-law.
Arriving in Puerto Rico, in January 1521, he received the terrible news that the Dominican convent at Chiribichi had been sacked by Indians, and that the Spaniards of the islands had launched a punitive expedition, led by Gonzalo de Ocampo, into the very heart of the territory that Las Casas wanted to colonize peacefully.
The Indians had been provoked to attack the settlement of the monks because of the repeated slave raids by Spaniards operating from Cubagua. As Ocampo's ships began returning with slaves from the land Las Casas had been granted, he went to Hispaniola to complain to the Audiencia. After several months of negotiations Las Casas set sail alone; the peasants he had brought had deserted, and he arrived in a colony already ravaged by Spaniards.
Las Casas worked there in adverse conditions for the following months, being constantly harassed by the Spanish pearl fishers of Cubagua island who traded slaves for alcohol with the natives. Early in 1522 Las Casas left the settlement to complain to the authorities. While he was gone the native Caribs attacked the settlement of Cumaná, burned it to the ground and killed four of Las Casas's men. He returned to Hispaniola in January 1522, and heard the news of the massacre. The rumours even included him among the dead. To make matters worse, his detractors used the event as evidence of the need to pacify the Indians using military means. The tragic outcome of Las Casas's great mainland adventure made him turn his life in a new direction.
Devastated, Las Casas reacted by entering the Dominican monastery of Santa Cruz in Santo Domingo as a novice in 1522 and finally taking holy vows as a Dominican friar in 1523. There he continued his theological studies, being particularly attracted to Thomist philosophy, but there is little information about his activities in the following ten years. So, having entered the Dominican Order and became a friar, he apparently ended up leaving public life for a decade. However, it is well known that he travelled to Central America, acting as a missionary among the Maya of Guatemala and participating in debates among colonial churchmen about how best to bring the natives to the Christian faith.
Revolt of the Comuneros
In Spain this was also a turbulent and politically unstable period, especially in Castile with the revolt of the Comuneros.
In 1536 Las Casas went to Oaxaca, Mexico, to participate in a series of discussions and debates among the bishops of the Dominican and Franciscan orders. The two orders had very different approaches to the conversion of the Indians. The Franciscans used a method of mass conversion, sometimes baptizing many thousands of Indians in a day.
This method was championed by prominent Franciscans such as Toribio de Benavente, known as "Motolinia", and Las Casas made many enemies among the Franciscans for arguing that conversions made without adequate understanding were invalid.
Las Casas wrote a treatise called "De unico vocationis modo" (On the Only Way of Conversion) based on the missionary principles he had used in Guatemala. Motolinia would later be a fierce critic of Las Casas, accusing him of being all talk and no action when it came to converting the Indians. As a direct result of the debates between the Dominicans and Franciscans and spurred on by Las Casas's treatise, Pope Paul III promulgated the Bull "Sublimis Deus," which stated that the Indians were rational beings and should be brought peacefully to the faith as such.
Sublimis Deus (English: The sublime God) is a papal encyclical promulgated by Pope Paul III on June 2, 1537, which forbids the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas (called Indians of the West and the South) and all other people. It goes on to state that the Indians are fully rational human beings who have rights to freedom and private property, even if they are heathen. It strengthened the decree issued by Charles V of Spain in 1530 in which the King prohibited the enslavement of Indians. Another related document is the ecclesiastical letter Pastorale officium, issued May 29, 1537, and usually seen as a companion document to Sublimis Deus.
Pastorale officium was a Apostolic Brief issued by Pope Paul III, May 29, 1537, to Cardinal Juan Pardo de Tavera which declares that anyone who enslaved or despoiled indigenous Americans would be automatically excommunicated.
The harsh threat of punishment (Latae sententiae) contained in Pastorale officium made the Conquistadors complain to the Spanish king and Emperor. Charles V went on to argue that the letter was injurious to the Imperial right of colonization and harmful to the peace of the Indies. The urging of the Conquistadors that Charles V revoke the briefs and bulls of 1537 exemplifies the tension between the concern for evangelisation as manifested in the teachings of 1537 and the pressure to honor the system of royal patronage. The weakened position of the pope and the memory of the Sack of Rome (1527) a decade earlier by imperial troops, made the ecclesiastical authorities hesitant in engaging in any possible confrontation with the Emperor. Under mounting pressure Pope Paul III removed the ecclesiastical censures in the letter titled "Non Indecens Videtur ". However, the annulling of the ecclesiastical letter was not a denial of the doctrinal teaching of the spiritual equivalence of all human beings. In fact, the annulation of the letter gave rise to the subsequent papal encyclical Sublimis Deus. Thus the Pastorale officium has been seen as a companion document to the encyclical Sublimis Deus.
