The Trial of Don Pedro León Luján and the Saga of Slavery on the Utah Frontier

New Year's Day 1852, in the Utah Territory, a Mexican trader from Abiquiú, New Mexico Territory was found guilty by a jury of violating the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834.  The law regulated "trade and intercourse with the Indian tribes," and required anyone trading with the American Indians west of the Mississippi (Indian country) to have a license issued by a government official of Indian affairs.  It's true, Don Pedro León Luján's license did not permit him to trade with the indigenous people of the Utah Territory, but the true matter at hand had less to do with whether Luján was trading without a license, and more to do with whether he was trading in slaves.
Three years earlier, when the first Mormon emigrant parties arrived in the Great Basin, the Utah Territory had been part of a Mexican province called Alta California, a vast state with its eastern border stretching partway into modern Colorado, its southern border partway into modern Mexico, and its western extremity at the shores of the Pacific, with its capital in Monterey.  The Old Spanish Trail, as it is now known, was the major highway of trade connecting this vast and sparsely inhabited territory, originating in Santa Fe, New Mexico, cutting across the southwest corner of Colorado before entering Utah from the east and passing through the future sites of Moab and Green River.  While there were a few different options cobbled together from smaller trails, the main trail then cut around the San Rafael Swell and entered the Great Basin through Salina along the modern route of I-70 before turning south and exiting Utah through the southwest corner, passing through Mesquite and Las Vegas, entering southern California in Inyo County, then passing through Barstow and San Bernadino before reaching its western terminus in Los Angeles.  The trail connected the major Spanish settlements of Santa Fe and Los Angeles, providing a convenient thoroughfare for goods such as furs, livestock, woven items like blankets and clothes, and much more, bought from and sold to indigenous peoples and frontiersmen along the roads between the two major destinations.  It was also used to sustain an American Indian slave trade.
Views on Slavery in the Early Mormon Movement
In one of the earliest interactions recorded by Mormon settlers in the Salt Lake Valley with the local indigenous population took place in the winter of 1847, when according to the journal of Mary Ellen Kimball, an indigenous slave trader tried to sell a little Bannock girl to one of the settlers in exchange for a rifle.  The settlers were reluctant, so the trader began torturing the little girl until one man, Charles Decker, stepped forward to buy the girl (the girl was taken into the household of Decker's brother-in-law, the prophet Brigham Young, where she was named Sally and eventually married the Mormon-converted Pahvant Chief Kanosh as one of his plural wives).  This interaction is corroborated by multiple other diaries.  The Mormon stance on slavery prior to the U.S. Civil War was inconsistent, and while some church leaders certainly spoke about the issue in their official capacities, no position was imposed as an official doctrine.  Typically, early church leaders emphasized recognition of slavery as a legal institution and the non-interference with it, and the owning of slaves by members of the church was never frowned upon in any official capacity, so long as the slaves were not treated with outright physical abuse.  The church had originated in the Northern United States, where many of its early converts joined with their anti-slavery views already established, but as Mormonism became a hotly contested social-political topic and their base moved further south into Missouri, more varied views on the matter emerged.  While based in pro-slavery Missouri, the movement's founder Joseph Smith wrote to his "Assistant President of the Church," Oliver Cowdery, in the Latter-Day Saint news publication, Messenger and Advocate, that slavery was the "will of God" based on several scriptures drawn of the Bible and specifically the Curses of Cain and Ham.  As a U.S. presidential candidate based in anti-slavery Illinois eight years later though, Smith proposed a gradual abolition of slavery, one which compensated slave owners through the sale of public lands.  His presidential bid and leadership over the faith ended with his assassination in 1844, after which he was succeeded by the more explicitly pro-slavery Brigham Young from Vermont.

