I’ve found little evidence that the European invaders questioned the colonization practices they used to conquer and enslave Indigenous Peoples, seize their lands and take their property. There is an occasional journal entry referring to a soldier refusing to take part in a massacre. Or of priests offering help, such as the Jesuits who gave aid and sanctuary to escaped slaves in Brazil. Almost everyone, it seems, who was involved in the enterprise during those early centuries accepted and promoted the human tragedy that resulted from colonization.
However, there were a couple of notable exceptions. One was Roger Williams (1603 – 1683) who initially was a Puritan minister and founded a colony called Providence Plantation which later became the State of Rhode Island. He had left both the Puritan and Pilgrim colonies in the 1630s for religious reasons – he felt neither were sufficiently separated from the Church of England. He also believed the royal land grants and colony charters were invalid because they did not contain provisions to purchase land from the Indigenous Peoples. Providence Plantation was not created by grant or charter, rather Williams purchased the land from the Narragansetts, who along with other Indigenous nations in the area became his allies. Providence was the first place in modern history where citizenship and religion were separate, providing religious liberty and separation of church and state.
Williams published The Language of America which was a ‘phrase-book’ combined with his observations about life and culture of the Indians of New England. He also made an attempt to correct the attitudes of superiority displayed by the colonists towards Indians with these suggestions:
“Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood.”
“Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good.”
“Of one blood God made Him, and Thee and All.”
Williams consistently expressed disapproval of slavery, though he did not strongly object to the enslavement of captured enemy combatants, but only if it was for a fixed duration. And he even felt an enemy’s women and children could be enslaved if it was necessary due to their loss of family support – their husband and father. When the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws permitting slavery in 1641, Williams led the effort in passing ‘counter’ laws for the Providence Plantation which limited the time an individual could be held as a slave, prevented the importation of slaves from Africa, and established that enslavement could not be passed down to children.
The other individual who raised a dissenting view was Bartolome de las Casas. He lived during the height of the colonization period – 1474 to 1566. Records indicate that he first went to the West Indies as a Spanish soldier in 1497. Under the Spanish Encomienda System, Casas was rewarded for his participation in various military expeditions with a land grant, which included the Indian inhabitants living on that land. (See Spanish Colonization Practices for more information about the Encomienda System) Then in 1513 he participated in the invasion of Cuba and apparently received another land grant with an allotment of native slaves in recognition for his military achievements in that campaign. After the Cuban invasion Casas became troubled when he started to feel that colonization was a ‘sin’ of domination, oppression and injustice that the invaders were inflicting on the Indigenous Peoples. He began to beleive that these sins would be the reason for the misfortunes that Spain would eventually suffer when it became the object of God’s punishment. In a speech on August 15, 1514, Casas announced that he was “returning his Indian serfs to the governor” and sailing to Spain to plead for better treatment for all the native inhabitants in the Spanish colonies. Casas proposed to King Charles I of Spain a plan to create “towns of free Indians” consisting of both Spaniards and Indians who would jointly create a new civilization in the Spanish colonies. The king supported his plan and a group of farmers departed from Spain in December 1520 to establish a new colony in the northern part of present-day Venezuela. But the failure to recruit a sufficient number of farmers, both Indigenous and Spanish, plus the opposition of the other colonies and, finally, an attack by the Indians themselves all were factors that brought a close to the experiment in January 1522.
For the rest of his life Casas was a prominent and respected advocate for the just treatment of the indigenous Peoples of the Americas. He became a Dominican Priest, was appointed a West Indies administrator, was a prolific writer, and made numerous trips around the Americas attempting to convince the conquerors and colonizers to be more humane and fair in their relations with the natives. The Spanish royalty and leaders of the Catholic Church came to accept his positions on the issue, to the point where King Charles I enacted laws that required, among other regulations, that slavery was not an inherited status and owners were to release their Indian slaves after a span of one generation. But overall Casas was not very successful in changing the treatment of the Indigenous Peoples. The conquering and enslavement practices had become irreversibly established in the Spanish colonies. The invaders were much more in agreement with the position held by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who published a book titled Concerning the Just Cause of the War Against the Indians, in which he maintained that the Indians “are inferior to the Spaniards just as children are to adults, women to men, and, indeed, one might even say, as apes are to men.”
In 1542, partially in response to Sepúlveda, Bartolome de las Casas wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, perhaps his best known work. (You can read one chapter at this link: Destruction). The book describes his eyewitness accounts of the torture, mistreatment and genocide of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. The book offers this conclusion: “The reason why the Christians have killed and destroyed such an infinite number of souls is that they have been moved by their wish for gold and their desire to enrich themselves in a very short time.”