William H. Prescott

“ Half-conquered provinces, groaning under heavy taxation, had yet the remembrance of their former freedom, and were ready to cast off the yoke. It is still more remarkable that the superstition to which Montezuma had surrendered himself as the devoutest votary, which had led him to crowd the altars with human sacrifices in unprecedented numbers, and to ally himself by the strongest ties with the bloody priesthood, now, as it were, turned against him, and prostrated his spirit before the imagined divinity, or at least the predicted success of the stranger. ”

“ Our contempt for the pusillanimity of Montezuma, from the first moment of this meeting with Cortes, melts into respect for the dignified courtesy of his demeanor and language; the weak and superstitious barbarianan becomes a noble gentleman, bowed by the weight of inevitable calamity, and enduring affliction after affliction, insult after insult, with deep but suppressed feeling, with an outward lofty patience, yet with an inward agony of wounded pride which strives not to betray itself. ”

“ There was, however, no such distinct tradition among the Aztecs, as among the Peruvians, of a Mango Capac, who, suddenly appearing among a barbarous race, from his superior intelligence and knowledge, was hailed with awe and reverence as a deity, as a child of the sun, and to whom is ascribed the whole framework of the social polity, and all which may be called civilization. The Mexican traditions relate to the migration of tribes rather than to the power or influence of individual chiefs or sages, unless perhaps that beneficent God, supposed to have reappeared in the person of the Spaniards. ”

“ The massacre of six hundred Aztec nobles, unarmed, during the peaceful celebration of a religious ceremony, had at length maddened the whole people to revolt. There is no direct information whether the cruelty or rapacity of Alvarado, or some secret intelligence of a conspiracy, (not improbable, when the Mexicans saw that their whole city was now held in check by but a handful of the Spaniards,) had prompted this ill-timed and ill-conducted mimicry of the great blow struck by Cortes at Cholula; but from this time the whole Aztec nation was leagued in implacable hostility to the Spaniards. ”

“ Let the reader turn to the advice of an Aztec mother to her daughter— (the first article in Mr. Prescott’s Appendix) —and though that deepest well-spring of tenderness, a mother’s heart, is never dry, even in the lowest condition of humanity, and the “advice inculcates conjugal fidelity, not merely because God, who is in every place, sees you, but because the law punished adultery with death;” yet it seems almost incredible that such pure and gentle, though simply expressed, sentiments could prevail among a people whose altars, whose lips, reeked with human blood. ”

“ The Aztecs of Mexico were a martial race their leading institutions and the national spirit, the splendor of dress, of ornament, and the pride and glory of Aztec, were centered in war; their legions consisting of 8,000 men, not without discipline. Montezuma had been a distinguished warrior and conqueror. The peculiarity in their mode of fighting was that they did not seek to kill, but to make prisoners, and these prisoners were to be solemn votive offerings to the gods. ”

“ Prescott’s pages. Mexico was to Tezcuco as the sterner and more warlike Rome to the more polite and cultivated Greece. Like Venice, founded by a few wanderers and fugitives on the swampy islands of the great lake, it became a powerful city—the centre of a great nation. The city rose, with rapid progress, to strength and splendor; it connected itself with the land by its strong and solid causeways, bridged over at intervals; and its situation would have been impregnable to less than Spanish valor, European arms, and European vessels. Mexico was an elective monarchy ”

“ All that we know of human sacrifices in the Old World, from “Moloch, horrid king,” and the kindred superstitions of older Asia, the self-immolations under the car of Jaganaut, with the other bloody rites of Siva and of Durga in India, the wicker-cages in which our ancestors the Druids consumed their victims; all these terrific scenes shrink into nothing before the amount of human beings regularly slaughtered on the altars of the Mexican gods, with the revolting circumstances which accompanied their sacrifice. ”