Prospects of Popular Sovereignty
57-year-old Don Pedro León Luján had been trading for slaves from the Utes (known to the Spanish as Yutas) since well before the Republic of Mexico had lost Alta California and the neighboring province of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico (mostly comprised of today's New Mexico with parts of Texas, Arizona and Colorado) to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War.  Mexican residents on the land ceded to the U.S. could relocate to within Mexico's new boundaries or stay and automatically become U.S. citizens with full rights.  The question that was all abuzz in the states was whether slavery would or would not be permitted in these vast new lands the nation had acquired, as both opponents and advocates of slavery seemed to agree that without further American expansion of the institution, it would wither away.  With the question of slavery yet again threatening to rend the Union, the United States Congress passed a package of five bills called the Compromise of 1850, in an attempt to diffuse the tension.  Drafted by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky and brokered by Clay and Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the compromise reshaped the boundaries of the slave state Texas while paying off the state's considerable public debt, admitted California as a free state, and banned the slave trade in the District of Columbia (not slavery itself, just the buying and selling of slaves), but most controversially, the compromise also passed the infamous Fugitive Slave Act, an update of an older law that punished officials with a fine for not apprehending suspected runaway slaves and threatened imprisonment for anyone caught aiding a runaway slave.  Finally, the Compromise allowed the new territories created in the newly acquired Mexican land to determine their own position on slavery by popular sovereignty.  Those two territories were the New Mexico Territory and the Utah Territory, the latter of which Brigham Young was appointed territorial governor by President Millard Fillmore. Utah would choose to legalize slavery.
At the time that Luján was arrested, however, the matter of slavery in Utah was still ambiguous.  Ironically, while Luján was trading slaves years before in what was part of Mexico, slavery had been technically outlawed since 1829, however, this was scarcely enforced, especially in what was still mostly a frontier region.  When the first Mormons arrived in the Great Basin in 1847, as with most immigrants from the United States practicing their "Manifest Destiny" in Mexican territory, they didn't recognize Mexico's laws or claims (even less than they recognized the claims of the indigenous tribes), and with the two nations at war, they understood the likelihood that Utah would soon be claimed by the U.S.  There were three black slaves with Brigham Young's vanguard company that entered the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847; Green Flake (whose ownership, according to tradition, would be transferred to the LDS church itself in the form of tithing later in 1850), the slave of James Flake; Hark Lay, the slave of William Lay; and Oscar Crosby, the slave of William Crosby.  Although the Compromise of 1850 allowed Utah to decide its own slave status, and an unknown number in the dozens of black and indigenous slaves already existed in the territory, Utah's territorial government had not addressed the issue in any legislation and attempted to downplay the practice within their borders as much as possible.  The arrest of Luján forced their hand.
Indian Slavery Among the Mormons
Luján had attempted to recognize the laws of the new government over the land, beginning in New Mexico Territory, where he posted a $1,000 bond for a license from Territorial Governor and superintendent of Indian Affairs James S. Calhoun to trade with the Ute people.  The license was issued on August 14, 1851.  Although he later attempted to argue that his license from Governor Calhoun entitled him to trade with the "Utah Nation of Indians...in their own localities," meaning the Utah Territory as well, Luján knew when he arrived in Utah he had to seek out Territorial Governor Brigham Young to obtain a license from him as well.  Young was in the Sanpete Valley in Central Utah that fall, probably overseeing progress on the budding Manti settlement, and that is where Luján found him.  The Mormons had been practicing Indian slavery since shortly after they came to Utah, beginning in the winter of 1847, when Charles Decker bought Sally Young for a rifle, but the practice had escalated to a more sinister form in enslaving native Utahns as a conquered people.  Surviving Timpanogos women and children from the Battle Creek massacre in 1849, the Battle at Fort Utah in 1850, and other altercations with native people would be typically taken into Mormon households as "servants," to be converted and to work to repay their "hosts."  When Luján requested a license to trade in Indian goods and slaves in the Utah Territory however, Young denied the request and reportedly issued a stern rebuke of Indian slavery before sending Luján away.  Not long after, however, Luján and his party were arrested, still in the Sanpete Valley, for trading with the Indians without a license, and more specifically, for having apparently received nine Piute slaves, most of them children.  How they came to be with Luján's party was the central question at hand in their trial.
For a some of Utah's tribal leaders at this time, the trading of slaves captured from neighboring tribes was a highly lucrative and empowering business, one which they weren't going to give up without a fight.  Luján and his party were arrested by the Mormon authorities near Salt Creek in Sanpete County with nine American Indian slaves in their possession including a woman about age 30 and eight children.  Luján and his fellows would plead innocent, protesting that Indian slave traders had stolen about a dozen of the Mexicans' pack animals, and that their attempts to reclaim their animals had failed while the raiders had insisted they take the slaves as payment for the animals, essentially forcing the trade upon Luján against his will.  The slave trade was not technically illegal in the Utah Territory at this time, but trading with the Indians without a valid license, of which Luján and company were accused, violated the Nonintercourse Act.
