Spanish colonization

“ It was not, however, without difficulty that the Mexican empire could be entirely reduced to the form of a Spanish province. Enraged and rendered desperate by oppression, the natives forgot the superiority of their enemies, and ran to arms in defence of their liberties. In every contest, however, the European valour and discipline prevailed. But fatally for the honour of their country, the Spaniards sullied the glory redounding from these repeated victories, by their mode of treating the vanquished people. ”

“ Population and industries.—The heroic age of Spanish colonization had now passed. The surprising results achieved in the New World during the first eighty years, not counting the work of exploration, are set forth in a description of the colonies in 1574 written by López de Velasco, official geographer. At that time there were in North and South America about two hundred Spanish towns and cities, besides numerous mining camps, haciendas, and stock ranches. The Spanish population was 32,000 families, or perhaps from 160,000 to 200,000 persons. ”

“ French adventure and enterprise had precedence in the actual colonization of the northern half of this continent. Spain was long content with conquest without colonization. She has in Mexico and in South America all that can be said to be rightfully hers in the perpetuation of her language, in exclusive privileges of commerce, in the mixture of Spanish with native blood, and in the still effective, though strained and fretting, ties of traditional loyalty recognized by her transatlantic subjects on main and island. ”

“ We need not therefore stay to express our abhorrence of Spanish cruelty, or describe at great length the deeds of own countrymen in any quarter of the globe,—it is enough to say that English and American treatment of the aborigines of their colonies is but Spanish cruelty repeated. With one or two beautiful exceptions, which we shall have the greatest pleasure in pointing out, no more regard has been paid to the rights or the feelings of the North American Indians by the English and their descendants, than was paid to the South Americans by the Spanish and Portuguese. ”

“ In treating Spain's part in the New World it has been customary, after recounting the discovery of America, to proceed at once to territory now within the United States—Florida, New Mexico, Texas—forgetting that these regions were to Spain only northern outposts, and omitting the wonderful story of Spanish achievement farther south. This book being a history of the colonization of North America, Spain's great colonies in South America, now powerful nations, fall beyond our geographical limits. ”

“ Imagine the privates of an army of foot soldiers pocketing for prize-money, each four thousand pounds! the troopers each eight thousand! But enormous as this seems, there is no doubt that it would have been vastly more had the natives been as confident in the faith of the Spaniards as they had reason to be of the reverse. The Inca, Garcillasso, and some of the Spanish historians, tell us that on the Spaniards displaying their greedy spirit of plunder, vast quantities of treasure vanished from public view, and never could be discovered again. ”

“ It required but a single well directed stroke, and the Anglo-Saxon race and the hated Protestant faith would perish together.
We have glanced at the barbarous scenes with which Spain opened her schemes of colonization in North America. The same malign purposes and bigoted spirit moved all her subsequent counsels, and hung like a dark and portentous cloud over the future peace and prosperity of her border settlements.
In her efforts to make good her pretensions, a series of petty jealousies and strife between the English and Spanish races ensued. Distrust and jealousy were fostered. ”

“ The only Spanish settlement was still Santa Fe, where lived two hundred and fifty Spaniards and some seven hundred and fifty half-breeds and Indian servants. The Indians of the province who were not personal servants paid tribute of a yard of cotton cloth and two bushels of maize each year, burdens which they resented and resisted. There were now friars at work in twenty-five missions, which served ninety pueblos comprising 60,000 Indians. At each mission there were schools and workshops where the neophytes were taught reading, writing, singing, instrumental music, and manual arts. ”

“ At the outset there was a period of undoubted prosperity, due in part to a continuation of the favoring legislation of the era of the Catholic Kings, but more particularly to the enormously increased demand resulting from the rapid and extensive colonization of the Americas, whose commerce was restricted by law to favored regions of the Spanish kingdom. The American trade and to some extent the considerable fortunes gained in the colonies themselves provided capital for a yet further expansion of the industrial wealth of the peninsula. ”

“ After touching at different spots, to remind the natives of the Christian faith by "routing them with great slaughter," and carrying off provisions, cotton garments, gold, and twenty female slaves, one of whom was the celebrated woman, called by the Spaniards Donna Marina, who rendered them such services as interpreter, they entered, on the 2nd of April 1519, the harbour of St. Juan de Ulua. Here we are told by the Spanish historians, that the natives came on board in the most friendly and unsuspicious manner. ”

“ Commercial relations of Spain and England, 1715-1739.—By the treaty of Utrecht England had gained the right to supply the Spanish colonies with slaves and to send an annual cargo of five hundred tons to Spanish ports. English merchants were not satisfied with this paltry trade, and smuggling increased. Spanish coast guard ships seized many of the English traders, who received rough handling by the Spanish officials. During 1738 and 1739 public opinion in England became more and more inflamed against Spain. ”

“ On the other hand, the Florida frontier, which in the seventeenth century had been pushed back by the English colonies of Virginia and the Carolinas, was now still further contracted by the establishment of French Louisiana and English Georgia, while in the West Indies and Honduras Spanish rule suffered a like diminution through the continued advance of the English, French, and Dutch. The Asiento of 1713 with Great Britain was a particularly hard blow at Spain's commercial independence, and was made worse by England's gross violation of the compact. ”

“ Married Spaniards emigrating from Spain were urged or even required to take their families but the emigration of unmarried Spanish women was discouraged. Intermarriage of Spaniards with native women was favored by the authorities and, as a large majority of the immigrants were single men, the practice was common, either with or without formal sanction. An effort to supply the lack of women by sending white slaves to the islands failed, and in 1514 marriage with Indian women was approved by royal order. With the opening of Mexico and Peru the island colonies were in danger of depopulation. ”