“ Murder, adultery, some kinds of theft, destruction of the landmarks of property, altering the public measures, unfaithful guardianship of the estate of a ward, even intemperance in young persons, were capital crimes. Barbarism and civilization mingled still more strangely in the law of slavery. Prisoners taken in battle were reserved as sacrifices to the gods; but no one could be born to slavery in Mexico. Criminals, public defaulters, (for the system of taxation was rigorous and well organized,) persons in extreme poverty, either became slaves by law, or sold themselves into slavery. ”

“ Besides this, we have the frank and gallant, however rugged, Bernal Diaz, chronicling, from recollection it is true, but still with the fidelity of honest pride and the complacent satisfaction of an old soldier, day by day, the occurrences of the whole war; speaking out, without fear or hesitation, the living feelings, the hopes, and even the fears, the passions, the superstitions of the camp. Bernal Diaz avowedly wrote to vindicate for the soldiers of Cortes that share in the common glory, which Gomara, the other great authority for the war, has ascribed too exclusively to the general. ”

“ Not one flows back to its pleasant source. They rush onward, hastening to bury themselves in the deep bosom of the ocean. The things of yesterday are no more to-day; and the things of to-day shall cease, perhaps on the morrow. The cemetery is full of the loathsome dust of bodies once quickened by living souls, who occupied thrones, presided over assemblies, marshalled armies, subdued provinces, arrogated to themselves worship, were puffed up with vainglorious pomp, and power, and empire. ”

“ As the long file of priests and warriors reached the flat summit of the teocalli, the Spaniards saw the figures of several men stripped to their waists, some of whom, by the whiteness of their skins, they recognized as their own countrymen. They were the victims for sacrifice. Their heads were gaudily decorated with coronals of plumes, and they carried fans in their hands. They were urged along by blows, and compelled to take part in the dances in honor of the Aztec war-god. ”

“ But if the mind of Cortes was once bewildered by the pride of success, how did it rise to meet adversity? In one week after the retreat along the causeway, with his diminished and broken force, without his artillery, with almost all his crossbows gone, with but few of his horses, with many of his men and himself severely wounded, he fights the great battle of Otumba against the whole force of the Mexican empire; he wins it by his own personal prowess in killing the commander of the hostile army. ”

“ But there was one unanswerable argument: the God of the conqueror— (we fear that we must write, considering the share that the Virgin and the Saints took in the conquest) —the Gods of the white men were the strongest and if the deities of the Indians allowed themselves to be tumbled headlong from their pedestals, it was a sure sign that their reign was over, and a full justification for the desertion of their altars. ”

“ His courteous reception of the Spaniards, his submissive acknowledgment of the superiority of the Emperor Charles, above all the liberality of his gifts, embarrassed Cortes more than open hostility; it had whetted the appetites of the soldiery for gold; it had encouraged the resolution of Cortes to effect a complete conquest of the country, yet seemed to have cut off all justification for further aggression. Yet Cortes had only been six days in the city when he determined on the seizure of the emperor in his own palace. Ambition can always find pretexts ”

“ His patriotism warms as he recounts the old hostilities of his countrymen with the Aztecs; and it is singular to observe how the detestation of the rival nations survived their common subjection under the Castilian yoke.
Yet it is chiefly on the institutions, manners, and polity of the kingdoms of the New World, that these masses of published and unpublished documents throw light. The great facts of the invasion and conquest; the life and character of Cortes himself; the triumphs and disasters, the gains and losses, have long been before the world. ”

“ Nor is it unimportant to remark how comparatively recent appears the whole civilization of Anahuac. Even if, as is not improbable, the race who peopled Mexico and Tezcuco were ruder and fiercer tribes, who descended upon an older civilization, and yielded to its subduing influence, (like the shepherds in Egypt or the Tartars in China,) yet that which we are able, on the authority of the earliest traditions, to throw up into the highest antiquity, comes far within the historic times of the Old World. This recent origin effectually cuts off all possible connexion with the West ”

