The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (32 page)

Why did the Industrial Revolution push out slavery? It’s not that slaves couldn’t do the work. Slaves could be found working as factory hands, miners, and skilled tradesmen in cities and towns throughout the Western Hemisphere—and doing a perfectly fine job of it. Factories often treated their workers like slaves anyway, so using actual slaves was not a problem.

The real problem was that slaves were a long-term investment that tied up capital and became riskier as the economy became more dynamic. With markets always fluctuating, it was easier to just hire and fire free labor as needed, rather than raise slaves from babies for jobs that might be gone when they were old enough to work. Only agricultural production was steady enough, year by year, to make it feasible to acquire a workforce years before it would be put to use.
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Also, plantations were more self-sufficient than cities, making it a lot cheaper to keep slaves. Food, water, housing, and firewo
od were easily available on farms, so in bad times it was possible to hunker down and wait for the economy to improve. Keeping slaves in an urban economy meant renting shelter, importing food, and buying fuel. That’s money flowing out even when there’s no money coming in. It was easier to pay workers a wage and let them worry about their own upkeep.
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By 1800, Western Civilization had divided regionally, all-or-nothing, on t
he issue of slavery. Unless a region absolutely depended on slaves to maintain the economy, harassed local leaders usually knuckled under to the moral badgering of the abolitionists and just freed the damn slaves—anything to get the Quakers off their backs.

Within the first generation of the abolitionist movement, slavery disappeared from the world’s most urbanized economies. In Great Britain, a landmark case in 1772 concerning the slave James Somerset decided that slavery could not be enforced under English law. The northern American states and territories abolished slavery between 1777 (Vermont) and 1804 (New Jersey). The revolutionary government of France abolished slavery at home almost as soon as it took power (1791) and in the colonies after much debate (1794).

In warmer regions where cash crops grown by slaves were the mainstay of the local economy, slavery survived these opening battles. Fearing both bankruptcy and the unleashing of thousands of unsupervised savages into their helpless communities, the slave owners stood stubbornly against any reform. Politics polarized. Tempers flared. Negotiated emancipation became nearly impossible in the regions where slavery was most deeply rooted, and it was only violent upheavals that finally shook it loose.

In 1791, the slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue rebelled while the motherland was distracted by the French Revolution. It took hundreds of thousands of lives and many years, but in the end, they established Haiti as the second independent country in the Western Hemisphere (see “Haitian Slave Revolt”).

In 1802, Napoleon reestablished slavery in the remaining French colonies. Only after the violent overthrow of the restored monarchy and the founding of the Second Republic in 1848 did France permanently abolish slavery in all of its colonies.

The British parliament abolished slavery in all of the British colonies in 1833. This was probably the only major emancipation that was accomplished without fighting.

In the United States, the North-South divide over slavery intensified and touched every aspect of public life. In 1845, for example, the pro-slavery factions of the Baptists split off and formed the Southern Baptist Convention, currently the second largest religious body in the United States.
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Every new territorial acquisition by the United States had to be allocated to either the slave or the free section of the country. The future balance of power depended on North and South packing potential new states with like-minded settlers. The dispute eventually produced a political party, the Republicans, whose unifying principle was its opposition to the expansion of slavery. When this party was voted into office in 1860, the slave owners rebelled, and over a half-million people died in the ensuing civil war.

In Cuba, slavery wasn’t shaken loose until its first unsuccessful war of independence, the Ten Years War. By the time the insurrection was put down in 1878, too many slaves had escaped to hunt them all down again, so the Spanish government decided not to argue with any slaves who had guns. (In technical terms, the peace treaty granted freedom to any slave who had fought for either side in the war—in other words, those who had guns.) The rest were set free eight years later.

In 1888, more than a century after the beginning of the abolitionist movement, Brazil became the last Western nation to abolish slavery during a political upheaval that included the overthrow of the monarchy, although the lineup probably wasn’t what you would expect. Instead of elitists (monarchists and slave owners) versus liberals (republicans and abolitionists), the upheaval saw nationalists (republicans and slave owners preferring local control) allied against internationalists (monarchists and abolitionists trying to fit into global civilization).

In
The
Great Big Book of Horrible Things
, slavery stands unique as one of the few atrocities that has been utterly and completely . . . well,
eradicated
is too optimistic a word . . . let’s say
marginalized
. Although forms of slavery still exist here and there in dark pockets, nations as a whole do not practice it anymore. A nation can openly torture prisoners, shoot dissidents, invade neighbors, beat women to death, or work children in sweatshops without apology, and it will still get its seat in the United Nations, no questions asked; however, not one of them will dare to legalize slavery. Pure and unadulterated slavery is the strongest taboo in international law.

