himself from the deck of the Santa Maria, and in the morning the real, undoubted land, swelling up from the bosom of the deep, with its plains, and hills, and forests, and rocks, and streams, and strange, new races of men; these are incidents in which the authentic history of the discovery of our continent excels the specious wonders of romance, as much as gold excels tinsel, or the sun in the heavens outshines that flickering taper. But it is no part of my purpose to dwell upon this interesting narrative, or to follow out this most wonderful of histories, sinking as it soon did into a tale of sorrow for Columbus himself, and before long ending in one of the most frightful tragedies in the annals of the world. Such seems to be the law of humanity, that events the most desirable and achievements the most important should, either in their inception or progress, be mixed up with disasters, crimes, and sorrows which it makes the heart sick to record. The discovery of America, I need hardly say, produced a vast extension of the territory of the power under whose auspices the discovery was made. In contemplating this point, we encounter one of the most terrible mysteries in the history of our race. "Extension of territory!" you are ready to exclaim; "how could Spain acquire any territory by the fact that a navigator, sailing under her patronage, had landed upon one or two islands near the continent of America, and coasted for a few hundred miles along its shores? These shores and islands are not a desert on which Columbus, like a Robinson Crusoe of a higher order, has landed and taken possession. They are occupied and settled, crowded, even, with inhabitants, subject to the government of their native chiefs; and neither by inheritance, colonization, nor as yet by conquest, has any human being in Europe a right to rule over them or to possess a square foot of their territory." Such are the facts of the case, and such, one would say, ought to be the law and equity of the case. But alas for the native chiefs and the native races! Before he sailed from Spain, Colum bus was furnished with a piece of parchment a foot and a half square, by Ferdinand and Isabella, creating him their Viceroy and High-Admiral in all the seas, islands, and continents which he should discover, his heirs for ever to enjoy the same offices. The Viceroy of the absolute monarchs of Aragon and Castile! Thus was America conquered before it was discovered. By the law of nations as then understood, (and I fear there is less change in its doctrines at the present day than we should be ready to think,) a sovereign right to the territory and government of all newly discovered regions inhabited by heathen tribes was believed to vest in the Christian prince under whose auspices the discovery was made, subject to the ratification of the Pope, as the ultimate disposer of the kingdoms of the earth. Such was the law of nations, as then understood, in virtue of which, from the moment Columbus, on that memorable night to which I have alluded, caught, from the quarterdeck of the Santa Maria, the twinkling beams of a taper from the shores of San Salvador, all the territorial and political rights of its simple inhabitants were extinguished for ever. When on the following morning the keel of his vessel grated upon the much longed for strand, it completed, with more than electric speed, that terrible circuit which connected the islands and the continent to the footstool of the Spanish throne. As he landed upon the virgin shore, its native inhabitants, could they have foreseen the future, would have felt, if I may presume thus to apply the words, that virtue had gone out of it for ever. With some of them the process was sharp and instantaneous, with others more gradual, but not less sure; with some, even after nearly four centuries, it is still going on; but with all it was an irrevocable doom. The wild and warlike, the indolent and semi-civilized, the bloody Aztec, the inoffensive Peruvian, the fierce Araucanian,- all fared alike; a foreign rule and an iron yoke settled or is settling down upon their necks for ever. Such was the law of nations of that day, not enacted, how ever, by Spain. It was in reality the old principle of the right of the strongest, disguised by a pretext; a colossal iron falsehood gilded over with the thin foil of a seeming truth. It was the same principle which prompted the eternal wars of the Greeks and Romans. Aristotle asserts, without qualification, that the Greeks had a perpetual right of war and conquest against the barbarians, that is, all the rest of the world; and the pupil of Aristotle proclaimed this doctrine at the head of the Macedonian phalanx on the banks of the Indus. The irruption of the barbarous races into Europe, during the centuries that preceded and followed Christianity, rested on as good a principle, — rather better, principle, rather better, the pretext only was varied; although the Gauls and Goths did not probably trouble themselves much about pretexts. They adopted rather the simple philosophy of the robber chieftain of the Scottish Highlands: "Pent in this