American Negro Slavery | Page 7

negroes carried to Portugal in the fifteenth century a large
proportion were set to work as slaves on great estates in the southern
provinces recently vacated by the Moors, and others were employed as
domestic servants in Lisbon and other towns. Some were sold into
Spain where they were similarly employed, and where their numbers
were recruited by a Guinea trade in Spanish vessels in spite of
Portugal's claim of monopoly rights, even though Isabella had
recognized these in a treaty of 1479. In short, at the time of the
discovery of America Spain as well as Portugal had quite appreciable
numbers of negroes in her population and both were maintaining a
system of slavery for their control.

When Columbus returned from his first voyage in the spring of 1493
and announced his great landfall, Spain promptly entered upon her
career of American conquest and colonization. So great was the
expectation of adventure and achievement that the problem of the
government was not how to enlist participants but how to restrain a
great exodus. Under heavy penalties emigration was restricted by royal
decrees to those who procured permission to go. In the autumn of the
same year fifteen hundred men, soldiers, courtiers, priests and laborers,
accompanied the discoverer on his second voyage, in radiant hopes.
But instead of wealth and high adventure these Argonauts met hard
labor and sickness. Instead of the rich cities of Japan and China sought
for, there were found squalid villages of Caribs and Lucayans. Of gold
there was little, of spices none.
Columbus, when planting his colony at Isabella, on the northern coast
of Hispaniola (Hayti), promptly found need of draught animals and
other equipment. He wrote to his sovereigns in January, 1494, asking
for the supplies needed; and he offered, pending the discovery of more
precious things, to defray expenses by shipping to Spain some of the
island natives, "who are a wild people fit for any work, well
proportioned and very intelligent, and who when they have got rid of
their cruel habits to which they have been accustomed will be better
than any other kind of slaves."[9] Though this project was discouraged
by the crown, Columbus actually took a cargo of Indians for sale in
Spain on his return from his third voyage; but Isabella stopped the sale
and ordered the captives taken home and liberated. Columbus, like
most of his generation, regarded the Indians as infidel foreigners to be
exploited at will. But Isabella, and to some extent her successors,
considered them Spanish subjects whose helplessness called for special
protection. Between the benevolence of the distant monarchs and the
rapacity of the present conquerors, however, the fate of the natives was
in little doubt. The crown's officials in the Indies were the very
conquerors themselves, who bent their soft instructions to fit their own
hard wills. A native rebellion in Hispaniola in 1495 was crushed with
such slaughter that within three years the population is said to have
been reduced by two thirds. As terms of peace Columbus required
annual tribute in gold so great that no amount of labor in washing the

sands could furnish it. As a commutation of tribute and as a means of
promoting the conversion of the Indians there was soon inaugurated the
encomienda system which afterward spread throughout Spanish
America. To each Spaniard selected as an encomendero was allotted a
certain quota of Indians bound to cultivate land for his benefit and
entitled to receive from him tutelage in civilization and Christianity.
The grantees, however, were not assigned specified Indians but merely
specified numbers of them, with power to seize new ones to replace any
who might die or run away. Thus the encomendero was given little
economic interest in preserving the lives and welfare of his workmen.
[Footnote 9: R.H. Major, _Select Letters of Columbus_, 2d. ed., 1890,
p. 88.]
In the first phase of the system the Indians were secured in the right of
dwelling in their own villages under their own chiefs. But the
encomenderos complained that the aloofness of the natives hampered
the work of conversion and asked that a fuller and more intimate
control be authorized. This was promptly granted and as promptly
abused. Such limitations as the law still imposed upon encomendero
power were made of no effect by the lack of machinery for
enforcement. The relationship in short, which the law declared to be
one of guardian and ward, became harsher than if it had been that of
master and slave. Most of the island natives were submissive in
disposition and weak in physique, and they were terribly driven at their
work in the fields, on the roads, and at the mines. With smallpox and
other pestilences added to their hardships, they died so fast that before
1510 Hispaniola was