Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico

William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico reminded me of so many other nineteenth-century documents written by historians, missionaries, and others, regarding Native American populations and the approach of “civilization.”  Positing the civilization versus savagery as a central theme of his history, Prescott represented well the period of his writing and the views of Indian peoples held by him and his contemporaries.  Of course, the advance of civilization came at a price for those not willing to break from their savagery – in this case, the “Aztecs” and others found themselves directly in the path of a distinct Roman Catholic civilization, represented by Cortes and his fellow soldiers for the Faith.  Prescott justified their conquest of Mexico on the grounds that the “Aztecs” proved unwilling to advance the cause of humanity, i.e. the advance of civilization, thus their conquest constituted a good shaped by divine providence and enacted by Cortes.

Prescott also fell prey to many of the myth cited by Restall in our earlier reading.  Using terms such as “soldiers,” “infantry,” “troops,” and “cavalry” to describe Cortes and his group of conquistadors, Prescott gave the impression that these men were trained military fighters rather than a group of regular men looking to acquire land, wealth, and position in the “New World.”  Prescott further advanced the myth of a small group of Spaniards conquering large numbers of Aztecs and other Native American groups.  While the author did acknowledge at one point in his text that Indians actually conquered Indians during the Conquest, Prescott constantly questioned Cortes’s account of the number of Native Americans allied with Cortes.

In the end, the Christian soldiers conquered the Aztecs, and per Prescott, that was precisely the way things were supposed to work out.