fortress of the North, And from the robber rend the prey?" When the Mohammedan races rose to power, they claimed dominion over all who disbelieved the Koran. Conversion or extermination was the alternative which they offered to the world, and which was announced in letters of fire and blood from Spain to the Ganges. The states of Christian Europe did but retort the principle and the practice, when, in a series of crusades, kept up for more than three hundred years, they poured desolation over the West of Asia, in order to rescue the sepulchre of the Prince of Peace from the possession of unbelievers. Such were the principles of the public law and the practice under them, as they existed when the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took place. When the Portuguese began to push their adventures far to the south on the coast of Africa, in order to give to those principles the highest sanction, they procured of Pope Nicholas the Fifth, in 1454, the grant of the right of sovereignty over all the heathen tribes, nations, and countries discovered or to be discovered by them, from Africa to India, and the exclusive title thus conferred was recognized by all the other nations of Christendom. On the return of Columbus from his first voyage, the king of Spain, not to fall behind his neighbors in the strength of his title, lost no time in obtaining from Pope Alexander the Sixth a similar grant of all the heathen lands discovered by Columbus, or which might hereafter be discovered, in the west. To preclude as far as possible all conflict with Portugal, the famous line of demarcation was projected from the north to the south, a hundred leagues west of the Azores, cutting the earth into halves, like an apple, and, as far as the new discoveries were concerned, giving to the Spaniards all west of the line, and confirming all east of it to the Portuguese, in virtue of the grant already mentioned of Pope Nicholas the Fifth. I regret that want of time will not allow me to dwell upon the curious history of this line of demarcation, for the benefit of all states having boundary controversies, and especially our sister republics of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It is sufficient to say, that, having had its origin in the papal bull just referred to of 1454, it remained a subject of dispute and collision for three hundred and sixty-one years, and was finally settled at the Congress of Vienna in 1815! The territorial extension of Portugal and Spain, which resulted from the discovery of America, was followed by the most extraordinary effects upon the commerce, the finances, and the politics generally, of those two countries, and through them of the world. The over-land trade to the East, the great commercial interest of the Middle Ages, was abandoned. The whole of South America, and a considerable part of North America, were, in the course of the sixteenth century, settled by those governments; who organized in their Transatlantic possessions a colonial system of the most rigid and despotic character, reflecting as far as was practicable in distant provinces beyond the sea the stern features of the mother country. The precious metals, and a monopoly of the trade to the East, were the great objects to be secured. Aliens were forbidden to enter the American viceroyalties; none but a contraband trade was carried on by foreigners at the seaports. To prevent this trade, a severe right of search was instituted along the entire extent of the coasts, on either ocean. I have recently had an opportunity, in another place, to advert to the effects of this system upon the international relations of Europe.* Native subjects could emigrate to these vast colonial possessions only with the permission of the government. Liberty of speech and of the press was unknown. Instead of affording an asylum to persons dissenting from the religion of the state, conformity of belief was, if possible, enforced more rigidly in the colonies than in the mother country. No relaxation in this respect has, I believe, taken place in the remaining colonies of Spain even to the present day. As for the aboriginal tribes, after the first work of extermination was over, a remnant was saved from destruction by being reduced to a state of predial servitude. The dejected and spiritless posterity of the warlike tribes that offered no mean resistance to Cortés and Pizarro, are now the hewers of wood and the drawers of water to Mexico and Peru. In a word, from the extreme southern point of Patagonia to the northernmost limit of New Mexico, I am not aware that any thing hopeful was done for human improvement by either of the European crowns which added these vast domains to their territories. If this great territorial extension was fruitless of beneficial consequences to America, it was not less so to the mother countries. For Spain it was the commencement of a period, not of prosperity, but of decline. The rapid influx of the precious metals, in the absence of civil liberty and of just prin *Speech on the affairs of Central America, in the Senate of the United States, 21st of March, 1853. |