Manuscript No. 029 - First Blacks in The Americas

Date: 1537, February 3. [Valladolid?], Spain
Theme: Royal letter from king Charles V of Spain to the oidores or judges of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo ordering them to stop allowing judicial appeals submitted to the Council of the Indies against the Audiencia’s sentences by Indians and Blacks of La Española condemned to the death penalty or dismemberment or torture by the Audiencia, and to act as court of appeals of those same cases.
Source: PARES, Portal de Archivos Españoles–Archivo General de Indias, SANTO_DOMINGO, 868, L.1,F.14V-15R.

Date: 1537, February 3. [Valladolid?], Spain.
Theme: Royal letter from king Charles V of Spain to the oidores or judges of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo ordering them to stop allowing judicial appeals submitted to the Council of the Indies against the Audiencia’s sentences by Indians and Blacks of La Española condemned to the death penalty or dismemberment or torture by the Audiencia, and to act as court of appeals of those same cases.
Source: PARES, Portal de Archivos Españoles–Archivo General de Indias, SANTO_DOMINGO, 868, L.1,F.40V-41R. (xl v. – xli r.)

[fo. xl v. (40v.)]

so that in the criminal trials of blacks /
or Indians /
no appeals be granted for these/
realms /
requested /

President and oidores of our royal Audiencia and chancilleria /
of the Española island, I have been informed /

[fo. xli r. (41r.)]

[xli ]

that the Indians and blacks, because of the crimes they commit /
in that land, you proceed against them, and that /
some of the ones you condemn to death in accordance to justice /
appeal at these our kingdoms, /
for which, due to the delay, there are inconveniences, to /
avoid which, after discussing it at our Council of the /
Indies, it was agreed that I should mandate to issue /
this my decree, by which we order you that, if /
the Indians and blacks that, by means of sentence, you may have/
condemned or hereafter may condemn /
to death or loss of /
a limb or issue of torture in accordance to justice, may appeal to /
our kingdoms before us against the sentence /
or sentences that you may have issued or may issue
against them, hereafter you must not grant them the said appeal. Rather, after calling and listening to the parties, you must receive [them] in second appeal, admitting the supplications that
may be presented about such sentences, you must administer
and execute what you may decide as justice, so that none of them [the parties] receives damage. And the /
content of this my decree you must comply with as one of the /
ordinances of that audiencia, and hence do not do otherwise.
Issued in The Village [Madrid] on three days of February of one thousand /
and five hundred and thirty seven years. I the King /
Certified and signed by the said ones //

This letter from King Charles V to the judges of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo in 1537 seems to be a firm indication that at least early on during the colonization process in La Española, Taino natives and Blacks who had been condemned to the death penalty by the local tribunal of Santo Domingo had been successfully using the Spanish judicial appeal mechanism at least to postpone the implementation of local sentences by the Audiencia by submitting their appeals to the Council of the Indies in the metropolis, a process that took at least a number of months, if we take into account the usual time of the transoceanic journey, plus whatever time these requests took, having reached Spain, to move up through the maze of the Council of the Indies’ justice bureaucracy.

The decision by the Crown to stop appeals to the Council of the Indies and to bestow appeal-review powers on the Audiencia of Santo Domingo in these cases must have been a big blow to La Española’s Amerindians and Blacks, whose alloted time for negotiating the toughest sentences must have been reduced considerably, while most likely having their chances for a different assessment of their case equally diminished by the fact that it was the same judges who had already condemned them who would now be in charge of taking a putative second look at those cases.

Based at least on this evidence, the year 1537 may be considered one in which the social control exerted by the colonial authorities or system upon Indians and Blacks, the bulk of the subaltern population of the island, harshened. It may be worthwhile, from a historiographical point of view, for us to ask why the harshening came precisely at this time. Did it have anything to do with an increase in actions of resistance by the most oppressed people in the colony?

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