Missions and Moral Judgement

Amy Turner Bushnell

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History 14 (Summer 2000). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2000, Organization of American Historians
 

Once the missions were in ruins, their history became fair game for social activists and the inventors of tradition. When, a half century after secularization, Helen Hunt Jackson, author of A Century of Dishonor (1881), turned to fiction to lament the loss of California's native population, the American public took Ramona (1883) to heart, but not as Jackson intended. Indifferent to the fate of Indians, they romanticized the Spanish past, and California hillsides blossomed with mission-style architecture and gardens (1). Reflecting shifts in the moral climate, mission interpretation took on fresh messages, as when the makers of the film The Mission (1986), set in Paraguay, looked through a 1960s lens and saw the Jesuits as pacifists with meek, nonviolent flocks. In the last thirty or forty years, studies of Indian mortality, oral histories, and the new social history ("history from the bottom up") have thrown missions and missionaries into a morass of moral ambiguity. In some parts of the former Spanish Borderlands, the debate has become heated and has spilled into the open, pitting scholars who venerate mission founders against scholars who view the missions as death camps.

An unresolved moral question presents the historian with an array of possibilities: take a position and argue it; claim cultural relativism and suspend judgment on everyone; declare the matter moot and history an outmoded European construct; or contextualize the question, inquiring how well people were living up to their own moral standards, rather than celebrating the few who by chance lived up to ours.

In church history, a mission was not a place, but an activity. Missions were groups of men sent from Christian Europe to places of barbarians to preach against alien religions. The apostles who followed hard on the heels of the conquerors Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro were members of religious orders, governing themselves under a papally approved constitution, or regula. They entered a region, preached, founded churches, baptized, and returned to their convents to pray that the Primitive Church might be reborn in the simplicity and poverty of their neophytes. Once the spiritual conquest of the imperial Aztecs and Incas was assured, the bands of itinerant preachers gave way to small religious communities who sent out visiting ministers. In response to the decline in Indian numbers as European pathogens ran rampant, viceroys congregated the inhabitants of remote or underpopulated areas into new settlements, apart from Spanish settlers. Their purpose was not to create a mestizo society through intermarriage, but to preserve a Republic of Indians under its own rulers, respecting God and the king, with spiritual authority firmly in the hands of Spaniards.

In the 1570s, with the conquest of the Aztecs and Incas accomplished and the conquest of the nonimperial peoples bogging down on all sides, the Crown's plans for extending Spain's kingdoms in America shifted to a policy of pacification, a kind of conquest by contract, in which the missionary orders--mainly the mendicant Franciscans and the militant Jesuits--took the lead. The initial stage in the process was an expedition of reconnaissance, or entrada, also called a "flying mission." If the friars and their gifts were welcomed, they erected a cross and a chapel and gave the town a saint's name. Only after the chiefs had accepted baptism, signalling their support, did the missionary presence advance to the stage of conversión, or intensive adult indoctrination. The town became a doctrina, or "fixed mission," when it had a church with a sacristy, a convent, and a resident friar, or doctrinero. The Crown paid the doctrinero's stipend and allowances, presented the new church with a one-hundred-peso gift of bells, vestments, and sacred vessels, and gave the new congregation ten years of grace from civil and ecclesiastical taxes, the usual exemption for a newly formed civil pueblo. In the final stage, the mission became a parish with a secular priest, its members supporting the Crown with their taxes and the Church with their tithes--in effect, becoming a rural peasantry, connected to the Republic of Spaniards through their natural lords. On the edges of empire, this stage was frequently postponed. The friars' assignments tended to become permanent, producing enclaves of natives stalled on the path to parishhood, insulated from settler demands by the religious orders and reluctant to surrender their exempt status. During the eighteenth century, the word "mission" first became synonymous with "doctrina" and then replaced it in the lexicon.

Herbert E. Bolton, the Berkeley professor who defined the Spanish Borderlands, was also the historian who divested the mission of its religious garb and revealed it as an instrument of early modern empire (2). In geopolitical terms, the mission was a successful frontier institution, lasting into the 1830s in California and, with minimal exertion and expense, throwing a Spanish or Portuguese mantle over a good half of Ibero-America. Mission provinces were established in North America from Florida to the Californias and from Tamaulipas to Sonora, in large areas of Central America, on the coasts of Brazil and Chile, on the llanos of Gran Colombia and the pampas of Argentina, on the eastern slopes of the Andes, and in the river basins of the Amazon, the Orinoco, and the Paraguay-Paraná (3). In harmony with his triumphalist sources, Bolton applauded the padres as bearers of civilization and surrounded them with a halo of romance. His classes were full, but his field was headed down a dead-end road, for his sidelining way with Indians was soon outclassed by a brilliant new school of indigenista anthropology out of Mexico, while his acceptance of the northern mission as the norm acted to separate the borderlands from the mainstream of colonial Latin American scholarship.

