# About Mexico - Past and Present/Chapter 19

Table of Contents
CHAPTER XIX.
THE HEEL OF THE OPPRESSOR.
A GREAT storm broke over the ruined city the night after the surrender of Guatemozin. The rain came down in torrents, as though the pitying heavens would wash out the awful blood-stains with which men had polluted the earth. The streets were deserted by friend and by foe. Only the dead were there, lying in silent heaps over which brooded the pestilence. More than fifty-five thousand persons are said to have perished within the city by sword and by famine in that siege of seventy-five days.
Taking with them the captured chief Guatemozin and all the treasure which could be found after a most diligent search, the Spaniards withdrew to Cuyoacan, a city on the mainland, not far south of Mexico.
Cortez had not secured peace for himself by the destruction of Mexico. Envious tongues were busy against him on both sides of the Atlantic, and he was in constant danger of arrest and recall. More than once directions were sent to Mexico to hang him without the ceremony of a trial. Admiral Columbus, a son of the great discoverer, was one of those who came from Cuba to put an end to what were deemed his treasonable designs. In ​spite of these untoward circumstances, and before the smoke of battle had fairly lifted, Cortez sent out exploring parties to continue the search for that strait to the south seas of which all Europe was dreaming, and with less than a thousand of his countrymen, some of whom were disloyal at heart, he proceeded to garrison the valley and the Gulf coast, and to subdue the outlying tribes.
Among those who came to pay their respects to the conqueror were the Michoacans, a powerful tribe living about two hundred miles west of Mexico. Warned by the fate of that city, and afraid, perhaps, that their turn might come next, they hastened to become the allies of the great lord Cortez claimed to represent. He received the embassy, which was headed by the principal chief himself, with the honor due to distinguished visitors, and by way of entertainment took them in one of his brigantines to view the ruins of the great Aztec capital. They gazed on the widespread scene of desolation with mute wonder, but seemed much less impressed by that than by the running of the horses and the noise made by the black monsters that vomited fire.
These people told of a great sea lying near their country, toward the sunset. About the same time Cortez heard of another large body of water, stretching far to the south. In the geographies of those days all unknown lands were counted as islands, and, now that it was settled that the world was round, men were continually looking for a passage between these to "other islands, rich in gold, pearls, precious stones and spiceries." The report of these Indian visitors therefore received immediate attention. Explorers were sent west and south ​with strict orders not to return without discovering and taking possession of these seas by setting up crosses along their shores.
Mexico was now more of a fortress than ever, though it did not cover so much ground as formerly it had done. All the canals were filled up and the streets laid out wide and straight. Day and night the work went on until it was completed. Like the children of Israel who built the cities of old Egypt, the lives of these Aztec masons and carpenters were "made bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field." On the foundations of the old teocallis rose a great cathedral. The Aztecs had boasted that human blood and precious stones had been freely mingled in the mortar of their temple; the building which replaced it, though dedicated to the Prince of peace, cost them far more in human life and treasure.
In time nearly all the country known at the beginning of the sixteenth century as Mexico was conquered by Spain. A few wandering tribes at the North continued to defy all attempts at subjugation, and still lived by the chase. Village Indians—who, as far as possible, have maintained their old laws and customs, in spite of foreign intruders—have always boasted with a laudable pride that no Spanish, or even Aztec, banner ever floated over their lands. These are tilled in common now as then. These people still speak their old dialects and refuse to learn any other, communication for the purposes ​of trade being kept up by a few men who act as interpreters and attend to the business of the tribe. In recesses among the mountains far to the south are tribes which have held entirely aloof from white men, whose very existence is known only by hearsay. Many others that are better known have been so reduced in numbers and so broken by oppression that scarcely a trace of their old character remains.
Some who took the wrong, or unfortunate, side in the struggle constantly going on between Cortez and his Spanish enemies were punished with fire and sword. Many a chief was hung from his own roof tree or burned at the stake, while thousands of the common people were branded as slaves and sold to the highest bidder, to wear out their lives in cruel bondage.
