Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 2/Appendix of the Fourth letter
APPENDIX TO FOURTH LETTER
ENCOMIENDA SYSTEM
The system of repartimientos and encomiendas of the Indians was begun in the Islands in the time of Columbus, and was, at the outset, sanctioned by the Catholic Sovereigns, though the first authorisation, given in 1497, grants repartimientos of lands but says nothing about Indians. It was represented to be the best means for civilising and Christianising the natives; but this sanction was afterwards revoked by Isabella the Catholic, who, with a fuller knowledge of the real conditions and of the abuses which quickly sprang up, issued severe edicts against them.
The repartimiento, according to Leon, signified the first partition or allotment of Indians made to the colonists, and the encomienda was the second grant, made after the death of the first holder of the right. The repartimiento in the Islands was sometimes of only a week's duration, and hence had a temporary character, whereas the encomienda was a permanent concession of rights over certain Indians which was as much a property right as a grant of land and became hereditary in the family holding it.
The home government enacted many measures for regulating the system, and for the protection of the Indians, but distance and other circumstances made it easy to evade these provisions, and shocking abuses and cruelties, which rapidly depopulated the islands, became common. It was this deplorable state of things which first aroused the indignation of the Dominican monk, Las Casas, afterwards Bishop of Chiapa and started him upon the zealous crusade in favour of the rights of the natives; which procured him the glorious title of "Protector-General of the Indians."
The defenders of this system of enforced serfdom argued that the Indians were by nature lazy, and, if left free, would never work; that the only hope of converting them to Christianity was to keep them in touch with Christians; and also that the climate was such, that white labour could not be employed, even if there were plenty of workmen, which there were not. It was therefore urged that without compulsion there would be no native labour and without native labour there would be no revenue.
Practically the only reward given to the soldiers of Cortes after the conquest of Mexico was to assign to each one a repartimiento or encomienda of Indians, with whom to work the lands granted them. Cortes seems to have been sincerely opposed to the system from the outset, and to have yielded to the general clamour, only after having presented other projects which were refused; nor does he seem to have ever reconciled his conscience to it, although, once his sanction had been given, he defended it on the usual grounds of its expediency, even going so far as to withhold the publication of a royal decree which the friars had obtained from the Emperor, revoking all repartimientos and encomiendas already conceded, and forbidding new ones under severest penalties in the future. He defended this action by writing to the Emperor that to execute the decree would be to throw the Indians back into barbarism, ruin the colony, and drive the colonists out of the country.
The bishops and friars in Mexico energetically repudiated this idea, and in writing to the Emperor, in 1528, during the governorship of Nuño de Guzman, who was striving to obtain the royal approval of encomiendas, the Franciscans of Mexico expressed themselves as follows: "The proposal of the Governor and his auditors, suggested to them by the holders of encomiendas in New Spain, that the natives should be so held for their own welfare, their conversion to the faith, and their obedience to the King, is nothing else but the using of religion as a pretext to enable them to continue their tyranny as heretofore. When have these impious men ever had a thought of converting these people? or of treating them humanely? We have been witnesses of the methods of these holders of encomiendas for the last five years, and we have seen that their vexatious torments seem to have for their object the destruction of the Indians, and from these we may infer how much more cruel they were in the other three years after the conquest. By a special providence of God they have not succeeded, even with all the means they have used, in destroying the Mexicans. To wish to make slaves of the natives of the New World in order to subject them to the Faith and the King's obedience, is undoubtedly iniquitous, and God has forbidden men all abominations, even though the greatest good should result from them. Sacrifice is never acceptable if offered with unclean hands. It were a lesser evil if not a single inhabitant of the New World were ever converted to our Holy Faith, and that the King's sovereignty should be lost forever, than that these people should be brought to the one or the other by slavery" (Fr. Andres Calvo, Apud Bustamante).
The Empress, when she was regent, was moved to tears by one such relation as this; royal decrees without number were repeatedly issued, not merely to correct the abuses, but to suppress the system itself; but by intrigue and every sort of subterfuge, rapacious conquerors and greedy colonists would wrench concessions from the unwilling sovereigns which, as soon as the real state of things became known, would be promptly revoked. Open violation of the law was common, and winked at by the local authorities, only the bishops and friars being left to protect against such doings. They were the abolitionists of those times, and they had recourse to the severest spiritual penalties, refusing the sacraments, and launching excommunications on the notoriously cruel among the slave-holding colonists. Yielding to the arguments so persistently advanced, temporising measures were adopted; the system being provisionally tolerated while every possible provision for mitigating its evils was prescribed. Some of these were as follows: the holder of an encomienda was bound to pledge himself to an eight years' residence on his estate; no women or boys under twelve years were to do plantation work; Indian labourers could not be let out to others, nor be employed for regulating waterways, excavating canals, nor for building any house other than that of the holder of the encomienda; they were not to be taken away from their native province, and squads of labourers could be summoned for a period of twenty days at a time only, at the ratio of ten men out of every hundred in a village, and this not at their own harvest time; since mules, horses, and oxen had been imported, the Indians were not to be used as beasts of burden, as they were in the beginning; the villages were to be within a given distance of the plantations; the hours of work were from sunrise until one hour before sunset, with a rest at midday, and the proprietor must feed them well, pay them at least one castellano per year, clothe them, and provide for the education of the sons of chiefs in thefriar's school; moreover a priest was to be in charge of every two thousand Indians. Had these, and the many other safeguards provided, been strictly observed by the Spaniards, the state of the Indians would not have been a particularly bad one.
The Indians thus divided in encomiendas were not, strictly speaking, slaves, though their labour was enforced. The slaves were a class apart, and consisted of those who had been held in slavery by the Mexicans before the arrival of Cortes, and of such as had afterwards been condemned to slavery for rebellion.
Mention is several times made in the Letters of whole villages being sold or divided as a punishment for insurrection. How easy it was for the unscrupulous to provoke quarrels and broils, readily magnified into "rebellions, "or to trump up a charge on which natives might be enslaved, may be imagined. All such were branded, and as encomienda Indians could not be sent to the mines or to work at a distance; the slaves were used for these hard purposes. They were procured in immense numbers from Mexican chiefs either by purchase — sometimes for nominal sums — and sometimes in payment of debts, or to discharge obligations, and this opened the way to countless abuses, as the caciques not infrequently delivered free men into Spanish slavery, and, once branded, their status was fixed forever. The trade in human flesh flourished, and thousands were shipped to the islands where the natives were rapidly being exterminated, and the treatment of these poor creatures was so inhuman that many died during the voyage, and others in despair threw themselves overboard and were drowned.
It is a question, however, whether this treatment was worse than they had suffered from their Mexican owners. Cortes affirms that it was not, and that the threat they most feared was to be sold back to the Aztecs. On the other hand, Motolinia describes the Spanish system as the "sixth plague." I have elsewhere read that the Aztec system was a purely patriarchal one, and that such slaves as were not destined for human sacrifices had everything but their freedom; it being also against the law to sell them, while their children were all born free, and they could hold property of their own. It may indeed be that the Aztec law provided such humane protections, but then we have seen that the Spanish laws were also numerous and beneficient, so that the actual fate of the slave cannot be gauged by the spirit of the laws, but by the observance of them.
The Tlascalans were exempt from the prevailing system, in recognition of their services during the conquest, and, in 1537, they themselves suppressed slavery and serfage of every sort within their province, a measure which was approved by the Viceroy.
The system of encomiendas was finally abolished in Mexico under Charles III.