The frontier mission took many forms over space and time, like a recipe never followed the same way twice. The model is rich in variables. Did the group concerned live in a fixed place as farmers and herders, practice slash-and-burn agriculture, or move about seasonally as hunters and gatherers? Did their habitat lie beyond the horizon of European adventurers, or did it possess the kind of treasures and natural resources guaranteed to draw looters, traders, and miners? Was their population count in a condition of free-fall, or had it reached its nadir and started to recover? Were their numbers being replenished with recruits or being reduced by wars and slave-raiding as neighboring colonies experienced labor shortages? Did European-owned mines or haciendas in their vicinity provide them with off-mission employment or threaten their landholding? Was their habitat strategic enough to require presidios of soldiers, demanding provisions and services? Did rival Europeans test their allegiance with liquor, firearms, and trade goods, or drive them into the arms of the Spanish against their will? Did the Crown subsidize the group's missions, expect them to survive on their own, or use them to underwrite the colonial state? (4).

The mission varied across the borderlands as it did elsewhere (5). The Jesuits modeled their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reductions, or towns founded by the missions, in Sonora and Baja California (as they had those in Paraguay and Brazil) after the pre-Columbian Incaic community, which they admired. Priding themselves on careful management, they financed new missions from the proceeds of the old. In 1769, two years after the Jesuits were expelled from New Spain, Franciscan missionaries extended the reduction model into Alta California and there, pressured to subsidize the presidios or suffer secularization, retooled it to concentrate on economic production instead of cultural change (6).

The California mission was "post-typical," representing "a total shift in Spain's cultural policy in the Americas," according to mission historian Charles W. Polzer (7). For architectural historian George Kubler, the difference was evident architecturally. In seventeenth-century New Mexico, where harassment by Apache raiders was common, massively fortified churches and small convents were located on the outskirts of the communities in which Pueblo Indians continued to live and work (8). The missions of nineteenth-century California, by contrast, were vast conventual enclosures in which relocated Indians lived under a discipline that was semi-military, semi-monastic. The New Mexico mission was a defensive compound beside an ancient pueblo; the California mission, an economic enterprise with a built-in labor camp (9). The missions of eighteenth-century Texas were neither. Founded to keep the French of Louisiana from expanding around the Gulf, Texas missions were deficit enterprises sustained, like presidios, from defense funds and providing the indios mansos ("civilized Indians") with places of refuge from the indios bárbaros ("savage Indians"), mainly Comanches, who were mounted and equipped with firearms. Some of the Texas missions had relatively stable populations; from others, the Indians came and went at will, treating them like stops on the seasonal round (10).

Although Bolton, whose vision was continental, included Florida in the borderlands by courtesy, Florida missions defy categorization in Boltonian terms. The Southeast was a region of swamps and forests, utterly unlike the great plains and deserts of arid America. Viewed as part of the Caribbean, the Gulf, the eastern woodlands, and the Atlantic world, however, Florida ceases to be the misfit of the borderlands and becomes a prototype of the maritime periphery (11). The colony's one city of Spaniards, the presidio of St. Augustine, was founded as a defensive outpost on the strategic Gulf Stream. Its sphere of influence was the area within which Indian allies had agreed to report foreign vessels or visitors and to trade only with floridanos. And its mission provinces--which at their largest extent covered the upper third of the peninsula plus portions of Georgia and Alabama and included some twenty-six thousand Christian Indians--were at once St. Augustine's buffer zone to the north and west, its agricultural hinterland, and its labor reserve.

The Florida mission was no theocracy; it was a fully operative pueblo governed by hereditary and elected native leaders who answered to the governor. Florida Indians did not compartmentalize their religions as New Mexico's Pueblos did; instead they allowed new and old to exist side by side. Through the institution of the sabana, or communally worked field, mission Indians supported a Spanish elite of friars, soldiers, and settlers much as they supported an Indian elite of caciques and principales, with comparatively little change to their material culture or political organization. The chiefs of the Florida provinces of Apalachee, Timucua, and Guale (pronounced "Wally")--who played a major role in organizing labor, economic production, and defense--were paid in redistributable goods charged against the Indian fund in the situado, the presidio's annual subvention from the royal treasury in Mexico City. From the same subvention came the Franciscans' stipends, equaling a common soldier's pay and rations, plus small allowances for "habit and sandals" and allotments of wax, wheat flour, and wine for the mass.

After the period of adult indoctrination, life in the doctrinas revolved around the agricultural cycle, with breaks when the community collected to dance, watch a ball game, or attend mass; or dispersed for seasonal foraging. The women tended their fields, houses, children, pigs, and chickens; ground cornmeal; wove mats and baskets; fired earthenware; made clothing; gathered oysters; dried meat, berries, and vegetables; cooked over an open fire; processed deerskins; parched cacina leaves for tea; and went nutting to make hickory nut oil. The men cleared their wives' fields, hunted, honed their skills for war, traded with distant partners, built houses and other structures, rowed canoes, made tools, painted hides, and drank cacina in the councilhouse, talking as long as it took to reach male consensus in a matrilocal society. Although several men might be working off-mission for Spanish ranchers on contract, and many spent time at the presidio as part of their town's labor levy, in times of peace the Spanish presence in an Indian town was slight.