Poor Guatemozin, the young Aztec "chief-of-men," lost his life in these contentions. It was in 1525. Cortez had gone to Honduras, a journey of fifteen hundred miles, to put down D'Olid, one of his captains, who had been sent to the south on a colonizing expedition and undertook to set up for himself. Besides his Spaniards, horse and foot, Cortez had three thousand Mexican troops. The wild mountain-ravines echoed with the strains of martial music as they passed along, while buffoons in gay attire cheered the way with jest and song. But during this almost kingly progress through the land food and provender gave out, and the whole army were in great peril from famine. For days they subsisted on grass and the roots of an herb which burned the lips and the tongue. The poor fool who rode near Cortez was the first who died. The Indian guides lost the way, and the whole party would have perished in those pathless forests but for the mariner's compass which Cortez always ​carried. The army became so disorganized that each man foraged for himself. Sandoval, the faithful friend of Cortez, was obliged to go out at night to procure food for him, for his rations were stolen constantly. It is said of the Mexicans that from the chiefs down they fared much better, as they kidnapped unwary natives in villages through which they passed and had some cannibal feasts until Cortez heard of it and put an end to their orgies.
In this state of affairs the Aztec chief who rebuilt Mexico came to Cortez with the story of an Aztec plot to reinstate Guatemozin in his chieftainship. At no time since the conquest had there been a better opportunity for revolt; the city was weakly guarded and the garrison was a house divided against itself. The informer showed Cortez pictures of those who led the conspirators; they were Guatemozin and his friend, the chief of Tlacopan. They were both seized immediately and examined separately, and after a short trial, with dubious proofs of guilt, both were hung by the roadside on a great ceyba tree. The people, seeing Cortez in his tent studying his chart and compass, concluded that he was a magician, and that the trembling little needle he so anxiously watched had been telling him the secrets of hearts. Some of them, afraid for their own lives, came to him and begged him to look again at the strange oracle and ask it if they were not true friends to the white man. It is needless to say that Cortez improved this, as he did all other opportunities, to establish his character of a teule, or god.
The subjugation of the tribes of Mexico was not accomplished until the Spaniards had swept the land as with a besom of destruction. Cities were depopulated ​and leveled to the earth, the mountains denuded of their forests, streams and lakes dried up, the farms laid waste, and those of the people who escaped the awful havoc of war were driven into hopeless slavery. The bishop of Chiapas affirms that fifteen million out of the thirty million found by the Spaniards on entering the country had been cut off before the land had been quieted in that mental and moral death which followed the conquest. Well may historians call this "one unspeakable outrage, one unutterable ruin"!
The priests who accompanied the army of zealots which overran the country seem from the first to have counseled more gentle measures, but all alike were bent on forcing the conquered race into obedience to the pope. They had come to wipe out paganism and drive the people like a flock of frightened sheep into the fold of the true Church. When they saw the picture-writings of the Aztecs and the sculptured walls of their temples, it was decided that all such heathenish rubbish must be put out of sight as soon as possible. Thousands of carefully written books were therefore piled up and burned, and as far as possible everything which reminded the people of their ancient faith was destroyed, unless, as was often the case, it could be furbished up and adopted by the Church. Without waiting to understand enough of the language to communicate an idea in words, they baptized the natives in crowds. One priest boasted that he had converted and brought into the Church from ten to fifteen thousand in a single day. So superficial was the work that, although Mexico became one of the most faithful and intolerant upholders of Rome, so much of the ancient idolatry remained that to this day intelligent defenders of the papacy visiting Mexico blush for shame at what ​they may well call a paganized Christianity. In many cases the same idol has served for both forms of idolatry when reclothed, renamed and well sprinkled with holy water. Tomantzin—"Our Mother"—was once worshiped by crowds in the very spot now sacred to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the tutelar divinity of Mexico.
The land must have been full of idols. The Franciscans boasted that in eight years they had broken twenty thousand images. On a high mountain in Miztec one of the Dominican friars found a little idol called "the Heart of the People." It was a beautiful emerald four inches long and two wide, engraved with snakes and other sacred devices. Knowing its great value as a gem, a Spanish cavalier tried to buy it, but the pious friar was horror-struck at the idea, and, proceeding with what he considered his duty, he ground it to powder and strewed it to the winds.
