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Pacification by gifts established control of Florida Indians through their caciques

Source: Situado and Sabana #82

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CHAPTER 9. ROYAL SUPPORT OF THE CACIQUES

HISPANICIZING THE NATIVE ELITE

Throughout the Spanish empire it was standard procedure to favor and Hispanicize the native leaders, protecting their hereditary status and rank. This model of European-native relations evolved from Spain's practice of governing a conquered people through their own rulers as a separate polity, or res publica. Just as the conquest of Granada led to two republicas, one of Moslems and the other of Spaniards, so the New World was divided in theory into a dominant Republic of Spaniards and a subordinate Republic of Indians.

In the Philippines, as in the Americas, Franciscan missionaries boarded the sons of leaders in their convents, using them as catechists and interpreters. Once grown, these members of the ruling class served the Crown as production intermediaries and gobernadores, or elected local magistrates, the same as their New World counterparts. The caciques and principales of the "indios filipinos were similarly exempt from tribute and compulsory labor and entitled to honorifics and other signs of authority.

By the end of the 16th century, Spaniards had encountered and recorded, in Greater Florida, over 50 autonomous political units, including 9 paramount chiefdoms. According to David H. Dye (1990), the paramount chief in the Southeast and his or her supporting elites exercised hegemony over the chiefs of subordinate towns and tributary towns, periodically demanding loyalty oaths, or pledges, of subordinate chiefs or their emissaries. The lesser chiefs, in turn, controlled and delivered the labor and tribute of commoners. A paramount chiefdom's wars of conquest were hegemonic wars, intended to achieve political expansion and access to the tribute and social labor of new populations without the necessity of accessing new lands or policing new territories. Elites supported themselves through the institutions of staple finance and wealth finance, staple finance being the redistribution of commoner tribute to caciques, principales, and those working for the polity, and wealth finance being control over the distribution of status indicators such as copper and other exotic goods. The paramount chiefs' methods of establishing hegemony were not unlike the Spaniards' own.

From 16th-century French sources, David Hurst Thomas determined that the chiefs of preconquest Guale functioned as "collectors and redistributors of food and other products," with the "most common mode of redistribution" being the periodic ritual feast. Their trade with inland people was largely in elite goods, and they "compensated their supporters in military activities with valued items such as deerskins, shell money, and metal tools received in exchange with Europeans." This pattern of exchange and redistribution made the caciques natural brokers between Spaniards and Indian commoners once the Spaniards had secured their friendship. It also provided an opening by which to secure it.

Depending on whether his purpose was trade or diplomacy, Pedro Menendez' s gifts to the coastal Indians of southern Florida and the Atlantic coast, including Guale, were of two kinds: "rescates"or "regalos." The term "rescate," originally meaning "ransom," had by the mid-1560s come to mean any kind of cross-cultural trade, including trade with corsairs or unpacified Indians. When Menendez arrived in Florida, coastal chiefs and European visitors had long since opened channels and established procedures for the "rescate" of salvaged silver and Christian captives, and these procedures the Adelantado duly observed.

"Regalos," on the other hand, were the reciprocal tokens of "amistades," or "friendships," the common term for diplomatic and trading alliances. The term "regaling the chiefs," so prevalent in official Spanish correspondence, suggests not only gift-giving but the whole tiring round of speeches and hospitality associated with the calumet ceremony, the traditional means by which many North American Indian societies validated friendship and initiated or reestablished trade. The Spanish were not the only Europeans to come around to the Indian system. When their turn came, the French and the British would do the same.

The policy of pacification by gifts that was first implemented on the northern frontiers of New Spain, with Franciscans present to observe and translate, was tried in Florida soon after (Lopez, 1602). There, however, the policy of "peace by purchase" appropriate to a nonsedentary native society with a low level of social stratification was overlaid by the policy of "conquest by contract" suitable to a more sedentary and stratified native society. Gifts from the king were the means by which civil and religious authorities attracted, attached, and empowered the "lords of the land" and through them exercised control over commoners. Outmaneuvered in war and suborned by gifts, the Florida caciques induced their followers to be baptized, to restrict their trade to espanoles, and to function as a labor reserve. In the Spanish model of European-native relations, they were the enablers.

(Bushnell SS)