A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Part II of the Introduction details Las Casas’s biography. Little is known of his birth and early life. In 1502 he landed in the Americas at Santo Domingo (part of present-day Haiti), and by 1510 he had turned to a career in the priesthood. Under a colonial institution called encomienda, or the “care” of Spanish settlers for households of native peoples (set up by Isabella and Ferdinand to prevent the development of feudal fiefdoms), Las Casas had several natives working for him as slaves (13).

After witnessing a sermon of the recently arrived Dominican priest Antonio Montesinos and massacres in Cuba, Las Casas began resisting colonial agitation and adopted abolitionist views on the encomienda system. This transition culminated in his reading of Ecclesiasticus 34: 21-22: “he that defraudeth him thereof is a man of blood. He that taketh away his neighbour’s living slayeth him, and he that defraudeth the labourer of his hire is a bloodshedder” (13). Taking heart in this passage, Las Casas renounced his native slaves in 1514, and in 1515 he “returned to Spain for the first time, determined to inform the King of the evils which his agents were perpetrating in his Indies” (13).

When Las Casas returned to Spain, he gained an audience with the aging King Ferdinand, lecturing him at great length. Ferdinand referred the matter to the president of the Council of the Indies, the bishop of Burgos Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, who remained completely unconcerned by the atrocities Las Casas recounted (13).

While Las Casas’s work did little to stymy Spain’s feudal enterprise in the Americas, it did create a powerful audience of supporters in Spain. This eventually led to Las Casas becoming the bishop of Chiapas in Southern Mexico in 1543. In 1513, however, the Laws of Burgos were passed. These laws were an attempt by the Crown to “regulate the relations between colonized and colonizer” (13), but they largely disrupted what remained of tribal lifestyles in the Americas, driving many natives to suicide, infanticide, and induced abortion (13). While well intentioned, these laws were often unheeded by Spanish colonists looking to establish themselves as masters of this new land within a political system modeled on the Old World (13).

The New Laws of Burgos, passed in 1542 and owing something to the work of Las Casas, attempted to abolish the encomienda system but were partially repealed in 1545 and largely unheeded by colonists even before then (13). However, Las Casas’s intellectual influence among the Spanish at home was profound, contributing to rejection of texts such as The Second Democrates; Or, The Just Causes of the War against the Indians by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, which attempted to justify native enslavement. A debate held between Las Casas and this man inspired Las Casas to publish A Short Account in 1551.

Part III of the Introduction primes the reader to understand Las Casas’s Short Account as a persuasive text.

Las Casas understood the Short Account as a shorter restatement or “epitome” of his larger work, The History of the Indies, which was also written to convince Spanish leadership to stymy atrocity in the Americas. Intended to persuade the emperor, A Short Account is a “an exercise in propaganda” (13) containing multiple truthful accounts of atrocity as well as some false narratives and enhanced death tolls (13). Las Casas, however, implores his readers in other works to understand that the death tolls are not literal figures but an attempt to give the reader an impression of what he actually perceived. The text remains aware of itself as the only honest account of the overall nature of atrocities in the Americas and their consequences on the native population. In Las Casas’s view, this is by nature of his experiential, rather than textual, knowledge of this history.

Las Casas’s text is written with a poverty of style aimed at captatio benevolentiae, or “capturing the goodwill of the reader” (13) through proof of humility and sincerity. While it may seem humble, we must remember that the text is neither devoid of rhetoric or wholly literal. We must also appreciate that Las Casas’s rhetoric has a highly moral aim at its heart. Las Casas’s work was an effort to convince the Spanish king to cease atrocities in the New World and to stymy the divine punishment that Las Casas believed was headed for Spain due to its actions. Las Casas furthermore believed the conquistadors’ ungodly and inhumane actions were a forfeiture of their humanity through sins against fellow children of God.