Subterranean spirits might dwell in burning mountains, or occupy themselves in mining . . . Many Irish legends relate to such. They may appear as Daome-Shi [fairies], dressed in green, with mischievous intent.
—James Bonwick
The first of the assassinations came at the dawn of the year, in the middle of the day, in the shadow a burning mountain. The last came nearly thirteen years later, on a December night as black as anthracite. Both killings involved teams of gunmen, opening fire in the home of an Irish immigrant. In many ways, the murders were mirror images of each other—the bookends of a shadowy struggle that left dozens dead in the hard-coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Those marked for death in the two attacks stood on opposite sides of that struggle. The first victim was a former militiaman whose murder was blamed on a violent secret society. The last victim was a member of that secret society and his pregnant sister-in-law. A militia unit’s second-in-command was implicated in the killings.
In neither case was anyone ever brought to justice. For generations, the exact motives have remained a mystery.
The first killing took place in a valley that was often swathed in sulfurous fumes. The fire in the burning mountain had blazed long and deep, but when exactly it erupted remains something of a mystery. One account says it all began in the darkest recesses of winter, on December 13, 1840; another claims it was 1835. Local folklore is short on specifics but long on atmosphere.
The miners were going for a vein of anthracite so thick it was known as “the jugular” near the village of Coal Castle, Pennsylvania, in the Heckscherville Valley of Schuylkill County. In 1932, an eighty-six-year-old resident of the valley told a folklorist that water trickling down into a mine had frozen, turning the underground chambers into a palace of shimmering black ice, with frozen stalactites reaching down from the roof and crystals coating the anthracite walls. The miners, so the story goes, lit a fire on a Saturday to melt the ice, then left, returning on Monday to find the shaft and the face of the coal seam ablaze. The local newspaper, relating the story decades after the fact, reported that two of the miners entered the burning pit to retrieve their tools, never to return.1
While the newspaper said it was common practice to set fires in grates to prevent mine water from freezing, Scientific American blamed the blaze on “careless miners.” The phrase had very specific legal ramifications. Because carelessness by a miner—any miner, not just the dead one—could absolve a mine operator of liability for a fatal accident, “careless miner” became a stock phrase for those who would have otherwise borne the responsibility.2
However and whenever it started, the underground fire burned for years, at times leaving the valley below and the hidden stream that ran through it enveloped in steam and smoke.
“It has even roasted the rocky strata above it, destroying every trace of vegetation along the line of the breast, and causing vast yawning chasms, where the earth has fallen in, from which issue hot and sulfurous fumes, as from a volcano,” one observer wrote in the 1843. Elsewhere, the fire hollowed out portions of the hill. Anyone traversing those areas ran the risk of plunging through the upper crust, perhaps three or four feet, into pits of ash up to one hundred feet deep. The fire was “still burning, like a slumbering volcano,” in 1855.3
By June 21, 1861, when David J. Kennedy painted a watercolor of the scene, Mine Hill Gap and Burning Mountain, there was just the barest hint of the underground fire—a bare patch and two bare trees on the mountain in the background—but there was also the suggestion of a more recent conflagration. A rifleman in blue appears along the rail line through the gap, though it is not clear whether he is a Union Army soldier on patrol or simply a hunter, out for a stroll in the lingering light of the summer solstice.4
For the Irish immigrants who dominated the valley, the underground inferno was a mixed curse. By 1858, word had spread that sulfur-laden water from the burning mine cured rheumatism, restored twisted limbs, and even rejuvenated a broken-down old colliery mule. People from far and wide made the pilgrimage to Coal Castle to cure their afflictions.
In that sense, the mine water was akin to the holy wells of Ireland that were said to effect miraculous cures, and when some enterprising miners decided to sell barrels of the stuff for profit, the older Irish of the area were aghast at the sacrilege. Holy wells were not to be profaned—indeed, it was said they could lose their powers if desecrated by a murder nearby. So perhaps the fate of the burning mine’s healing waters should come as no surprise. “The day came when their misgivings were realized,” the folklorist George Korson wrote of the Irish. “The snow no longer melted on the mountain in the winter. Its water became like any other sulfurous mine water. The magic mine had grown cold!”5
It was here in the shadow of Mine Hill, where miracles were born of fire and brimstone and peasant belief clashed head on with the capitalist spirit, that one of the century’s most sensational campaigns of cold, calculated killing began, on a winter’s day just about a quarter century after the start of the mine fire. It was these burning hills that gave birth to the Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania.