The written record of mission life in Florida represents the purposeful output of many authors--Franciscan doctrineros, army officers on duty in the provinces, governors, and the occasional Hispanized chief--all of them crafting their letters and reports to influence official decisions. Fortunately, documents are imperfect filters; the past clings to them like flecks of gold dust, and the reader can discover much. Despite the official seventeenth-century discourse of pacification, St. Augustine was a garrison town, and Florida was a captaincy general, a "land of living war," where governors drew combat pay and chiefs held officer rank in the provincial militias. Truces with Spain's enemies were hedged and mistrustful, and only in hurricane season were the seaways free of pirates.

The mid-century point was marked in Florida by the arrival of yellow fever, which struck Spaniards as well as Indians. The English landing on Jamaica in 1655 sent a shock wave around the Caribbean. Governor Diego de Rebolledo's ill-considered call-up of the militia the next year provoked a rebellion in Timucua Province which emptied the doctrinas of central Florida and left the friars sitting in their convents alone. The rebels who accepted amnesty and returned to kiss the governor's hand were resettled at intervals along the camino real to service the road between St. Augustine and Apalachee across what had become a hollow peninsula (12).

By the mid 1680s, slaving raids on the missions of the Atlantic coast, outfitted by the English of Charles Town, had reduced Guale Province to a shell, forcing it southward. Carolina's assault on the mission provinces culminated in 1702 and 1704 during Queen Anne's War, when Creeks and Carolinians destroyed the missions of Apalache Province around present-day Tallahassee. In less than two years all but a handful of Florida's ten thousand remaining Christian Indians scattered, taking their beliefs with them. The ragged remnant camped in hamlets under the guns of the fort in St. Augustine. They were joined by Indians from the lower Atlantic coast: non-agricultural, foraging peoples whose gypsy habits had made them unwilling to live "beneath the bell" until the mission barrier was breached and the slave hunters began to prey on them (13). The inhabitants of these polyglot pueblos left the company of Spaniards as soon as possible. They had little in common with the third- and fourth-generation Old Christians, the former mission Indians who as servants and soldiers made their way inside the walls to be absorbed into the Spanish community (14).

Plainly, missions differed across the Spanish Borderlands, as they differed throughout the Americas, and that variety was a function of time, place, and above all, people: those who held the keys to the kingdom, and those who elected to enter Christendom. At this remove, the motives of missionaries and mission Indians may be difficult to comprehend, but the exercise of trying to do justice to past concepts of fit and unfit behavior will engage many students, quietly working out a moral compass of their own.

1. David Hurst Thomas, "Harvesting Ramona's Garden: Life in California's Mythical Mission Past," in Columbian Consequences, vol. 3, The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective, ed. David Hurst Thomas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 119-57.

2. Herbert E. Bolton, "The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colonies," American Historical Review 23 (1917): 42-61.

3. David Sweet, "The Ibero-American Frontier Mission in Native American History," in The New Latin American Mission History, ed. Erick Langer and Robert H. Jackson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1-48.

4. See Lance R. Grahn, "Guajiro Culture and Capuchin Evangelization: Missionary Failure on the Riohacha Frontier," in Langer and Jackson, eds., New Latin American Mission History, 130-56; John H. Hann, trans. and ed., Missions to the Calusa (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991); and James E. Officer, Hispanic Arizona, 1536-1856 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987).

5. For an overview of mission activity in the borderlands, see David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

6. Paul Farnsworth and Robert H. Jackson, "Cultural, Economic, and Demographic Change in the Missions of Alta California: The Case of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad," in Langer and Jackson, eds., New Latin American Mission History, 109-29. See also, Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi, eds., Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

7. Charles W. Polzer, "The Spanish Colonial Southwest: New Technologies for Old Documents," in Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, vol. 1, Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 180.

8. On New Mexico missions, see Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and John L. Kessell, Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540-1840 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979).

9. George Kubler, "Two Modes of Franciscan Architecture: New Mexico and California," in Franciscan Presence in the Americas: Essays on the Activities of the Franciscan Friars in the Americas, 1492-1900, ed. Francisco Morales (Potomac, MD: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1983), 369-70.

10. Donald E. Chipman, Spanish Texas: 1519-1821 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 86-170; and Félix D. Almaráz Jr., The San Antonio Missions and Their System of Land Tenure (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).

11. Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida. American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, Number 74 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).

12. John E. Worth, Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida, vol. 2, Resistance and Destruction (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).

13. Amy Turner Bushnell, "The Sacramental Imperative: Catholic Ritual and Indian Sedentism in the Provinces of Florida," in Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, vol. 2, Archaeology and History of the Spanish Borderlands East (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 475-90.

14. For more on the Florida missions, see John H. Hann, Apalachee: The Land Between the Rivers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1988); Bonnie G. McEwan, ed., The Spanish Missions of La Florida (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1993); and Jerald T. Milanich, Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999).

Amy Turner Bushnell, Ph.D., teaches history at the College of Charleston. Her publications include The King's Coffer: Proprietors of the Spanish Florida Treasury, 1565-1702 (1981); Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida (1994); and Establishing Exceptionalism: Historiography and the Colonial Americas (1995), as well as a number of articles on Spanish frontiers and the historiography of the southeastern borderlands. She has taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of South Alabama, and was the historian of the Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board.