“ The Adelantados.—The latter sixteenth century was still within the age of the adelantados, when the development of the Spanish frontiers was left largely to men of means, obligated to bear most of the expense of conquering and peopling the wilderness, in return for wide powers, extravagant titles, and extensive economic privileges. As types of these proprietary conquerors of the period there stand out Ibarra in Nueva Vizcaya, Menéndez in Florida, Legazpi in the Philippines, Carabajal in Nuevo León, and Oñate in New Mexico. ”

“ In Spanish America it was the civil disqualification and social degradation of this race that brought on the revolution, and the loss of those vast regions to the mother country. In our East Indies, what thousands upon thousands of coloured children their white fathers have coolly abandoned ”

“ Administrative divisions.—Spanish America was now divided into two viceroyalties, New Spain and Peru. New Spain included all of the American mainland north of Panamá, the West Indies, part of the northern coast of South America, the Islas del Poniente, and the Philippines. It comprised the four audiencias of Española, Mexico, Guatemala, and Nueva Galicia, the Audiencia of Panamá being a part of the viceroyalty of Peru. ”

“ Some teachers may for special reasons wish to treat the development of the colonies of a single nation as a continuous movement, or in longer periods, less frequently broken by happenings in the colonies of other nations. This can be done conveniently by grouping the chapters in the desired order. A continuous account of Spanish expansion is given in Chapters II, III, XIII, XVI, and XXI. A connected story of French America is told in Chapters IV, XIV, XV, XX. By omitting these and Chapter IX a continuous narrative of English expansion is obtained. ”

“ There is, then, in this period of colonization, a well-defined migration northward. The ancient cities in the south did not die out at once, and we may suppose that the sixth century of our era was a time of great cultural activity. ”

“ Mexico and Peru had proved to be inexhaustible sources of wealth, and when the gold and silver diminished, the Viceroys in these and the other colonies could compel the people to wring rich products out of the soil, enough to supply Spain's necessities. The inhabitants of these colonies, composed of the aboriginal races with an admixture of Spanish, had [pg 138] been treated as slaves and drudges for so many centuries that they never dreamed of resistance, nor questioned the justice of a fate which condemned them always to toil for Spain. ”

“ And at the period that a few scanty bands of expatriated malefactors, and of refugees for opinion’s sake, flying from persecution to the wilderness, toiled out a scanty and laborious existence in the forests and prairies of North America, and alone represented the Anglo-Saxon race in the New World, Spain was in secure and undisturbed enjoyment of two vast and productive empires. To-day, how great the contrast! The unwieldy Spanish colonies have crumbled and fallen to pieces, the petty English settlements have grown into a flourishing and powerful nation. ”

“ It is hardly to be believed that either Great Britain or the Indian proprietors have so disinterested a regard for us, as to be willing to relieve us, by receiving such a colony themselves.... On our western and southern frontiers, Spain holds an immense country, the occupancy of which, however, is in the Indian natives, except a few insulated spots possessed by Spanish subjects. It is very questionable, indeed, whether the Indians would sell? ”

“ The spanish domination during the colony was overwhelming and absolute, reaching so inhumane extremes, which only demonstrate the spiritual poverty of the spanish who carried out the invasion. By the end of the colonial period, it is estimated that the New Spain approximately had six million people, of these, according to the 1793 census there were eight thousand peninsular Spanish, who controlled the political, economic and social power of the entire population. ”

“ If, on the one hand, the early conquistadores treated the natives with hideous cruelty, the Spanish government legislated more systematically and benevolently to protect them than any other colonizing power. In the time of the first conquests things moved too rapidly for the home government in those days of slow communication, and the horrors of the clash between ruthless gold-seekers and the simple children of nature, as depicted by the impassioned pen of Las Casas and spread broadcast over Europe, came to be the traditional and accepted characteristic of Spanish rule. ”

“ This is especially necessary on account of the traditional and widely prevalent opinion that the Spanish colonial system was always and everywhere a system of oppression and exploitation; whereas, as a matter of fact, the Spanish system, as a system of laws, always impeded the effectual exploitation of the resources of their colonies, and was far more humane in its treatment of dependent peoples than either the French or English systems. ”

“ The depopulation of Spain dates certainly from the Moorish conquest, possibly from the earlier Visigothic invasion. The Moors decimated the native population; when they in turn were expelled, the country lost not only a numerically large section of its inhabitants, but the section best able to develop its natural wealth. The wars of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and the vast potentialities of fortune which drew men to the Spanish colonies in America, caused a further serious drain upon the population. ”

“ However much we may deprecate the treatment of the Indians by the conquistadores, we must not forget that the greater part of the population of Spanish America to-day is still Indian, and that no other colonizing people have succeeded like the Spaniards in assimilating and civilizing the natives. The code of laws which the Spaniards gradually evolved for the rule of their transmarine provinces, was, in spite of defects which are visible only to the larger experience of the present day, one of the wisest, most humane and best co-ordinated of any to this day published for any colony. ”

“ Colonies, from being primarily fields for the propagation of Christianity and incidentally for the production of wealth, became the field primarily for industrial and commercial development and incidentally for Christian work. The change no doubt has contributed vastly to the wealth of the world and to progress, but it has been fatal to the native populations. The Spanish policy aimed to preserve and civilize the native races, not to establish a new home for Spaniards, and the colonial legislation provided elaborate safeguards for the protection of the Indians. ”