What defined a Molly Maguire was the resort to conspiratorial violence—during the potato famine in Ireland, teams of Mollies, often dressed as women, had murdered grasping Irish landlords and local magistrates with ruthless efficiency. That sort of organized, premeditated violence claimed its first life in this country on January 2, 1863, in the village of Coal Castle, under that “smoldering volcano” at Mine Hill Gap.*
The Mollies would gain infamy in Pennsylvania for killing mine bosses, but the man gunned down in Coal Castle that day was an Irish-born mine worker, James Bergen, a wounded Union soldier who had spent his entire life under a series of rumbling volcanoes.
Bergen was born in Ireland around 1833, almost certainly near Castlecomer, County Kilkenny, a coal-mining center. Castlecomer natives, several named Bergen, poured into Coal Castle and other mining villages along the western branches of the Schuylkill River in the years before the Civil War. Local tradition holds that a Heckscherville mine operator, William Payne, went to Ireland in 1845 to recruit men from Queen’s and Kilkenny Counties to dig Schuylkill anthracite, which was similar to the hard coal the Irishmen mined.6
Bergen was born in a period when poverty, not Britain, was the true ruler of rural Ireland. The authorities labored mightily, and with only middling success, to stem an epidemic of violence by secret peasant societies that, like the Mollies, were intent on enforcing traditional notions of the social contract. In the early 1830s, when Bergen was born, the coal fields of Queen’s County and County Kilkenny were beset by a secret society called the Whitefeet, which sought to improve conditions for miners and peasants. In November 1831, a band of Whitefeet clashed with the police on the border between the two counties. When several members of the group were arrested, a crowd attempted to rescue them. In the ensuing battle, between seven and ten people were killed, and up to fifty were wounded.7
For all the violence, the real horror came just as Bergen reached puberty, with the failure of the potato crop from 1845 to 1850. The great famine decimated agrarian Ireland. It is estimated that more than a million died, and more than a million emigrated.
Among the immigrants were many Bergens. Some had already made it to Pennsylvania by 1850—the census for that year shows five families listed variously as Bergan, Bergen, and Bergin living in close proximity in the Heckscherville Valley in Cass Township. At least one head of a Coal Castle household, Michael Bergin, had been married in Castlecomer. Up the valley in Heckscherville lived William Bergan, a native of County Kilkenny.8 The overlap in children’s given names suggests that many of the Bergen families were related. The men were all Irish-born miners or mine laborers. And they soon learned of the dangers that smoldered deep below the surface.
In June 1853, John Bergen, sixteen, was driving a mule in a Heckscherville mine when a fellow worker began teasing the beast. Annoyed, the boy offered some fighting words, whereupon his antagonist hit him in the forehead with a pick, killing him, according to the local paper. The attacker escaped.9
It is possible that the killing was not isolated. Just a month before John Bergen was killed, the newspaper reported that a James Burger has been shot in the jaw at Payne’s Mines—another name for Heckscherville—after an altercation with an Arthur O’Neal.10 John Bergen’s father was named James, and the newspaper sometimes rendered the family’s last name with an “r” instead of an “n,” in which case the victim in the shooting might have been John Bergen’s father.