In this respect the early Fathers were a great contrast to those who followed them. One of the first acts of Cortez as governor-general had been to propose a plan for the conversion of the Indians, and one of its prime requisites, in his opinion, was that no prelate or bishop should be sent to New Spain, since the first object of such officials would be to make money. "They will use," he says, "the estates of the Church in pageants and other foolish matters, and bestow rights of inheritance on their sons or relatives." He told the king very plainly that if the Indians had an opportunity to compare the honest, moral lives of their old priests with those led by the corrupt dignitaries of Rome it would be worse for the latter: "If they, the pagans, understood that these were the ministers of God who were indulging in vicious habits, as is the case in these days in Spain, it would lead them ​to undervalue our faith and treat it with derision, and all the preachers in the world would not be able to counteract the mischief arising from this source."
The frightful oppressions of the Indians by the colonists were for many years combated by the monks. When Charles V. changed the form of colonial government to that of an audiencia, the president and four councilmen who composed the body seem to have vied with each other in keeping up the pomp and ceremony of court-life, and the labors of the Indians in building their palaces and in bringing provisions for their luxurious establishments were greatly increased. In six or eight months one hundred and thirteen persons, men and women, died from exposure in carrying burdens from distant mines and fields and gardens through the snow and rain of those bleak uplands. The monks, who always sided with the Indians, thundered from the pulpit and the confessional, aiming especially at the auditors, whose sumptuous works were carried on at such a sacrifice of human life. The audiencia, in revenge for some of. the plain sermons of the first bishop of Mexico, cut off his support. He retaliated by excommunicating the audiencia. In 1530 a great junta, or council, was held in Spain, to consider the important questions arising out of the relations between the colonists and their serfs; for such they truly were. The decision was unanimously in favor of the Indians. ​Of the priests, none were more faithful friends to the natives than was the philanthropist Las Casas. While a young man residing in Cuba his attention had been called to their wrongs. His Dominican confessor had decided that his sins could not be forgiven while he owned Indians. With his eyes thus opened, Las Casas began to preach against his brother-slaveholders. He finally saw it to be his duty to go to Spain to plead the cause of the Indians with the king himself. It seems that while Charles V. was yet a boy his heart had been touched by the stories related to him by Las Casas, who had been to America with Columbus in 1494. Las Casas determined to use his influence with the king in behalf of the oppressed people of Cuba and other islands, who were melting away.
Las Casas became a priest in order to preach the gospel to the Indians and humanity to their oppressors. He had a friend in Cuba to whom he applied for money to enable him to carry out this noble aim. To his surprise, he found that the eyes of his friend, Reuteria, had also been opened, and that he was preparing at that very time to go to Spain on the same errand. After conferring together, however, it was decided that, since they were both so poor, Reuteria should mortgage his farm and Las Casas should sell his horse, and that all they both could raise should be spent by the latter in a trip to Spain. While there he gained new light on the avarice and tyranny of the Spanish colonists. The facts were so disheartening that he was afraid to speak all his mind to the all-powerful Cardinal Ximenes, with whom he consulted about the wrongs of the Indians. But one day he asked,
"With what justice can these things be done, whether the Indians are free or not?" ​Ximenes exclaimed,
"With no justice! What! are they not free? Who doubts about their being free?"
It was while such discussions as these were going on that the planters bethought themselves that the negroes of Africa might replace the Indians. While Charles V. was in Germany he was besieged with petitions to grant licenses for the importation of Africans to till the depopulated soil of the West Indies and of other Spanish colonies. Ximenes protested, and twelve times during fifty years Las Casas crossed the sea on his philanthropic errands, but in vain.
One of the earliest effects of the discovery of America was a division of its lands (repartimientos) among the settlers from the Old World. In 1497 a patent was granted to Christopher Columbus authorizing him to divide the newly-discovered countries among his followers. It was his decision that "the natives should till the soil for the benefit of those who hold them." Little did this good man think of the inheritance of shame and sorrow he was preparing for his countrymen and their victims in lands he had never seen.
