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Spaniards disagreed on the role of missions

Source: Situado and Sabana #82

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Herbert Bolton and his students of the "Spanish Borderlands School" invested their subject with an aura of old-fashioned adventure and romance. They reacted to the Anglocentric Black Legend with a Hispanocentrism which "exalted and romanticized Spaniards in general and missionaries in particular." 
...Bolton put forward the bold thesis that, secularly speaking, the mission was a successful agent of borderland control.
...Charles W. Spellman disputed Maynard Geiger's millennialist concept of a "Golden Age" of Florida missions based upon outward conformation and soul counts. "The idyllic picture of Indians living prosperously with their friars in pleasant mission compounds," Spellman declared, was a fantasy that the 17th-century record did not support: "the 'Golden Age' never really happened."

...Robert Matter further challenged Bolton's picture of the mission as a successful frontier institution. In Matter's view, the Florida missions served no useful secular purpose. An economic backwater, Florida had little of value to offer, nor for some time after 1566 was foreign intrusion a problem. The only reason he could discover for Spain's abiding interest in the colony was, as the Crown itself said, to convert and protect the Indians. Yet he found that evangelism was "not properly integrated into the overall administration of Florida, and what success the missionaries enjoyed did little to prepare the vulnerable colony for its own defense and perpetuation." Far from defending the frontier, the missions were "the weakest link in the colony's defenses." The friars themselves "made a major contribution to the decay of their installations and the loss of the Spanish frontier" by their "bitter, uncompromising feud" with the governors. Although Matter acknowledged that Indian uprisings triggered the episodes in this conflict, on his stage the only actors were Spaniards:
"For over a hundred years the pawns in the game-the Christian Indians of Florida-considered and treated as inferior by the Spaniards, secular and religious, had little choice in selecting their masters or in determining the outcome of the church-state feud about them that swirled around their heads."

David Hurst Thomas remarked on the contrast in Florida between the late 16th century, when Jesuits and Franciscans tried to protect their charges from abusive soldiers, and the late 17th century, when governors and officers defended the Indians from abusive missionaries. What appears to be a major shift in attitude was partly a function of source survival. In the archives, much of the early Florida correspondence concerns mission administration, while the later correspondence is heavily gubernatorial and military. Nonetheless, as Thomas observed, 
"Such disputes over military and religious priorities reflected deep-seated differences in perception about the true role of the mission system: as strictly agent of the Church or as an ingredient of a presidio system designed to conquer and safeguard new frontiers." AN259

Michael Gannon came to the missionaries' defense. Their loss of zeal in the late 17th century could, he said, be attributed to the "constant pressure on the friars to defend themselves and their native charges" from interfering governors. When "the friars acted on their own behalf," he asserted, they were also safeguarding "the welfare of their converts." The "rights and dignity of the missions" were tantamount to the "rights and dignity of the native peoples."

David Weber, taking a larger view of Spanish-Indian relations, wrote:
"Whatever their spiritual successes, then, missionaries failed to advance permanently, defend effectively, or Hispanicize deeply Spain's North American frontiers of the seventeenth century."
…The mission did not fit Bolton's model of a successful "frontier institution," and it failed in large part because Indians did not wish it to succeed (Weber, 1990: 439).

Viewing Florida in the context of cultural contact on the Atlantic seaboard from Greenland to Hispaniola and trying to account for its lack of colonists, William Fitzhugh observed that Spanish "interest in La Florida was primarily strategic and military" and that, accordingly, "very little Spanish investment was made in this area, which was turned over to Jesuit and Franciscan friars and a handful of military men scattered in posts along the Georgia and Carolina coasts." The Crown's subsidies to friars and soldiers were not, it seems, Spanish investments. Fitzhugh continued:
"Because of the poverty of these missions located in an economic backwater of the Spanish Empire, the emphasis on religious rather than economic activity, the collapse of native political and military infrastructure, and the gradual depopulation resulting from the European epidemics, these missions were weakened and fell prey to incursions by Yamasee and Creek Indians and others armed and encouraged by expanding English settlement in the Charleston area. Retreating to the safety of St. Augustine, these remnant groups existed as refugee communities until they were evacuated to other Spanish centers in the Caribbean in 1763.

This declensionist view, minimizing royal expenditures and local economic activity in the colony and emphasizing its poverty and isolation, reflects the impression of most historians and archaeologists examining Spanish Florida's missions, military posts, and native societies. Many of the letters from Florida's royal officials and religious authorities to the Crown were written to convey that very impression, and as historian Engel Sluiter pointed out, the writers succeeded-not with the knowing Crown, but with presentday scholars, trustingly accepting sources that Sluiter dismisses as "literary" and "non-enumerative."

The consequent emphasis on mission isolation and self-sufficiency fell comfortably in line with the Boltonian picture of the Spanish Church on the "rim of Christendom" and with the Borderlands Paradigm which combined the religious history of missionary orders with the secular history of the frontier (Block, 1980: 161). In the words of historian David Block: "Professional historians, following the diaries and letters of the missionary fathers, have placed priests, neophytes, and-in North America-presidial soldiers beyond the aid or control of metropolitan authority, touched only by an occasional visita or supply train."

Although scholars understood that the mission had an economic dimension, they tended to recognize only the internal one, passing over the evidence for the survival of preconquest trading networks and for the postconquest flow of Indian labor and agricultural produce toward Spanish settlements.

Architectural historian George Kubler called attention to the mission as "an economic unit capable of supporting itself and its spiritual head by means of its own resources and labor." In Kubler's view, there were "on the northern periphery of the Spanish world in America" two ways of achieving self-support, the absolutist and the humanistic, which he illustrated by the contrasting mission architecture of California and New Mexico. In the "complex industrial mission" of California, the "human group occupying the buildings existed in a quasi-military state of being, subject to the strict regulation of a conventual discipline," their village "subordinate to the vast enclosure of the religious buildings." In the "monastic plan" of New Mexico, "the church and its accessory buildings occupied a subordinate position with relation to the great Indian towns." The church was massively fortified; the convent was "merely a residence for the missionaries and their personal servants," and the Indians carried on their economic activities elsewhere.
(Bushnell SS)