The motive for this violence, if it was connected, remains murky, though regional rivalries may have played a role. The Bergens were from southern Ireland, and the mid-May shooting involved a man with a distinctly northern name—O’Neal. There was certainly tension in Cass Township between natives of the various parts of Ireland. Almost a year to the date after the O’Neal shooting, a riot erupted in Mackeysburg, at the western end of the Heckscherville Valley, between “Far-downs,” or Ulstermen, and natives of Connacht, the western Irish province.11 And various early accounts about the origins of the Molly Maguires, including one written by a Schuylkill County resident, speak of tensions or “a feud” between Kilkenny natives and those from other counties in Ireland.12
John Bergen’s family left the area after his killing, but a second James Bergen stepped into this violent world sometime between 1850 and 1855, settling just down the road from Heckscherville in Coal Castle. The village had about seventy homes in 1845, but that number swelled with the influx of famine immigrants over the next ten years.13
Nicknamed “Yellow Boy” for his fair hair and complexion, Bergen, like most of his neighbors in the predominately Irish Cass Township, worked in the anthracite mines. Though his new life was hard and dangerous, Bergen found time for romance and the military. By about 1855 he had found a wife, Elizabeth; they had a daughter the following year. Bergen also volunteered as a private in the Columbian Infantry, an almost entirely Irish American militia unit based in Glen Carbon, just up the valley on the other side of Heckscherville.14 The names on its rolls—Brennan, Lawler, Tobin, Mealy, O’Brien, Whelan, and, of course, Bergen—suggest that the bulk of the unit were natives of Kilkenny and Queen’s Counties.
As the crisis between the North and South mounted in the late 1850s Bergen’s family continued to grow. By 1860, he and Elizabeth had three children ranging in age from four years to six months.15
With the eruption of the Civil War, Bergen’s unit was mustered into service on April 21, 1861, as Company C of the 5th Pennsylvania Infantry. The regiment had some trouble reaching Washington—Confederate sympathizers in Maryland were suspected of sabotaging the train tracks—but on April 27, the 5th Pennsylvania arrived in the nation’s capital, where it was greeted by President Lincoln.16 The regiment was in service for three months. During the first battle of Bull Run it was on outpost duty in Alexandria, Virginia, and mustered out in late July, without seeing any real fighting.
Bergen missed combat at the front, but it appears he found some at home. A James Bergen went on trial on December 4, 1861, in Schuylkill County court for assault and battery with intent to kill in an incident involving a John Curran. Though the motive for the crime is unclear, it is all but certain that defendant James Bergen was Pvt. James Bergen. The names of two witnesses in the case—William Brennan and Matthew Maley—match those of privates in Bergen’s unit, Company C. A jury convicted Bergen on December 7, but his sentence was suspended.17
In Coal Castle on November 24, Pvt. Bergen enrolled in the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry, a new regiment raised entirely in Schuylkill County. He was mustered in on December 23 at Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina.18 The timing is consistent with the trial and its outcome, and strongly suggests that Bergen was allowed to avoid punishment by reenlisting.
The bargain proved a poor one. The 48th fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the war—Fredericksburg, Antietam, and Petersburg. In the spring of 1862, the regiment saw action at New Bern, South Carolina. The 48th was pulled out of the Carolinas in early July for duty in Virginia, and on August 29, at 2:25 P.M., it went into the line at the Second Battle of Bull Run. The 48th spearheaded a three-regiment assault on Stonewall Jackson’s Confederates, who were holding a line along an unfinished railroad cut in a wooded area.
Capt. James Wren, commanding Company B, described what happened next in a vivid diary entry: “We was ordered to cease firing & then ordered to fix baynet & we Charged the Cut & routed the enemy out of the Cut & we held the Cut & we war advancing beyond the Cut when a masked battrey opened and drove us Back into the Cut & while we were advancing beyond the Cut, our Left was unsupported and the enemy got around our left & got in our rear & we then had a fire to Contend against in front and rear.”19
The regiment made its way back to Union lines, but lost seven dead and sixty-one wounded.20 Among the injured was James Bergen. Hospitalized for a time with a wounded arm, he eventually returned to his wife, Elizabeth, and their three children in Coal Castle. As with the two men who reentered the burning mine in Coal Castle twenty-five years before, going back proved a fatal mistake.