At first the Spaniards had only a life-estate in the serfs; next, the owner had the right to the service of a man and his son, and finally the natives were doomed to unending servitude. They could be taken from place to place at their master's pleasure, with such wages as he chose to give or with none at all. These removals were the sorest trial the village Indians could endure. To be torn from the lands their forefathers had tilled, to work in mines for life, and to be compelled to labor on farms when they had been trained at the loom, were alike irksome to these creatures of custom. Not only toil, but tribute, ​was exacted. Every male over fourteen was obliged at appointed times to bring a little packet or quill of golddust if he lived near to or worked in a mine; or if he had no gold, he paid tribute in cotton.
After several experiments, the government of Mexico and of other Spanish colonies in the West was confided to the "council of the Indies," a body of men appointed by the king and nominally responsible to him. This council was represented in New Spain by a viceroy, who, with the old audiencia for his counselors, was absolute enough for a real monarch. There had been so much difficulty in ruling through persons of inferior rank, like the audiencia, that it was decided to put a man over them with "that divinity which doth hedge a king," that he might stand between the natives and the crowd of moneymaking adventurers who were flocking to America. Of the sixty-four viceroys who reigned in Mexico, several seem to have befriended the downtrodden race over whom they were placed. The second of these rulers declared that "justice to the Indians was of more importance than all the mines in the world, and that the revenues they yielded to the Spanish Crown were not of such a character that all human and divine laws were to be sacrificed in order to obtain them."
During the reign of Mendoza, the first viceroy, the Indians, grown desperate with their manifold wrongs, rose in their first formidable rebellion since the death of Guatemozin. The old names of Tlascala, Cholula and Tezcuco gleam out as of old in the records of these stormy days, although in the guise of serfs one scarcely recognizes the proud warriors of twenty years before. Up to that time their chiefs still wore their old insignia of rank and tied their hair on the tops of their heads ​with red leather. Those who had been loyal to Spain were now rewarded by permission from the viceroy to ride on horseback and carry a gun when they followed him to put down the insurrection. The gachupines were very angry about this conciliatory policy of the wise Mendoza; but when the news reached Spain, the king, who always had in his heart a warm corner for the Indians, was so much interested that he issued an edict of emancipation, with full authority to the messenger who took it to Mexico to enforce all its commands. If putting the Indians on horseback was an affront to the Spanish pride, the planters were much more deeply moved when their pockets were touched. After a vain attempt to resist the new law, a delegation of Creoles was sent to Spain to protest against this sentimental interference with their human machines. The good Las Casas, then bishop of Chiapas, tried his hand at mending matters, but he was too true a friend of the red men to be tolerated, and he was ever afterward regarded by the planters as their enemy.
Unfortunately for the Indians, the delegation reached Spain at a time when Charles V. was in great trouble. He was always in want of money to carry on his numerous wars, but never had he been in such need as now. The Turks, who for a long time had been thundering at the eastern gate of his empire, now boldly entered and snatched away the crown of Hungary, which he must win back at any cost. His quarrels with his neighbor across the Pyrenees, Francis I., were now at their height, and both these potentates were ransacking Europe for allies and borrowing money wherever they could get it. For political reasons, Charles was just then very friendly ​with the Protestants, and had thus offended the pope, who would be sure, unless pacified, to retaliate by stirring up trouble in other quarters. Besides all this, the ravages of pirates in the Mediterranean called for a strong hand to punish these old offenders. In doing this a great Spanish fleet was lost in one of the most awful storms which ever swept the seas, and hundreds of ships were wrecked, with the loss of eight thousand men. It will easily be seen that with all these troubles the emperor could not afford to quarrel just then with his colonists. Favored by these circumstances, and by means of bribery, the Mexican delegation carried their point and went home rejoicing, to rivet still tighter those chains which bound the Indians of New Spain to a life of hopeless slavery. Although a few of the principal Indian families remained who by law were entitled to the privileges enjoyed by the Spanish nobility, they were a conquered people and lived in bondage. It was to the interest of their conquerors that they should be kept in ignorance, counted as minors, shut up in villages by themselves and forbidden to engage in commerce.
