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CHAPTER 3

Liquidation of Indigenes | Reliance on Africans | Tensions in London

By the 1540s, it had been almost a half century since the beginning of European invasions in the Americas. What was called the “Mixton War” took place in what was called New Galicia, in the heart of today’s Mexico—the states of Aguascalientes, Guananjuato, Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit, and Zacatecas—in a conflict that had thrown up sparks as early as 1524. Later, due north in what is now New Mexico, conversos, those who were Jewish “passing” as Christian, were blamed for fomenting slave raids, but “Mixton” was said to have a similar purpose. Because of the spectacular losses imposed on indigenes, in the war’s aftermath more enslaved Africans were delivered, which simply substituted one problem for another from the colonizer’s viewpoint.¹

For our purposes here, note that the rampant bloodshed in this section of North America ill prepared indigenes for the siege warfare that culminated in their mass ouster in what is now New Mexico in the nineteenth century. And Spain’s detrimental reliance upon armed Africans was a partial product of privileging religious affiliation, which could at once attract Africans and repel non-Catholic Europeans, a trend that fell victim to the onrushing trend of “whiteness” construction, notably in North America, as perpetrated by London and their republican successors.

IN THE EARLY YEARS OF the 1500s, Spain authorized delivering enslaved Africans in the Americas, though it was not long thereafter that limitations were placed upon the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans since they seemed to have a proclivity to flee and influence indigenes. However, the monarch cancelled this initiative because many of the enslaved were good workers. So by 1510 the Spanish authorities authorized the arrival of non-Christian enslaved Africans from Guinea, and by 1518 the continuing slaughter of indigenes seemed to admit no alternative to admitting more Africans. Certainly, the deployment of Africans as footmen and warriors alike created numerous problems for the colonizer. Ultimately, the slaveholder was seeking to entice Africans to enforce his will on other Spaniards, the prospect of which, arising in London’s settlements in the 1770s, contributed mightily to the successful republican revolt, animated by a “whiteness” that served to disrupt the possibility of alliances across increasingly rigid racial lines.²

By 1532, the elite in Santo Domingo complained to the Crown that rogues and rebels among Africans belonging to the clergy had committed grave crimes, with some fleeing to monasteries on the island where the believers hid and defended them from molestation of any sort. Earlier the Africans demonstrated that they were not eternally bound to the Spaniards when a rebellion of the indigenes spearheaded by the cacique Enrique on the island was joined by Africans who fled the plantation to join them. These were the reputed Wolof rebels from today’s Senegal, who induced an equal number to join them on one of the earliest revolts of the enslaved in the hemisphere, a rebellion that may have lasted until 1533. Then, as already noted, there was the revolt with the Guale in the southeast quadrant of the North American mainland, which was followed by yet another trend that served to set “whiteness” in motion: by 1539, Frenchmen, working closely with African maroons in Cuba, attacked and burned Havana and attempted to seize neighboring Santiago. Interestingly, John Brown was emulating these adventurers by 1859, with similar impassioned response in both instances.

In what is now the U.S. Southwest, Spanish conquerors were clearing the ground for the eventual arrival of republicans by waging a brutal war against chichimecas, a generic term of contempt, a dehumanization of indigenes to the level of “uncivilized dogs,” a prerequisite for liquidation. Indigenes were left with unappetizing choices of enslavement or annihilation.³ Nevertheless, there was a real danger to settlers in Mexico in what were described as “chichimeca” raids, often augmented by allied Africans escaped from servitude, notably in the areas stretching from Guadalajara and Zacatecas to Guanajuato. Official complaints about this can be tracked from the 1540s in Nueva Galicia, and raids by Africans were invariably linked to official reports to the “chichimeca” marauders.⁴

Across the Caribbean, African rebels had plagued the government of “Cartagena de Indias” for nine years by 1545, a repetitive tendency. Madrid again sought to exclude African Ladinos, those most acquainted with Spaniards, just as another futile attempt was made to exclude Wolofs and Muslims generally and Berbers too. Yet by the 1540s, as one acute observer put it, Santo Domingo resembled Ethiopia. Then the count was maybe 30,000 Africans and 1,200 Spaniards, with perhaps 6,000 that could be defined as “white” if dependents were included. The slavocracy of the island included a goodly number of what the late scholar France Scholes of New Mexico described as “Spanish Jews who managed to run the island as it suited them by holding a majority of offices in the Cabildo or administration as late as 1554.” Like others, they were in the hot seat when thousands of Africans compelled some slaveholders to sue for peace. By 1546 war had been declared upon these insurgents, as Africans, said Scholes, “threatened to become masters of the island.” Their holy cause was symbolized by Sebastian Lemba, one of a number of remarkable African insurgents in the Americas—Guinean in his case—in the conflicted century. His courage was echoed across the water in Panama, where religious ceremonies that spurred on Africans were said to have originated in the Sudan, and also resembled what was then occurring in the land of Yorubas.

