Las Casas, Bartolomée de (1474–1566)

Spanish missionary and historian, known today as an advocate for the rights and liberty of Native Americans. Born in Seville, he was the son of a middle-class merchant who had little traditional schooling. His father and uncle joined the second expedition of Christopher Columbus. In 1502, Bartolomée voyaged to the New World in the expedition of Nicolas de Ovando, the new governor of Hispaniola, in order to manage lands granted to his father by Columbus. In 1510 he became the first priest to be ordained in Spain's American colonies. He served as a missionary in Cuba, Mexico, Central America, and Peru, and was appointed as the priestprocurator of the Indies in 1516, with his duties being to investigate fraud and abuse of the Indians by the Spanish colonists. He eventually came to oppose the system by which the Spanish were destroying the culture of Native Americans, forcibly converting them to Christianity, and using them as slaves. Las Casas advocated a new system in which Europeans and Indians would cooperatively work rural plantations, but when one such experiment failed on the coast of Venezuela, he gave up his livelihood as a landowner and retired to a Dominican monastery in Santo Domingo.

Las Casas' stand on Native Americans was based on the idea that the grant of the right to colonize this part of the New World by the pope was for the purpose of converting Indians to Christianity, and not for economic benefit. This aroused strong opposition among the Spanish landowners, who absolutely depended on forced labor in order to make their plantations profitable. He pled his case before King Ferdinand II and the officials of Spain, and won an important success with a code of New Laws promulgated by Emperor Charles V in 1542 that banned slavery in Spain's colonies, as well as the right of the colonists to pass their lands to their heirs. In 1544, he was appointed as the bishop of Chiapas, where his primary task was to see the New Laws enforced. In 1547, when the ban on inheritance was rescinded, he resigned this office. In 1550 Las Casas returned to Valladolid, Spain, to take part in a famous debate with the scholar Juan Gines de Sepulveda on the future of the encomienda system of slave-worked plantations. Speaking for five days, Las Casas succeeded in having Sepulveda's book, which advocated outright war against the Indians, suppressed. In 1552 Las Casas chronicled the cruelty of the encomienda system in his most famous work, Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indians. He also wrote a comprehensive history of the Spanish conquest, History of the Indies, as well as a book detailing the lives and culture of Native Americans, History of the Indians, in which work he showed that the Native American subjects of Spain should enjoy the same rights and freedoms as their European conquerors.

See Also: Columbus, Christopher; Cortes, Hernán; exploration