“ Had the Spaniards appeared in the cities of Mexico solely as the champions of humanity—as commissioned by the common Father of mankind forcibly to put down these unspeakable abominations—not as asserting the sovereignty of a foreign emperor, who had no more right to the supremacy over Mexico than over France or England, on the preposterous claim of a papal grant ”

“ Consider the ferocity which a people must have imbibed from these bloody spectacles, and the evidence which is furnished of the warlike character of a nation which could thus feed its altars with thousands of prisoners, from tribes as strong, if not as well armed, as themselves, and our astonishment at the conquest achieved by this handful of Spaniards is immeasurably increased. ”

“ It is a whimsical notion of the author of the “True-born Englishman,” that the devil luckily enabled the Spaniards to discover South America, because the wealth of those provinces, in the hands of any but that proud nation, would have been fatal to the liberties of mankind: thus, by the way, representing the devil as rather more favorable to the liberties of man than might be expected. ”

“ The conqueror had entered Tlascala, and, by the more than human power which he seemed to exercise over the minds of men, he had changed these deadly enemies into faithful allies—all Tlascala was following the stranger in arms, to assist in the conquest of Mexico! ”

“ Some paradoxical writers have attempted to dispute the proofs of cannibalism; which, if less common than is supposed, appears to us to rest on incontestable evidence in so many quarters of the world. The most amiable skepticism can, we fear, encourage no doubt that in Mexico both priests and people feasted on the flesh of the victims, which was cast down among them. It seems to have been a part of the sacrifice just like the feasting on the slaughtered bulls and goats of other religious sacrifices. ”

“ The siege lasted for seventy-five days; of the amount of carnage, it is impossible to form any conjecture. Cortes, on one occasion, speaks of 12,000—in others of 50,000—killed in one conflict. And this warfare was carried on in the name and under the Cross of Christ!
De Solis, like a skilful dramatist, closes his book with the catastrophe of the capture of Guatemozin. Mr. Prescott carries us on through the shifting vicissitudes of the life of Cortes, his popularity in Spain, his favor at the court, his later disastrous adventures in other parts of the American continent. ”

“ Clavigero indeed, who would by no means incline to take a low view of Aztec antiquities, fixes the descent of the Toltecs—the earlest race to whom the vague tradition, which by courtesy is called history, assigns any important influence on the civilization of this part of the New World—in the year 648 of our æra;—the foundation of Mexico, probably far better ascertained, in the year 1325.
Are we not, then, thrown back upon the previous question, whether man at earlier social stages has not a tendency to develop his social being in the same manner? ”

“ There is a fine epic interest in the midnight retreat along the causeways. The battle, from its local circumstances, is perfectly distinct and intelligible; while, on the Spanish side, the individual feats of valor, the personal exploits of Alvarado, Velasquez, Sandoval, and above all of Cortes himself, awaken breathless sympathy. ”

“ The system of intercalation may indeed have forced itself upon different peoples, when they had arrived at the knowledge of the time of the sun’s annual course; and nature itself might seem to establish, especially in the period of superstition through which all nations seem doomed to pass, that period of mourning which followed the sun’s declension, and of rejoicing after the winter solstice, when the lengthening days gave the hope of another revolving year, with all its fruits and blessings. ”

“ We have glanced thus rapidly at some of the more prominent points in this curious, but, we must confess, unsatisfactory discussion, because this appears to be the strongest case in history of a spontaneous and indigenous civilization growing up without foreign influence, and within a recent period. Whatever traditions the natives of Anahuac might inherit from their Asiatic origin, if Asia was indeed the cradle of the race, have survived, what seems incredible, the total extinction of every sign of relationship in the language. ”

“ Yet, in an incredibly short time, Cortes is marching back to Mexico at the head of the troops who came to depose him, now mingled, if not altogether in cordial amity, yet with outward unanimity, among his own veteran soldiers; he has cajoled by smooth language—he has bribed, he has beaten his enemies into his own ranks ”