It’s a start at least.

CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAS

Death toll:
15 million

Rank:
11

Type:
colonial conquest

Broad dividing line:
Europeans vs. Native Americans

Time frame:
beginning in 1492

Location:
Western Hemisphere

Primary participants:
Aztecs, Carib, Incas, Spaniards, Taino

Secondary participants:
Americans, Blackfoot, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Creeks, English, Iroquois, Pequot, Powhatan, Shoshone, Sioux

Who usually gets the most blame:
Columbus, conquistadors, Custer
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Economic factors:
gold, silver

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

You would be hard-pressed to find a nation less suited to peaceful first contact with an alien culture than Renaissance Spain. For over seven hundred years, this peninsula had been torn between Christian and Muslim cultures, European and African armies, into a kaleidoscope of angry kingdoms, duchies, and emirates. Spain didn’t even exist as a nation until two lesser kingdoms were fused by the marriage of their monarchs in 1469.

In Spain, the crusader mentality was alive and unlikely to take prisoners. Grenada, the last Muslim stronghold in the peninsula, didn’t fall t
o Christian conquerors until 1492, the same year that Spain expelled its Jews. By that time, the Spanish Inquisition had been set up to make sure there were no hidden infidels mocking decent people from behind a mask of piety. Heretics were broken and burned by the thousands.

The Mediterranean Sea was a battleground between the Christian and Muslim fleets, so European mariners began to explore the Atlantic, hoping to bypass the hated Saracens and connect with the riches of the Orient. The Portuguese took the obvious route, down the coast of Africa, while the Spaniards took a gamble on the direct route, straight across the open ocean to the other side of the globe. Christopher Columbus imagined, planned, and led the 1492 expedition, which probably would have disappeared in the wide, endless ocean if he had been right about the next stop being Asia. As luck would have it, islands off the coast of an entirely unsuspect
ed pair of continents gave him a safe landfall before his supplies ran out. He thought it was Asia, but within a decade or so, subsequent explorers proved it to be a completely New World.

Waiting for Columbus

In one of the great contrasts of history, the people who greeted Columbus, the Taino (or Arawak) of the Bahamas, were among the gentlest people ever recorded. As Columbus described them, “They neither carry nor know anything of arms, for I showed them swords, and they took them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance.”
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“They are a loving people, without covetousness, and fit for anything . . . there is no better land nor people. They love their neighbours as themselves, and their speech is the sweetest and gentlest in the world, and always with a smile.”
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Well naturally the first thing Colu
mbus did was to size them up for plunder. “They would make fine servants,”
³
he noted. “With fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.”
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He then poked southward, deeper into the West Indies, inquiring after any spare gold they might have lying around. He explored the larger islands—Cuba, Hispaniola—and found little worth stealing except for m
ore natives. Always on the lookout for opportunity, he noted, “From here, in the name of the Blessed Trinity, we can send all the slaves that can be sold.”
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To prove his point, Columbus kidnapped a few natives to take back to Spain as specimens. Then he left a small settlement on Hispaniola and sailed back to Spain with the wonderful news.

The Snake in Paradise

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the wonderful bounty that was laid out before the Spaniards, free for the taking, starting with the most important item for a sailor finishing a couple of months on the open ocean. The women, Columbus reported, were “naked as the day they were born,” with “no more embarrassment than animals.”
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Once we’ve contemplated that, let’s notice that the natives had almost no metals—certainly no brass, tin, steel, iron, or bronze—no metals at all
except
gold and silver, which were soft and shiny and easy to work. That means the Native Americans had spent several centuries digging and panning all of the precious metals they could find, accumulating treasures conveniently within reach, but had failed to invent a way to defend them.

It would be misleading to characterize the Spaniards as lions among sheep, but they were definitely lions among coyotes—both being predators, but in a far different league. Native Americans could be as cruel a
nd vicious as any of the world’s peoples. The Aztecs were sacrificing 15,000 fellow humans atop their pyramids every year (see “Aztec Human Sacrifice”). Even before Columbus arrived, the gentle Taino were being gradually but inexorably driven off their islands by the Carib, who gave their name not only to the sea but also to their characteristic diet:
cannibalism
. The Incas sacrificed children on mountains. The Iroquois delighted in cutting and burning captives.