Capt. Wren had recorded in his diary on May 6, 1862, after a heavy storm the day before, that the slaves around New Bern “have a Kind of superstition that thear was a heavy battle Fought yesterday, which caused the trouble of the elements.”21 May 5 did indeed mark the beginning of a battle, for as Wren, Bergen, and the rest of the regiment sought shelter from torrential rains at Fort Totten, South Carolina, 1,500 mine workers went on strike for higher pay throughout the West Branch region of Schuylkill County, which includes Cass, Foster, Reilly, and Branch Townships. Led by men who preferred to remain in the shadows, the walkout was the spark for a long conflagration.
By the end of the week, a front-page headline in Philadelphia was trumpeting “The War at the Coal Mines.” With no settlement several days into the strike, the largely Irish workers stopped the pumps that prevented water from flooding the mines. The governor of Pennsylvania dispatched more than eight hundred troops from Philadelphia to occupy the mining villages of Heckscherville and Forestville, where the strikers were reported to be heavily armed. A settlement was reached before there were any clashes, but sporadic labor trouble continued through early July.22
Thus, the Cass Township to which the Bergen returned after he was wounded in August was a far different place than the one he had left. If the intervention of troops in a labor dispute had helped sour many Cass Township residents on Union blue, the launching of a state militia draft a few months later completed the job. Benjamin Bannan, the Pottsville newspaper publisher appointed to administer the draft in Schuylkill County, was a Radical Republican and proud bigot with intimate ties to the coal industry. The son of a Protestant Ulsterman, he hated Irish Catholics, Democrats, and unions, and conceived a special loathing for Cass Township, where all three flourished.
To Bannan, the militia draft was a handy broom for sweeping troublesome union activists and Irish Catholic Democrats from the mining villages along the West Branch into the maw of a bloody civil war, where they would have no chance to either strike or vote. With the connivance of Republican state officials, Bannan set unusually high quotas for Cass Township. At a time when soldiers in the field were denied the franchise, he then urged that the draft be held before a crucial election, to ensure a Republican victory.23
Shredding the anthracite region’s frayed social contract, the political abuse of conscription by Bannan proved a catastrophic miscalculation. For among the bulwarks of the Irish community in Schuylkill County was the Hibernian Benevolent Society, a fraternal group rooted in the Catholic secret societies of northern Ireland, which had long experience in fighting precisely this sort of official persecution.
A direct ancestor of the Hibernians—a secret society called the Defenders—had led resistance to a militia draft in Ireland in the 1790s, when miners opposed to conscription shut down and threatened to flood collieries in the Kilkenny coal fields.24 When the Defenders were suppressed after joining the United Irishmen in the great, failed uprising of 1798, they evolved into another secret society, the Ribbonmen. An American branch of the Ribbonmen—the Hibernians—was founded in 1836 by Irish immigrants in Schuylkill County and New York City. The anthracite Hibernians quickly became involved in Democratic politics and labor issues, and they appear to have been the driving force behind the May strike.
Bannan’s political manipulation of the 1862 draft thus forced some Schuylkill County Hibernians back into their old role as outlawed defenders of the oppressed. The new militancy quickly became evident. In October 1862, Gov. Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania wrote the War Department in Washington about organized draft resistance in Schuylkill County by up to one thousand armed men, many of whom feared that freed slaves would take their jobs in the mines. Hundreds of armed miners marched through Cass Township that month, shutting down the collieries, and newspapers suggested that a shadowy organization was behind the trouble.25
To avert open warfare, local officials, with Washington’s support, drew up affidavits stating that Cass Township’s quota had been filled by volunteers who joined military units from adjacent towns, such as the Ringgold Rifles of Minersville, the Minersville Artillerists, and James Bergen’s old unit, the Columbian Infantry of Glen Carbon.
Bannan’s attempt to dragoon his political and economic foes had failed, for the time being. He retreated to his newspaper, damning the Cass Irish and their political leaders as Southern sympathizers, and urgently calling for martial law.
In the wake of the successful draft resistance, new labor troubles wracked the West Branch region. By December 1862, strikers were using the name “Molly Maguire”—a nickname for the Hibernians—as both a battle cry and a signature on “coffin notices,” or death threats aimed at mine bosses. Amid the industrial chaos, signs of a crackdown loomed clear.