The natural taste of the Indians for engraving, embroidery, feather-and mosaic-work, modeling in clay, and other like occupations requiring artistic skill, met with great disapproval from the Council in Spain. They were forbidden to engage in anything but the coarsest work, lest they should become discontented or unfit for menial service. This oppression was at last so evident to the world that the pope, with all his jealousy of Charles V., declared that "the Indians are really and truly men capable of receiving the Christian faith."
But those original proprietors of the soil were often sullen and distrustful, only held in check by the strong ​arm of the law, and quite as liable to break out in unexpected times and places as were the long-slumbering fires of their own volcanoes. Again and again in Spanish colonial history was the cruel Indian warfare of our own times enacted. During a time of famine they burned the palace of the viceroy over his head and tore down some of the public buildings in a blind fury which struck alike at friend and at foe. Even the labors of their kind-hearted spiritual Fathers were several times repaid by general murder and pillage.
Famines were sadly common. At one time this disaster was followed by a plague which carried off two million people. In the all-absorbing search for gold the old system of irrigation was neglected, and the mountains, made bare of their natural covering of trees, ceased to regulate the supply of moisture. The streams, suddenly swollen by rain, often became raging torrents, and, overleaping their natural bounds, poured down the mountain-sides into the lakes. In the Valley of Mexico there were five of these which were often so full in times of freshets that they overflowed every barrier and ran together.
Lake Tezcuco, in which the City of Mexico originally stood, and which is still near it, is twenty-six feet lower than Lake Zumpango, farther north. In 1607, after the city had been several times flooded by the influx of the waters from the upper lake, it was resolved that it should be drained by tunneling the mountain-wall which surrounds the valley at its lowest point. Fifteen thousand Indians were set to work on this gigantic enterprise, and by a reckless sacrifice of human life the subterranean canal, twelve miles long, was cut through in a few months, making an outlet to the sea. But the torrents ​which sometimes flowed through it carried with them so much sand and rubbish that the canal was soon choked up, not being made with a sufficient slope to give momentum to the current. The sides gave way, the vaulted roof fell in, and the upper lake was dammed up again. More than seventy years afterward the consulado, or incorporated merchants of Mexico, took the work in hand and resolved to make an open cut. This was done, at an enormous expense of men and money, about one hundred
and thirty years after it was begun. During this time Mexico was almost entirely under water for five consecutive years. The foundations of houses were destroyed, and such misery prevailed that the court at Madrid gave orders that the city which Cortez built should be abandoned and a new Mexico built, on higher ground. Happily, several earthquakes during the year 1634 cracked the ground in various directions, and the surplus water made its way down through the yawning fissures, much to the relief of the inhabitants, who had been living ​in second stories and on roofs and going about in boats. The poor natives gave all the credit of this providential interference to their patron Our Lady of Guadaloupe.
As in other things, so also in the matter of education, did the Church befriend the Indians. In the latter part of the sixteenth century the Jesuits founded a seminary where the natives were taught to read, write and recite prayers to the Virgin and the saints. The University of Mexico, for the education of Creole youth, had been established more than thirty years when this school was begun. About the same time an attempt was made to gather the wandering savage tribes at the North into settled habitations, and to teach them to work as a source of revenue to the colony, and also to quell their constant tendency to rebellion. This proved to be a very difficult task, and more than one mission established for this purpose was destroyed and had its leaders murdered by those whom they came to help.
* ↑ The remnant of the population, at the request of the conquered Guatemozin, went to the neighboring villages until the town could be purified and the dead removed (Bernal Diaz).
* ↑ Cortez.
* ↑ The Spaniards were known as teules, or gods, long after they were found to be like other men.
* ↑ * In 1847, Brantz Mayer writes: "While at the hacienda of Tamise, near Cuernavaca, he pointed out to us the site of an Indian village at the distance of three leagues, the inhabitants of which are almost in their native state. They do not permit the visits of white men, and, numbering more than three thousand, they come out in delegations to work on the haciendas, being governed at home by their own magistrates, and employ a Catholic priest to shrive them of their sins once a year; they earn their wages, make their own clothes of cotton and skins, and raise corn and beans for food."
* ↑ The Mexican name for natives of Spain.