The Nonintercourse Act
First passed in 1790 and renewed and revised several times since, the Nonintercourse Act was created in response to the violent conflicts that had occurred between European-descended colonists and American Indians since the 17th century, originating from uninhibited purchasing of land from native tribes in deals where the buyer and seller did not always share the same understanding of the deal that was being made (sometimes intentionally, as in the case of unscrupulous persons who might take advantage of drunkeness or a cultural misunderstanding in order to swindle the other) and, with the native people's increasing reliance on European goods and what at first seemed like an abundance of land to trade, which saw tribal lands shrink at an alarming rate.  Various laws, and eventually the Nonintercourse Act, were created to regulate trading between what were essentially separate nations and hopefully prevent trades that could provoke conflict, although the Nonintercourse Act would also be used to subjugate indigenous tribes who were reliant on trading with U.S. merchants.
Charging Luján with a violation of the Nonintercourse Act, however, was transparently intended by the Mormon settlers to make a point about slavery as practiced by Mexicans.  Although slavery had been abolished in Mexico by the decree of President Vicente Guerrero in 1829, the system of Indian slavery practiced in the northern frontier regions since the 18th century had persisted.  Typically used as house servants and occasionally ingratiated to some degree with the families they worked for, the labor of Indian slaves was considered a way to pay off the debt of being purchased, and after about ten to twenty years, they would be released, supposedly having been reformed for their betterment within a civilized Christian household.  Ironically, this was almost exactly the same way Indian slavery was practiced in the Mormon colonies of Utah, but for whatever reason, be it xenophobia, anti-Catholicism or some other reason entirely, Brigham Young and many of his followers viewed Mexican slavery as uniquely barbaric compared to their own.  However, the Mormons had another compelling reason to suppress the trading of Indian slaves with people outside their own communities.  As long as Mexican traders like Luján were buying up Indian slaves, Ute traders had a reason to raid neighboring tribes, thus inciting conflict within the network of native communities amidst whom the Mormons now found themselves.  While the Mormons still supported such conflicts by purchasing Indian slaves, at least they engendered ties with the selling party and potentially bonded themselves to the indigenous people by bringing them into their communities in whatever form.  The Mexican slave trade had the same downsides, but none of the benefits.
The hypocrisy was not lost on Luján, however, and he accused them of as much when the nine captives he and his party were arrested for possessing were then sold by Mormon authorities into Mormon households.  Still, Luján also maintained that he had been coerced into taking the captives after Ute traders had stolen their livestock and demanded the captives be taken in exchange as payment (others have theorized that Luján's party abducted the slaves in retaliation for the theft of their livestock).  In the case tried before Utah Territorial Supreme Court Justice Zerubbabel Snow (a member of the LDS church and the only district judge left in Utah after federally-appointed non-Mormon justices had left in frustration toward the church's dominance over the law), with Brigham Young acting as a witness for the prosecution, and a jury made up of local Mormon settlers, Luján and his trading party were found guilty of violating the Nonintercourse Act.  As a result, their remaining trade goods and livestock were confiscated to pay a fine and the traders were sent back to New Mexico on foot.
Brigham Young Addresses the Legislature
Only a few days after the trial began, Brigham Young addressed a joint session of the territorial legislature, addressing the issue of Luján's trial directly: "The practice of purchasing Indian children for slaves, is a trade carried on by the Mexican population of New Mexico and California.  These traders of late years, have extended their traffic into the limits of this Territory.  This trade I have endeavored to prevent; and this fall, happening to encounter a few of them in my travels, as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, strictly prohibited their further traffic.  The majority of them appeared satisfied; and after making a few exchanges of property in the settlements, returned to their own country; unfortunately however, a few of them determined to carry on their nefarious traffic; they have been arrested, and are now on their trial in this city."
He then went on to request that the legislature explicitly address the issue of Indian slavery in the law, weaving a nuanced but contradictory and plainly white supremacist vision on the purpose for which Mormon households would continue their practice of using native laborers purchased from traders or captured in war.

