A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Fray (Friar) Bartolomé de Las Casas was born into a merchant family in Seville in 1484. Las Casas immigrated to the newly colonized island of Hispaniola with his father in 1502. Las Casas became a hacendado (owner of an estate on the colony) and a slave owner as part of the encomienda system established by the Spanish government. In 1510 Las Casas was ordained as a priest, though he still owned slaves at this time.

In 1511 Las Casas witnessed another Dominican Friar, Antonio de Montesinos, vehemently preaching against the colonists’ genocide of the native peoples. This was the first of three events that set Las Casas on his path of social reform. The second was his participation in the conquest of Cuba in 1513, where he witnessed such atrocities firsthand. Finally, while studying Ecclesiasticus in 1514, he read Ecclesiasticus 34: 18-22, a passage that objects to the abuse of any human against another.

These three events inspired Las Casas to give up his slaves and preach that his fellow colonists do the same. Meeting little success, he returned to Spain in 1515. There, on Christmas Eve in 1515, Las Casas gained an audience with the dying King Ferdinand, who referred him to the Bishop of Burgos, Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca. Fonseca, along with the secretary Lope Conchillos, controlled policies on the Indies. Both were encomenderos, and Las Casas had little success convincing them to deconstruct the encomienda system. Shortly thereafter, however, Las Casas was granted the official title of Protector of the Indians and expected to serve as an advisor to the governors of the New World. Back in the Indies, Las Casas was unsatisfied with the work of the Hieronymite monk commissioners appointed to reform colonist action, and he continued preaching for the breakdown of encomienda and cessation of abuse of the natives. In 1517 he returned to Spain, where the young Charles V appointed him and the sympathetic Chancellor Jean de la Sauvage to create a new plan for reforming the Indies. Las Casas motioned to migrate Spanish peasants to the Americas, thereby taking the load off of native slaves and establishing sustainable agricultural projects. Few peasants survived the journey, and they were poorly received.

In 1520 Las Casas was granted a small piece of land to establish a small non-encomienda-based settlement, which failed when it was sacked by the Spanish in 1522.

In 1523 Las Casas became a Dominican friar. Over the next 17 years he remained mobile in the Americas, preaching against colonial atrocity and converting natives to Christianity. In 1540 he returned to Spain to gather support for a missionary effort to Guatemala, which was still uncolonized, as well as to seek another audience with Charles V, now Holy Roman Emperor.

In 1542 Las Casas presented a narrative of atrocities before the Council of the Indies in Spain that would later become A Short Account. Near the end of 1542, the emperor established the New Laws of Burgos, which made it illegal to use natives as carriers and slaves and instituted plans to abolish the encomienda system. The New Laws were rejected in the New World and repealed in 1545.

Las Casas was appointed the bishop of Chiapas, a diocese he took possession of in 1545. By 1546 he was run out of his own diocese due to the unpopularity of his staunch anti-slavery policies. He returned to Spain in 1547, and in 1550-51 entered a formal debate with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, an intellectual supporter of Spanish colonial action, known as the Valladolid debate. The verdict of the debate was inconclusive, with both sides claiming victory.

In 1552 A Short Account was published and sent to Prince Phillip II of Spain. From thereon Las Casas remained in Spain as a courtly advisor on colonial matters, finishing his History of the Indies in 1561, which remained unpublished until 1875. He died in Madrid in 1566.