Bartolomé de las Casas · Politics
The hardest chapter in Las Casas’s life: his early proposal to import enslaved Africans to relieve the suffering of the Indians, his later horror at what he had done, and the recantation in his <em>History of the Indies</em> - a study in moral blindness, growth, and honesty.
The story of Las Casas is not the story of a spotless saint, and to tell it honestly we have to face its darkest turn. In his early years as a reformer, desperate to relieve the native peoples who were dying by the thousands under forced labour in the mines and fields, Las Casas cast about for alternatives to Indian slavery. Among his proposals, in memorials to the Crown around 1516 and after, was a fateful one: that Spanish settlers be permitted to import enslaved Africans to do the heavy labour instead, sparing the Indians. He was not the origin of the Atlantic slave trade, which was already under way, and his suggestion reflected assumptions widespread in his time - that Africans, already being enslaved by Portuguese and others, were a lawful and hardier source of labour. But it was, plainly, a proposal to relieve the suffering of one enslaved people by increasing the enslavement of another. The champion of the Indians had a blind spot the size of a continent.
What redeems the episode, and makes it one of the most morally instructive in his whole life, is that Las Casas did not stay blind. Over the following decades he came to understand what he had done. He learned more of how the Portuguese slave trade actually worked - the raiding, the wars deliberately provoked to produce captives, the sheer fraudulence of the claim that these Africans were ‘justly’ enslaved - and he came to a shattering realization: the enslavement of Africans rested on exactly the same injustice as the enslavement of Indians. The same principle that made it wrong to enslave the native peoples made it wrong to enslave Africans, because it was the same principle: that no rational human being may be robbed of natural liberty. There were not two questions, one about Indians and one about Africans; there was one question about human beings, and he had, for a time, gotten half of it wrong. Having seen it, he could not unsee it, and he did what few people of any era do about their past complicity: he wrote it down, condemned himself, and made his confession part of the historical record.
The tone of Las Casas’s recantation is worth dwelling on, because it is not the tone of a public-relations apology. He does not minimize, contextualize, or plead the customs of his time as a defence. He writes as a man genuinely afraid for his soul. The recurring note is that he acted in ignorance and good faith - he had not understood what he was doing - and yet he is not sure that ignorance and good faith will excuse him before God. This is the voice of a conscience that has understood something terrible about moral responsibility: that meaning well is not the same as doing right, and that we can incur real guilt for wrongs we committed without fully grasping their evil at the time. Las Casas will not let himself off on the technicality of sincerity. He records his good intentions and then refuses to hide behind them, leaving the final judgement to God while clearly fearing it. It is one of the most searching examinations of conscience left to us by any figure of the age, precisely because it is turned, without mercy, on the self.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Las Casas, early in his campaign, suggested importing enslaved Africans to relieve the Indians, that he later recognized African slavery as just as unjust as Indian slavery, condemned it in his History of the Indies , and feared he could not be excused before God. Explain what this episode reveals abo…
Leads to Montesquieu.
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