Question

In 3–5 sentences, explain why enslaving the Indigenous peoples of the Americas was largely unsuccessful in filling the need of the plantations. Support your answer by using one piece of qualitative and one piece of quantitative information from the sample excerpts below, or elsewhere in Las Casas’s writing.

Answer 1

Enslaving Indigenous peoples did not supply steady plantation labor because disease, brutal overwork, and outright massacre caused rapid demographic collapse and constant labor losses. Las Casas graphically recorded the cruelty and forced labor—Indians driven into mines and fields, tortured and "made to live like beasts"—which undermined families and communities needed to reproduce the workforce. He also gave a striking quantitative estimate, claiming that more than three million Indigenous people died in the Indies within the first decades of Spanish rule, a scale of loss that made indigenous slavery unsustainable. As a result colonists increasingly turned to importing African enslaved people to fill plantations’ labor needs.