In 1536 Las Casas followed a number of friars to Guatemala, where they began to prepare to undertake a mission among the Maya Indians. They stayed in the convent founded some years earlier by Fray Domingo Betanzos and studied the K'iche' language with Bishop Francisco Marroquín, before traveling into the interior region called Tuzulutlan, "The Land of War", in 1537. Las Casas returned to Guatemala in 1537 wanting to employ his new method of conversion based on two principles:
1) to preach the Gospel to all men and treat them as equals, andIt was important for Las Casas that this method be tested without meddling from secular colonists, so he chose a territory in the heart of Guatemala where there were no previous colonies and where the natives were considered fierce and war-like. Because of the fact that the land had not been possible to conquer by military means, the governor of Guatemala, Alonso de Maldonado, agreed to sign a contract promising that if the venture was successful he would not establish any new encomiendas in the area. Las Casas's group of friars established a Dominican presence in Rabinal, Sacapulas and Cobán.
2) to assert that conversion must be voluntary and based on knowledge and understanding of the faith.
Through the efforts of Las Casas's missionaries the so-called "Land of War" came to be called "Verapaz", "True Peace".
Las Casas's strategy was to teach Christian songs to merchant Indian Christians who then ventured into the area. In this way he was successful in converting several native chiefs, among them those of Atitlán and Chichicastenango, and in building several churches in the territory named Alta Verapaz.
In 1538 Las Casas was recalled from his mission by Bishop Marroquín who wanted him to go to Mexico and then on to Spain in order to seek more Dominicans to assist in the mission. Las Casas left Guatemala for Mexico, where he stayed for more than a year before setting out for Spain in 1540.
When he arrived in Spain, Las Casas started securing official support for the Guatemalan mission, and he managed to get a royal decree forbidding secular intrusion into the Verapaces territory for the following five years. He also informed the Theologians of Salamanca, led by Francisco de Vitoria, of the mass baptism practiced by the Franciscans, resulting in a dictum condemning the practice as sacrilegious.
A settled theological consensus was being assaulted by the rise of humanism, by the Protestant Reformation and by the new geographical discoveries and their consequences. These were the new problems being addressed by the School of Salamanca as Las Casas was working though his own theological challenges. The name refers to the University of Salamanca, where de Vitoria and other members of the school were based.
But apart from the clerical business, Las Casas had also traveled to Spain for his own purpose: to continue the struggle against the colonists' mistreatment of the Indians. The encomienda had, in fact, legally been abolished in 1523, but it had been reinstituted in 1526, and in 1530 a general ordinance against slavery was reversed by the Crown. For this reason it was a pressing matter for Bartolomé de las Casas to plead once again for the Indians with Charles V who was by now Holy Roman Emperor and no longer a boy. He wrote a letter asking for permission to stay in Spain a little longer in order to argue for the emperor that conversion and colonization were best achieved by peaceful means.
When the hearings started in 1542, Las Casas presented a narrative of atrocities against the natives of the Indies that would later be published in 1552 as "Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias". Before a council consisting of Cardinal García de Loaysa, the Count of Osorno, Bishop Fuenleal and several members of the Council of the Indies, Las Casas argued that the only solution to the problem was to remove all Indians from the care of secular Spaniards, by abolishing the encomienda system and putting them instead directly under the Crown as royal tribute-paying subjects. On November 20, 1542, the emperor signed the New Laws abolishing the encomiendas and removing certain officials from the Council of the Indies.
The New Laws made it illegal to use Indians as carriers, except where no other transport was available, it prohibited all taking of Indians as slaves, and it instated a gradual abolition of the encomienda system, with each encomienda reverting to the Crown at the death of its holders. It also exempted the few surviving Indians of Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica from tribute and all requirements of personal service.