On December 27, 1862, Bannan’s newspaper, the Miners’ Journal, announced the appointment of Charlemagne Tower as provost marshal to enforce future drafts in Schuylkill County. It described Tower as “a firm, conscientious gentlemen” who would “discharge the duties of his office with zeal and fidelity.” He was also a coal baron who only a few years before, during a stint as Schuylkill County district attorney, had prosecuted striking Irish miners on conspiracy charges, ensuring that future strikes could succeed only if they were, in fact, a conspiracy.
On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, worsening the fears of many West Branch residents that if they were drafted freed slaves would replace them in the mines. The very next day, “Yellow Boy” Bergen’s luck finally ran out. It had carried him through the great famine, years of work in notoriously dangerous mines, and a cataclysmic civil war. It would not survive Schuylkill County politics. On Friday, January 2, five strangers entered the Bergen home, asking for ale. It seems the wounded veteran and his wife had opened an unlicensed beerhouse, or “shebeen.” (Cass Township boasted scores of such establishments, and an Elizabeth Bergen stood trial in June 1863 on charges of selling liquor without a license.)26
When Bergen told the five strangers there was no ale to be had, three drew revolvers and fired, hitting him in the abdomen. They fled, cheering for the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis—an odd utterance for frustrated tipplers, but one that makes perfect sense were the victim killed because he was a two-fisted supporter of the government in an area up in arms against conscription.
Bergen, gutshot, died in agony three days later.27 He was buried in the old hillside cemetery behind St. Vincent’s Church in Minersville. A simple stone marks his grave: “Jas. Bergen, Co. E, 48th Pa. Infantry.” An inquest conducted by the Schuylkill County coroner, W. B. Johnson, concluded that Bergen had been shot “by unknown persons.”28
No charges were ever brought in the case, but a series of attacks in the ensuing days point to a motive.
One week after the Bergen shooting, a gang of forty men attacked the home of John McDonald, between Coal Castle and Heckscherville. McDonald hid in a nearby mine, but the attackers warned his wife they would kill him if they caught him.29 A John McDonald had served as a private with Company F of the 16th Pennsylvania Infantry, a three-month regiment mustered in at nearby Minersville in April 1861.
Two days after McDonald’s home was attacked, two men were shot as they walked together on the road between Heckscherville and Glen Carbon. One was identified as James O’Connor. James Bergen had a neighbor in Coal Castle named James O’Connor, a twenty-five-year-old carpenter with political connections. His brother Patrick, with whom he lived, had served as the township auditor in 1853, and Patrick O’Connor’s tavern served as the polling place for north Cass Township.30
O’Connor was shot in the hand and legs. His companion, identified only as “Curry of Glen Carbon,” was shot in the lung. The latter’s first name may be lost, but there was only one family of Currys listed in Foster Township in the 1860 census, and all four of its adult sons—Michael, Daniel, Thomas, and John—had served in military units with Bergen. Both of the Currys in the 48th Regiment, Thomas and John, had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. John was sent to a military hospital in Reading, Pennsylvania, just south of Schuylkill County, and went AWOL on January 2, 1863—the very day that his old comrade was gunned down in Coal Castle. Perhaps he had heard the news, and felt compelled to discover why the valley he called home was turning against soldiers in Union blue.31
Whatever Curry’s first name, he had served with Bergen and belonged to a family with government and management sympathies—Daniel Curry was a young colliery superintendent at the time of the shooting, and raised a volunteer company about six months later to help repel Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania.32 The victim was shot as he spoke with a politically connected neighbor of Bergen’s, barely a week after a slaying with strong political overtones. He was the third soldier attacked over the course of nine days in a short stretch of the Heckscherville Valley.
Popular tradition attributed the attacks on Bergen, McDonald, Curry, and O’Connor to the Molly Maguires, but the few historians who mentioned the incidents were stumped. Francis P. Dewees, writing in 1877 about the shooting of O’Connor and Curry, said, “The whole affair is a mystery.” He may have missed the connection with the Bergen killing because of a typo—a chronology in his book, the first on the subject, placed the killing in 1864.
