Human Rights In America Since 16th Century Until 18th Century.

UNIVERSIDAD

SAN FRANCISCO DE QUITO

ATLANTIC HISTORY

FINAL ESSAY

Paúl Gross, 22747

Juan Diego Sanchez, 24515‏

December- 09- 2010

Human rights in America since 16th century until 18th century.

Introduction:

From the beginning until know for many people the discovery of America is one of the most important events, after the creation of the world, as Human Rights mentioned in its text. Columbus’s voyage manifested a lot of ideologist changes for that time in many ways. An example of that is how Pliny talk about American persons discovered at that time too, he qualified them as “monsters” in his book Historia Naturalis. At the same way, St. Augustine in his De Civitate Dei in his text recorded and qualified with the same adjective the new American people. Later in Venice (1622) a picture of a Brazilian man will be shown, but it was not a real man, but a strange figure, like a fantastic creature. From the beginning the conquistadors thought that people in American were barbarians and they took the hard way to teach them to believe in God and more generally talking, to adopt their customs.

Later we found that American and African people become slaves. As the book says, Aristotle gave his point of view about slavery. He said that slavery is not natural, is not in its natural behavior of humans to be somebody´s slave, but it is natural human thinking and ideology to believe in being superior to someone else and in conjunction with the force, slavery is originated. This was exactly what in America happened. Columbus, in the return to Spain for example brought 500 “specimens” to work as slaves in Europe and other 500 slaves were captured in order to make them work in America. These examples and many other can be analyzed, thinking about Human Racism and rights.

Body:

First we can start studying how Christians behave with infidel people. From the beginning, for example when Hernán Cortés colonized part of America, he always repeat to himself and to his men to believe that they were fighting in the name of faith and justice and that they had just causes and reasons on their sides, one of them was to spread christianism. Another example is the excuse to colonize, that Bernal Diaz del Castillo had in his text Historia verdadera de la conquista de la nueva España says, “To God, to his Majesty and to all Christianity”. This book explains that in the colonization, wars between indigenous and Spanish people were produced by the imposition of the Christian religious to America and that a consequence of that slavery started to be a reality.

We have the religious immigrant to America too, caused because many groups of colonists came to the Americas searching for the right to practice their religion without persecution. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century broke the unity of Western Christendom and led to the formation of numerous new religious sects, which often faced persecution by governmental authorities. In the other hand, we have English and Dutch colonies tended to be more religiously diverse. Settlers to these colonies included Anglicans, Dutch Calvinists, English Puritans, English Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German and Swedish Lutherans, as well as Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Moravians and Jews of various nationalities. Strong believer in the notion of rule by divine right, Charles I persecuted religious dissenters. Waves of repression led to the migration of about 20,000 Puritans to New England between 1629 and 1642, where they founded multiple colonies. Later in the century, the new Pennsylvania colony was given to William Penn in settlement of a debt the king owed his father.

We found another aspect from the 16th to 18th century that attempt to human rights, the natural servitude and slavery. Slavery existed in the Americas, prior to the presence of Europeans, as the natives often captured and held other tribe´s members as captives. Some of these captives were even forced to make human sacrifice under some tribes, such as the Aztecs. The Spanish followed with the enslavement of local aborigines in the Caribbean. As the native populations declined (mostly from European diseases, but also and significantly from forced exploitation and careless murder), they were often replaced by Africans imported through a large commercial slave trade. By the 18th century, the overwhelming number of black slaves was such that native american slavery was less commonly used. Africans, who were taken aboard slave ships to America, were primarily obtained from their african homelands

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