However, the reforms were so unpopular back in the New World that riots broke out and threats were made against Las Casas's life. The Viceroy of New Spain, himself an encomendero, decided not to implement the laws in his domain, and instead sent a party to Spain to argue against the laws on behalf of the encomenderos.
Las Casas himself was also not satisfied with the laws, as they were not drastic enough and the encomienda system was going to function for many years still under the gradual abolition plan. He drafted a suggestion for an amendment arguing that the laws against slavery were formulated in such a way that it presupposed that violent conquest would still be carried out, and he encouraged once again beginning a phase of peaceful colonization by peasants instead of soldiers.
The Valladolid debate
The New Laws were finally repealed on October 20, 1545, and riots broke out against Las Casas, with shots being fired against him by angry colonists. After a year he had made himself so unpopular among the Spaniards of the area that he had to leave. Having been summoned to a meeting among the bishops of New Spain to be held in Mexico City on January 12, 1546, he left his diocese, never to return. At the meeting, probably after lengthy reflection, and realizing that the New Laws were lost in Mexico, Las Casas presented a moderated view on the problems of confession and restitution of property,
This resulted in a new resolution to be presented to viceroy Mendoza. His last act as Bishop of Chiapas was writing a confesionario, a manual for the administration of the sacrament of confession in his diocese, still refusing absolution to unrepentant encomenderos. Las Casas appointed a vicar for his diocese and set out for Europe in December 1546, arriving in Lisbon in April 1547 and in Spain on November 1547.
Las Casas had returned to Spain, leaving behind many conflicts and unresolved issues. Arriving in Spain he was met by a barrage of accusations, many of them based on his Confesionario and its 12 rules, which many of his opponents found to be in essence a denial of the legitimacy of Spanish rule of its colonies, and hence a form of treason. The Crown had for example received a fifth of the large number of slaves taken in the recent Mixtón War, and so could not be held clean of guilt under Las Casas's strict rules. In 1548 the Crown decreed that all copies of Las Casas's Confesionario be burnt, and his Franciscan adversary, Motolinia obliged and sent back a report to Spain. Las Casas defended himself by writing two treatises on the "Just Title" – arguing that the only legality with which the Spaniards could claim titles over realms in the New World was through peaceful proselytizing. All warfare was illegal and unjust and only through the papal mandate of peacefully bringing Christianity to heathen peoples could "Just Titles" be acquired.
As a part of Las Casas's defense by offense, he had to argue against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Sepúlveda was a doctor of theology and law who, in his book Democrates Alter, sive de justis causis apud Indos (Another Democrates /or A New Democrates, or on the Just Causes of War against the Indians) had argued that some native peoples were incapable of ruling themselves and should be pacified forcefully. The book was deemed unsound for publication by the theologians of Salamanca and Alcalá for containing unsound doctrine, but the pro-encomendero faction seized on Sepúlveda as their intellectual champion.
In order to settle the issues, a formal debate was organized, the famous Valladolid debate, which took place in 1550–51 with Sepúlveda and Las Casas each presenting their arguments in front of a council of jurists and theologians. First Sepúlveda read the conclusions of his Democrates Alter, and then the council listened to Las Casas read his counterarguments in the form of an "Apología".
Sepúlveda argued that the subjugation of certain Indians was warranted because of their sins against Natural Law; that their low level of civilization required civilized masters to maintain social order; that they should be made Christian and that this in turn required them to be pacified; and that only the Spanish could defend weak Indians against the abuses of the stronger ones.
Las Casas countered that the scriptures did not in fact support war against all heathens, only against certain Canaanite tribes; that the Indians were not at all uncivilized nor lacking social order; that peaceful mission was the only true way of converting the natives; and finally that some weak Indians suffering at the hands of stronger ones was preferable to all Indians suffering at the hands of Spaniards.
The judge, Fray Domingo de Soto, summarised the arguments. Sepúlveda addressed Las Casas's arguments with twelve refutations, which were again countered by Las Casas. The judges then deliberated on the arguments presented for several months before coming to a verdict. The verdict was inconclusive, and both debaters claimed that they had won.