The beset colonizers were in the untenable position of bringing more enslaved Africans to the hemisphere, just as free labor of indigenes was being impacted by the genocidal lust of the conquerors.⁵ As the midpoint of the sixteenth century passed, Africans outnumbered significantly the number of Spaniards in the colonies. Spain was overstretched as early as midcentury with financing dependent upon Lombardy since—again—religious sectarianism meant exclusion of Moors and those from the Jewish community, a now archaic principle incongruent with the rise of the new system that was capitalism.⁶

Unfortunately, among the Africans joining the Spaniards in fighting indigenes were the famed conquistadors Juan Garrido and Juan Valiente. There was much work to be done in this regard since indigenous and enslaved rebellions (at times combined) were becoming regularized: Santo Domingo in 1522, New Spain in 1523; as noted, today’s Carolina by 1526; Cuba in 1530 and what is now Colombia by 1530 when the five-year-old capital was destroyed by slave rebellions; restiveness in what is today’s Ecuador was so severe that by the end of the century an independent polity had been formed, recognized partially by the Crown.⁷ Given Spain’s religious sectarianism, which narrowed the base of colonialism, the Crown was left with the unappetizing prospect of empowering Africans. Thus, in the second half of the sixteenth century in Chile, there was continual warfare between the colonizers and indigenes, leaving few appetizing alternatives. Due north, in the Yucatan, indigenes rose in 1546 as one and were squashed by the colonizers, who enslaved those they captured and sold them in the Caribbean islands. Nonetheless, a few years later there were enslaved Mozambicans in that vast region, meaning the Crown was relying upon one group of Africans not to ally with another.⁸

Thus, Africans were aboard Magellan’s fleet as early as 1519. Understandably, one Spaniard was cited for the proposition that “we cannot live without black people; it is they who are the labourers and no Spanish person will work here,” meaning the Americas, but increasingly, Africans were toiling in Europe too. By 1550 Africans comprised a reported 7.5 percent of the population of Sevilla and later the city was described as a “giant chessboard containing an equal number of white and black chessmen,” a reputed inflation that conveyed an accurate point. England was not so marked, at least not to the same degree, and that may help explain why Africans probably fared better there than in Iberia for a good deal of the sixteenth century. And after Iberia, the largest African populations in Europe were in Milan—continuously the subject of bicker between “Frenchmen” and Milanese—Naples, and Sicily (all ruled from Madrid after 1535).⁹

Moreover, Spaniards were enduring revolts by thousands of organized indigenes in Darien, a province of Panama.¹⁰ Predictably, in 1537 Africans revolted in the heart of New Spain, as their numbers were at a level that gave them confidence that they could succeed, and then they rebelled again in 1612.¹¹ Tristan de Luna y Arrellano, who reached today’s Pensacola by 1559, sharpened his skill in combating indigenes in Oaxaca by 1548.¹²

Moreover, in the first half of the sixteenth century, there was an acute shortage of Spanish women in many of the hemispheric colonies, yet as the inevitable occurred and the number of mestizos grew, the Crown fretted that this would simply fuel dreams of secession.¹³ The situation cried out for a “whiteness” project, curbing religious sectarianism and inviting settlers from various European polities irrespective of confessional preferences, but it would take the scrappy underdogs who were the Protestants to embark on this pragmatic route. Assuredly, rampaging indigenes were not sitting around waiting for the Crown to sort out its demographic problems but, instead, were attacking on virtually every front.¹⁴ Enslaving indigenes and Africans was complicated when in 1550 the Crown hampered the ability to acquire slaves from the eastern Mediterranean—similar grounds hindered acquiring Wolofs, that is, their being largely Muslim, not to mention rebellious; in the long run, this would mean more enslaving of non-Muslim Africans and indigenes.¹⁵

Not accidentally, the mass liquidation of indigenes increased the odds of Spanish colonialism prevailing. But working against Madrid was its intensifying rule of the Netherlands, dominated by the Crown for decades, which drove numerous refugees into England. This flow increased beginning in about 1550 and continued for decades and contributed to the tens of thousands who made England their new home—and also, coincidentally, contributed to an incipient “whiteness.” Tellingly, Antwerp, a nearby site of Spanish influence, had one of the largest populations of Africans in Europe.¹⁶ In short, Spain’s religious sectarianism was at odds with the needs of colonialism, meaning, for example, that Havana’s resident European population generally did not grow in the 1540s and 1550s, which would mean more reliance upon Africans.¹⁷

This reliance was understandable since the liquidation of indigenes since 1492 had been nothing less than breathtaking. The objection of the colonist Bartolomé de las Casas is now well known, as indigenous numbers fell precipitously from approximately two million in 1492 to less than 15,000 a few decades later.¹⁸ The enraged cleric lamented that “there is no language, no art or science, that can avail to recite the abominable and bloody actions committed by these human monsters. Neither is it possible to exaggerate their detestable deeds” for “to all these horrible scenes, I was an eye-witness.” He cried that the conquerors sought to “blind their eyes with red hot irons, sear their tongues from their mouths,” and “drop molten lead on their bare flesh.”¹⁹ Thus, alert to the demographic debacle, when Charles V authorized the importation of more Africans into the Americas, the license for delivering 17,000 unfortunate souls was said to be for “philanthropic motives,” that is, “to preserve the Indians,” an exercise in the rankest cynicism.²⁰