Be that as it may, most natives didn’t quite have what it took to be unstoppable killing machines. Aztec warfare was ritualistic, with the purpose of collecting live prisoners to be sacrificed. The Indians of the North American plains became known for counting coup, the ritual of bravery in which they attacked only to tag the enemy, not to kill him. The Spaniards took war a lot more seriously.

The Spanish conquistadors went into battle with steel swords, which could easily kill by severing an arm or a head, unlike the native clubs and stone hatchets that required repeated battering to incapacitate an enemy. Spanish armor, especially helmets, made it even more difficult for the Indians to score a hit. The Spaniards used horses and hunting dogs, terrifying monsters that could easily chase down, trample, or tear apart fleeing warriors. European crossbows were easier to aim and shoot than native bows and arrows. Cannons shook the earth and shredded enemy m
obs. The arquebus, or primitive musket, of the conquistadors was too slow and inaccurate to have much of a military effect unless there were a lot of them, but don’t underestimate the psychological impact of a crack of thunder, followed by the man beside you dropping mysteriously dead.
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The West Indies

We know so little about Christopher Columbus. We don’t know when or where he was born, where he first landed in America, what he looked like, or where he is buried. Obviously that hasn’t stopped us from filling in the gaps with guesses, imagination, and speculation, even if it contradicts the little we do know. No matter what historians tell us, we continue to believe in the Christopher Columbus we want, not the one who existed. This is equally true whether we want Columbus to be a hero or a villain.

Every few years, a book comes out that promises to demythify Columbus a
nd expose him for the son of a bitch he was, and the oddest thing is that this has been happening for hundreds of years, right from the start. The most important primary source of what little we know of the life of Columbus are the writings of Bartolome de las Casas, Dominican priest and zealous defender of the Indians. The only reason we have, for example, the log of Columbus’s first voyage is because las Casas had a copy in his personal papers. Las Casas originally admired Columbus and was among the wild crowds that cheered his return to Spain, but after las Casas moved to America, he made it his driving goal in life to publicize and denounce the cruelties his fellow countrymen inflicted on the Indians. Columbus and his peers are often defended with the argument that you can’t judge the past by modern standards, but it’s important to remember that “modern standards” existed in Columbus’s day in the person of las Casas and others like him.

Columbus returned to Hispaniola in early 1494, outfitted by the Spanish crown with a fleet of seventeen ships to stake out an empire. He discovered that the small settlement he had planted on his first voyage had been wiped out after a dispute with the natives, but that didn’t matter. This new expedition had 1,500 fresh Europeans, along with tools, seeds, and livestock, ready to subjugate the New World. With Columbus came his two brothers to share his good fortune.

Columbus gave the natives strict quotas of gold to bring to him, and for several months he required the Taino to abandon their fields and pan gold in the hills, which sparked a famine that killed 50,000. He also rounded up 1,500 natives and penned them for sale as slaves. After stuffing as many as he could into ships heading back to Spain, he used the remainder locally.
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Columbus had spent so much of his life as a sea captain that he preferred ruling by edict and immediate punishment. Eventually his summary executions of occasional Spaniards annoyed the colonists. Disagreements over whether to treat the natives as slaves (Columbus’s view) or loyal subjects (the Crown’s view) divided the colony as well. When an auditor arrived from Spai
n, among the first sights to greet him were corpses swinging from ropes. The Columbus brothers were clapped in chains and shipped home to answer charges. The crown still had enough faith in Columbus to forgive him and continue to use him as an explorer, but he was never again given command on land.

The Caribbean

Soon the Spaniards began to parcel out the New World according to a system called
encomiendo
(trusteeship). In theory, the Indians remained in possession of the land under the supervision of a benevolent European trustee. You can guess how well that worked in practice.
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In 1502 Brother Nicholas de Ovando of a Spanish military-religious order arrived in Hispanola with 2,500 settlers. He invited all of the native chiefs to a splendid banquet in their honor, and then killed them. He easily enslaved the remaining leaderless natives. The next year, Ponce de Leon put down a rebellion on the tip of Hispanola with a massacre of 7,000 Taino.
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As Spaniards spread throughout Hispanola, the recorded population of the island quickly plunged from 60,000 (1509) to 11,000 (1518).

With the natives dying from o
verwork, unfamiliar diseases, and strict discipline, the Spaniards began raiding neighboring islands for new labor. When those islands ran out of people, they harvested slaves from the next island over, and then the next, until all of the Indians of the West Indies were either enslaved or, increasingly, dead.

The brutality didn’t go unnoticed or unopposed. As early as 1511, a Dominican priest in the Spanish colonies, Antonio d
e Montesinos, was arguing desperately that the Indians should be treated with common decency.
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