In 1552, Las Casas published A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. This book, written a decade earlier and sent to the attention of then-prince Philip II of Spain, contained accounts of the abuses committed by some Spaniards against Native Americans during the early stages of colonization. In 1555 his old Franciscan adversary Toribio de Benavente Motolinia wrote a letter in which he described Las Casas as an ignorant, arrogant troublemaker. Benavente described indignantly how Las Casas had once denied baptism to an aging Indian who had walked many leagues to receive it, only on the grounds that he did not believe that the man had received sufficient doctrinal instruction. This letter, which reinvoked the old conflict over the requirements for the sacrament of baptism between the two orders, was intended to bring Las Casas in disfavour. However, it did not succeed.
The cloister of the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid where Las Casas spent his final decades
Having resigned the Bishopric of Chiapas, Las Casas spent the rest of his life working closely with the imperial court in matters relating to the Indies. In 1551 he rented a cell at the College of San Gregorio, where he lived with his assistant and friend Fray Rodrigo de Ladrada. He continued working as a kind of procurator for the natives of the Indies, many of whom directed petitions to him to speak to the emperor on their behalf. Sometimes indigenous nobility even related their cases to him in Spain, for example, the Nahua noble Francisco Tenamaztle from Nochistlán. His influence at court was so great that some even considered that he had the final word in choosing the members of the Council of the Indies.
In 1561, he finished his Historia General de las Indias and signed it over to the College of San Gregorio, stipulating that it could not be published until after forty years. In fact it was not published for 314 years, finally being done so in 1875. He also had to repeatedly defend himself against accusations of treason: someone, possibly Sepúlveda, denounced him to the Spanish Inquisition, but nothing came from the case. Las Casas also appeared as a witness in the case of the Inquisition against his friend Archbishop Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda, who had been falsely accused of heresy. In 1565 he wrote his last will, signing over his immense library to the college. Bartolomé de Las Casas died on July 18, 1566, in Madrid.
For some Las Casas has come to be seen as an early advocate for a concept of universal human rights. He was among the first to develop a view of unity among humankind, stating that:
"All people of the world are humans,"
- and that they had a natural right to liberty –
This was Las Casas at his best, the creation of an ethical framework. It emerged as a synthesis of outrage and compassion, as well as a sense of justice, that was based on personal experience. In combination with Thomist rights philosophy and Augustinian political theology, it produced a significant challenge to power. Yet his work remains controversial.
But Las Casas's work and legacy has always been highly controversial. In the years following his death, his ideas became taboo in the Spanish realm, and he was seen as a nearly heretical extremist. The accounts written by his enemies Lopez de Gómara and Oviedo were widely read and published. As the British Empire rose to power and hostilities between the British and Spanish began, the British used Las Casas's accounts of Spanish cruelty as a political tool, as part of the foundation of what Spanish nationalists have called the Black Legend, the tendency of historians to slander Spain for its imperial past but to look mildly at the same undertakings by others such as the British.
Opposition to Las Casas reached its climax in historography with Spanish right-wing, nationalist historians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries constructing a pro-Spanish White Legend, arguing that the Spanish Empire was benevolent and just and denying any adverse consequences of Spanish colonialism. Spanish pro-imperial historians such as Menéndez y Pelayo, Menéndez Pidal, and J. Pérez de Barrada depicted Las Casas as a madman, describing him as a "paranoic" and a monomaniac given to exaggeration, and as a traitor towards his own nation. Menéndez Pelayo also accused Las Casas of having been instrumental in suppressing the publication of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda's "Democrates Alter" (also called Democrates Secundus) out of spite, but other historians find that to be unlikely since it was rejected by the theologians of both Alcalá and Salamanca, who were unlikely to be influenced by Las Casas.
The one persistent point of criticism has been Las Casas's repeated suggestions of replacing Indian with African slave labour. Even though he repented that position later in his life and included an apology in his History of the Indies, some later criticism held him responsible for the institution of the Atlantic slave trade.
One detractor, the abolitionist David Walker, called Las Casas;
"This wretch... stimulated by sordid avarice only,"and holding him responsible for the enslavement of thousands of Africans.
Men of Blood (continued) Equality, Humanity, Liberty or Property?
