Note 29 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

But the inevitable soon came to pass—much sooner than even the wisest statesman could have foreseen. The great Cardinal Ximenes, it is true, realized from the beginning the risk incurred by sending negroes to the Indies. He contended that it was wrong to send beyond the ocean people so “apt in war” as the blacks, who might at any time stir up a servile war against Spanish rule. He insisted that “the negroes, who were as malicious as they were strong, would no sooner perceive themselves to be more numerous in the New World than the Spaniards, than they would lay their heads together to put on their masters the chains they now carried.”29