"It is unnecessary, perhaps, for me to indicate the true policy of Utah, in regard to slavery.  Restrictions of law and government make all servants; but human flesh to be dealt in as property, is not consistent or compatible with the true principles of government.  My own feelings are, that no property can or should be recognized as existing in slaves, either Indian or African.  No person can purchase them, without their becoming free, so far as natural rights are concerned, as persons of any other color.  Under the present low and degraded situation of the human race, so long as the practice of gambling away, selling, and otherwise disposing of their children, as also sacrificing prisoners, obtains among them, it seems indeed, that any transfer would be to them a relief and a benefit.  many a life by this means is saved; many a child redeemed from the thraldom of savage barbarity, and placed on an equal footing with the more favored portions of the human race.  If in return for favors and expense which may have been incurred on their account, service should be considered due, it would become necessary that some law should provide the suitable regulations by which all such indebtedness should be defrayed.  This may be said to present a new feature in the traffic of human beings; it is essentially purchasing them into freedom, instead of slavery; but it is not the low, servile drudgery of Mexican slavery, to which I would doom them; not to be raised among being scarcely superior to themselves, but where they could find that consideration pertaining not only to civilized, but humane and benevolent society."  -Journals of the House of Representatives, Council, and Joint Sessions of the First Annual and Special Sessions of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah Held at Great Salt Lake City, 1851 and 1852.  Brigham H. Young, Printers. Pages 108-109.

With a vision of slavery as a progressive measure by which white people (whom "Nature and Nature's God has indicated to be their masters, their superiors") elevated those he deemed lesser people (i.e. "Indian or African") to a position not of equality with white people, but "by extending principles of true liberty to all the children of men, in accordance with the designs of their Creator," Brigham Young left it to the all-Mormon legislature to craft the laws according to his advisement.
The first slavery law to be passed was the Act in Relation to Service, which established the basic slave code in the territory, mainly pertaining to enslaved black people.  The act required that masters provide their "servants" with comfortable shelter, clothing, food, while slaves age 6 to 20 were to be given at least a year and a half of schooling, and if a master was found guilty of cruelty, abuse or neglecting these provisions, their ownership could be declared void.  It also stipulated that "It shall be the duty of the master to correct and punish his servant in a reasonable manner when it be necessary," regardless of the addition, "being guided by prudence and humanity," as much as prudence and humanity can be exercised in the owning of human beings.  Section 4 of the law established anti-miscengenation policy in Utah, which remained active until 1963; "...if any white person shall be guilty of sexual intercourse with any of the African race, they shall be subject, on conviction thereof to a fine of one thousand dollars nor less than five hundred, to the use of the Territory, and imprisonment, not exceeding three years."
The Act for the relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners was passed another month later on March 7, 1852, and was unique to the Utah Territory, specifying the manner by which American Indians specifically could be enslaved.  The text of the act was relatively brief, mainly pertaining to a justification of such an act to regulate the slave trade as it already existed among Utah's indigenous people and as a humanitarian measure to civilize them.  The act required that the owner of any Indian slave must immediately register them with their county government and be approved as a suitable person to "raise and retain or educate" an Indian slave, and specified that the contract of indentured servitude could not exceed 20 years.  Furthermore, any enslaved Indian between the ages of 7 and 16 was required to receive 3 months of school every year, considerably more than for any enslaved black person.
Utah's Place in the Civil War
Abolitionists back east, who had opposed the proposal of popular sovereignty, were dismayed by the turn of events.  Already strongly positioned against the Mormons in Utah for their practice of polygamy, the newly burgeoning Republican Party; which pitted itself against what it called "the twin pillars of barbarism," being slavery and polygamy; responded harshly.  Representative Justin Smith Morrill from Virginia lambasted the law, saying: "However cruelly we may have treated the Indians in other respects, either by encroachments upon their hunting grounds, with or without treaties, or by harassing wars, no party and no government in this country has sanctioned the idea of reducing the red man of the forest to slavery...this is a dreg placed in the bottom of the cup by Utah alone" (although there had been no official sanction of enslaved American Indian since the founding of the United States, an estimated 1,000 indigenous people from New England had been infamously shipped to plantations in the Caribbean and Africa in the aftermath of the King's Phillip's War in 1678).
