A slave-owning Spanish colonist became the Indies' fiercest defender
Bartolomé de las Casas arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 as a settler, joined raids and held Indigenous labourers. In 1514, while preparing a Pentecost sermon on a passage from Ecclesiasticus, he concluded the whole Spanish enterprise in the Americas was unjust. He freed his workers and spent roughly half a century fighting colonial abuse.
Born in Seville on 11 November 1484, Las Casas was long thought to be ten years older, until archival work in the 1970s turned up a lawsuit proving the later date. As a boy he saw Columbus return to Seville in 1493, parading seven Indigenous people and brilliant green parrots. His merchant father sailed on Columbus's second voyage and in 1502 took his son to Hispaniola, where the young man received land in Cibao. He went back to Spain to study canon law at Salamanca and was ordained a priest in Rome in 1507.
Change came slowly. When Dominican friars under Pedro de Córdoba reached Santo Domingo in 1510 and refused confession to slave owners, Las Casas was among those turned away, and he argued against them in defence of the encomienda, the grant of forced Native labour. In 1513 he served as chaplain in the conquest of Cuba and witnessed cruelty he later said no living being had ever seen. He still accepted a rich encomienda near Cienfuegos with a friend.
After his conversion he sailed for Spain in 1515 and met the ailing King Ferdinand on Christmas Eve, but the king died on 25 January 1516 before a promised second hearing. Undeterred, he submitted a memorial of remedies to the regents. In it he proposed importing enslaved Africans to spare the Indigenous population, a view he later retracted, deciding both forms of slavery were equally wrong.
A failed attempt at peaceful colonisation in Venezuela in 1522 led him into the Dominican Order and missionary work among the Maya of Guatemala. His lobbying helped secure the New Laws of 1542 against the encomienda. Named the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, he was driven out by hostile settlers. At the Valladolid debate of 1550 he insisted, against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, that Native Americans were fully human. He died on 18 July 1566, and a cause for his beatification was later opened.
Source: Bartolomé de las Casas