J. Walter Coleman, writing in 1930s, pointed out that Bergen, McDonald, O’Connor, and Curry were all of Irish extraction: “The fact that the attacks occurred within a radius of a few miles may indicate that the assailants had a common plan, or belonged to a single organization. On the other hand, there is no apparent reason an Irish gang would have singled out these members of their own race as victims.”33
In light of their service records and the recent military occupation of Cass Township, the reason they were singled out seems clear—three of the four were Union Army veterans living in an area where government troops had suppressed a strike just months before, and where a new military crackdown seemed imminent.
Bergen had also belonged to a militia unit that was dominated by Kilkenny men, at a time and in a place when there were tensions between natives of that county and some other elements of the Irish community. What is more, he likely alienated his own comrades with the 1861 attempted murder case—two testified against him—and angered the Irish community at large by joining the Union Army to evade punishment. If the Mollies wanted to make an example of a soldier, they could have picked no more isolated a victim for their first cold-blooded killing.
One intriguing hint that the Bergen slaying was committed on behalf of the community, as a form of folk justice, lies in its timing (on the day after New Year’s) and its circumstances (a visit by a band of men to a home).
For generations, secret society assassins in Ireland had targeted those perceived as breaking society’s rules with attacks that took place around—but rarely on—festive holidays like New Year’s or Halloween. The killers’ timing and their disguises—women’s clothing, straw clothing, blackface or whiteface—were meant to signal that the killers were acting on behalf of the community, for it linked them to a far more benevolent custom in the Irish countryside: mummery.
Well into the twentieth century, bands of Irish mummers promoted community cohesion by visiting homes during the Christmas season, dressed as women, or in straw, or with painted faces. They solicited drinks, food, and money in return for the performance of a “combat play” that always included the killing of one character. The money was used to pay for a community party, and admitting the mummers to one’s home affirmed one’s acceptance of the rules of communal life in the Irish countryside. During the potato famine, men in costumes identical to the mummers began visiting homes in the same region, at the same time of year, demanding a contribution to help the starving. They were Molly Maguires, members of the last of Ireland’s great peasant conspiracies, and when they did not get what they wanted, the killing became very real.
Mummery had long flourished in Pennsylvania. But in the years just before the Civil War, a peculiar form of mummery, one rooted in opposition to compulsory militia service, had appeared in Schuylkill County. So, too, had assassination on behalf of the community, by Irishmen in disguises that mimicked those of the Irish mummers. The first such killing involved a man who, like Bergen, was thought to have evaded justice for a violent crime against an Irishman. It took place on December 30, 1846, nearly sixteen years to the day before Bergen was slain. The killer had a face as white as a mime’s.
The link between festive custom and early Molly Maguire violence is thrown into sharp relief by another killing in the hard-coal fields in 1863. The victim, George K. Smith, was a mine superintendent from Audenried, Carbon County, just over the Schuylkill County line. Like Bergen, he was an isolated and belligerent supporter of the government in an area that had been occupied by government troops. Like Bergen, he was killed in his home by a band of men around a holiday.
On November 5, less than a week after Halloween, several men with false whiskers and blackened faces burst into Smith’s home and shot him dead. This time there was no doubt about who was behind the crime: “Molly McGuires on the Rampage” read a front-page headline in the New York Times. Fifteen years later, a witness told a Carbon County court that Smith was killed because he was helping the government enforce the draft, and that the organization behind the killing went by three names—the Hibernians, the Molly Maguires, and the Buckshots.34
Thus the real mystery to emerge from the January 1863 killing of James Bergen in Cass Township is not so much why he was gunned down, or even who was behind the attack, which set the mold for future Molly Maguire killings in the coal fields. The real—and far deeper—mystery is threefold: What was the relationship between the holiday festivities of groups like the mummers and the holiday mayhem of a secret society like the Molly Maguires? How was that organization transplanted from Ireland to the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania? And why did it emerge when it did, and where it did? The answers to the first two questions lie in the blood-soaked soil of Ulster.