Proponents of slavery in the United States were intent on the practice's expansion beyond the southern states, lest it fester and die isolated in a single region, an archaic cultural curiosity separated from the progress of modernity.  Utah, however, was an ill-suited stage for the "peculiar institution" to expand into, given the mountainous and rugged desert landscapes much less suited to plantation farming than the flat and and humid South.  Yes, slavery was legal in Utah and it was practiced by some of the Mormon settlers, but it never became common, because it was scarcely useful.
When the American Civil War finally erupted in 1861 over the issue of slavery and the many deep-rooted factors it entailed, Utah had been under the careful and cautious watch of federal troops for a few years.  The so-called Utah War of 1857-1858 had seen a spike in tensions between Mormons in Utah and the federal government, emanating out of the essential theocracy ruled by Mormons' religious leader and territorial governor Brigham Young and anti-Mormon sentiments in Washington, D.C., nearly leading to open conflict, but negotiations mediated by attorney and Mormon-ally Thomas Kane had prevailed, and U.S. Army troops were permitted to be stationed in the territory.  At the start of the war, troops were called out from Utah to the battlefields in the states, while some among them left Utah to join the war effort on the Confederate side.  By 1862, with enlistments high, the Army sent Colonel Patrick Connor and the 3rd California Infantry to Utah to protect the overland routes and maintain federal control over the territory.  Although just a few years before rumors had abounded in Washington that Utah was in a state of open rebellion, it was clearly held within the Union during the war.  For the most part, Mormons themselves actively avoided playing a part in the war, satisfied to see states full of anti-Mormon sentiment too busy warring with each other to meddle in Utah affairs.  Furthermore, many in Utah saw the Civil War as divine punishment for injustices committed against Mormons and the murder of their movement's founder, and as a prelude to Christ's Second Coming.  Even still, as much as they seethed under the federal governance of so-called "Gentiles," most Mormons desperately desired recognition within the United States and to prove their own brand of patriotism.  Young, for his part, expressed support for the United States in essence, but he was decidedly against the government as it stood.  He telegraphed Washington, stating, "Utah has not seceded but is firm for the constitution and laws of our once happy country," but also discouraged his followers from fighting or otherwise assisting either side, saying "I will see them in Hell before I will raise an army for them."  And yet, in 1862, when Washington asked for the Utah militia's assistance in protecting the overland mail routes and the recently completed telegraph line from native raiding parties, Young obliged, eager to prove his community's ability to independently maintain order within their domain.  Later the same year, with enlistments up and a few troops to spare again, Colonel Patrick Connor's 3rd California Infantry was dispatched to Utah to replace the troops that had been called back at the start of the war.  When the Army asked members of the militia to reenlist, this time likely serving under non-Mormon officers, Young refused them outright.
Slavery was officially outlawed in the Utah Territory on June 18, 1862 when the U.S. Congress (with most of its pro-slavery stalwarts who had fought so bitterly to open the newly acquired lands from the Mexican-American War having seceded to form the Confederate States) passed a law ending the practice throughout the organized incorporated U.S. territories, prior to President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that abolished the institution as it stood in the United States once and for all.  Little was made to note the freeing of the slaves in Utah, although, aside from the no doubt tremendous impact upon the human lives it emancipated, the law would have had a minor effect on the territory, since slavery never gained much of a foothold there.  As for Indian slaves, those who chose to integrate with Mormon society did so, while those who were determined to maintain their traditional way of life proved difficult to force.  Not long after the creation of the Act in relation to service, 1853 had seen a flare-up in tensions between Mormons and Indians with the so-called Walker War, when Walkara, one of the most powerful practitioners of the Indian slave trade, encouraged the raiding of settlements in the territory.  Ultimately, Walkara could not keep up his campaign and negotiated a peace with Brigham Young before his death in 1855, after which he was reportedly buried in the mountains near Meadow, Utah, with a pair of children buried alive with him to serve in the afterlife.  As other prominent Indian slave traders died away, settlements from the United States became more dominant in the region, and some people began choosing to relocate to the new Indian reservation created in 1861 by Abraham Lincoln in the Uintah Valley, Indian slavery was dwindling among the main body of settlement in Utah as well.  The Black Hawk War, which lasted in some form or other from 1865 to 1872, marked the last major conflict between settlers in Utah and the native people and ended with most of the territory's indigenous people forced to relocate to the reservation.