You must love without dissimulation, hating evil, cleaving to good. Love one another with brotherly love.
—Charter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians
In the 1830s, the anthracite region became home to one more band of brothers with roots in Ulster, a group that Benjamin Bannan and Franklin Gowen would fight, and at least one Mohan would join. In the same year that Col. Krebs warned that corporations would reduce Schuylkill County to the status of an Irish tenant farm, Irish immigrants there formed a neo-Ribbon society.
The organization that came to be known as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, or AOH, was incorporated in 1833 as Pottsville’s Hibernia Benevolent Institution, often referred to as the Hibernian Benevolent Society or simply the Hibernian Society. A St. Patrick’s Society had been active in Pottsville even earlier, parading on March 17, 1832, “decorated with the usual emblematic costume,” the Miners’ Journal reported, suggesting that this was not the society’s first outing.1 In 1836 the Schuylkill County Hibernians united with other former Ribbonmen in New York City. The new, national group marked its birth with a charter from a Ribbon Society in Ireland.2
The decision to merge and affiliate with a parent Ribbon body in the British Isles came against a backdrop of changing economic conditions in the coal region and growing nativism in New York and throughout the nation. In the fall of 1834, the inventor Samuel B. Morse published a series of letters claiming that the Catholic Church—and Catholic emigration—were being used by European monarchies to subvert democracy in America. That same year, Rev. Lyman Beecher called from the pulpit for “decisive action” against ascendant Catholicism in Boston, and a nativist mob obliged him the next day by burning a Catholic convent and school. Unrepentant, Beecher a year later published “A Plea for the West” suggesting that Catholic schools constituted a conspiracy against America’s children. And in 1836, Maria Monk’s “Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal” became a runaway best seller with its spurious tales of sexual depravity among nuns.
The polemics were soon followed by political action. In June 1835, the Native American Democratic Association was founded in New York City on an anti-Catholic and anti-immigration platform. It won 39 percent of the vote in city elections that November—largely because the Whigs failed to field a slate—and ran Morse as its candidate for mayor in the spring of 1836. Now facing Whig opposition, he won a mere 6 percent of the vote.3
This, then, was the context in which a neo-Ribbon organization was chartered in the United States, on May 4, 1836. Just as the Defenders sprang up as a response to raids by Protestant Peep O’Day Boys in Ulster, and the Molly Maguires were born amid changing economic and political conditions in the Ulster borderlands, so the Hibernians were born as New York’s Irish community came under attack from nativists, and Schuylkill County’s Irish mine workers were squeezed by industrial pressures.
It is possible that the new organization served at least one other purpose—to help fugitives from Ireland’s land wars. In an 1888 article about the Buckshots, as the early Mollies of Carbon County were called, the New York Times reported, “The Buckshots were a secret society formed more than thirty years ago, the original object of which was to provide protection and asylum in this country to fugitives from Ireland who had escaped from the old country after killing some obnoxious landlord or constable.”4
In the anthracite region, as in New York, the new organization served as a focus of Irish American political activity. It was firmly wedded to the Democratic Party, part of an ethnic allegiance that dated as far back as the support and sympathy United Irish émigrés received from Jefferson’s adherents.5
A charter for the Hibernian Society was brought to the United States from the governing body of one of the two Ribbon groupings in the British Isles by a Ribbonman working on a ship that sailed regularly between Britain and the United States. It offered “full instruction with our authority to establish branches of our society in America.”
Qualifications for membership were simple: “All members must be Roman Catholics, and Irish or of Irish descent, and of good moral character, and none of your members shall join in any secret societies contrary to the laws of the Catholic Church, and at all times your motto shall be: Friendship, unity and Christian charity.” It continued: “You must love without dissimulation, hating evil, cleaving to good. Love one another with brotherly love.”
It was, in short, to be a fraternal and mutual aid society of Irish Catholic immigrants. After a special admonition to “aid and protect” Irishwomen of all creeds, the parent body granted the American organization full autonomy, within the limits of Catholic doctrine: “You are at liberty to make such laws as will guide your workings and for the welfare of our old Society; but such laws must be at all times according to the teachings of the Holy Catholic Church, and the obligation that we send you, and all your workings, must be submitted to any Catholic priest, when called for.”
The charter closed with one final instruction: “Send a copy to our late friend that you spoke of and who is now working in Pennsylvania.” It was signed by Patrick McGuire, County Fermanagh; Patrick McKenna, County Monaghan; Patrick Reilly, County Meath; John Farrell, County Meath; James McManus, County Antrim; Patrick Dunn, County Tyrone; Daniel Gallagher, Glasgow; John Reilly, County Cavan; John Derkin, County Mayo; Patrick Boyle, County Sligo; Thomas O’Rorke, County Leitrim; John McMahon, County Longford; Patrick Hammill, Westmeath; John Murphy, Liverpool.6
A few facts can be gleaned from the document.
The residences of its signatories, who constituted the parent group’s governing body, or “Board of Erin,” show that the American organization chose to affiliate with the Northern Union, a Ribbon group based in Ulster and its borderlands, where religious or sectarian communalism lent it a bit more vitality than its Dublin-based rival, the Irish Sons of Freedom.7
The charter’s insistence that no member “join any secret society contrary to the laws of the Catholic Church” highlights the odd position of the Ribbon and Hibernian Societies in embracing a church that had repeatedly condemned secret societies. The prohibition may have referred to membership in Masonic groups, or it may have served as cover for the Hibernians, allowing them to claim that they could not possibly be members of a secret society, because their charter specifically forbade it.*
Last but not least, there is Board of Erin’s insistence that a copy of the charter be passed on to our “late friend” who was working in Pennsylvania. The man’s identity is not disclosed, but he must have been highly influential—the American organization had its headquarters in Schuylkill County for a number of years before 1853.
John O’Dea, the historian of the American branch of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, wrote that the society’s secret signs and passwords were sent from the Board of Erin in Ireland “to the President of the Divisions in Schuylkill County, being then transmitted by messenger to the other Divisions.”8 Divisions were the local chapters, each headed by a “body master.”
We may never know the exact identity of the first president of the Hibernian Society, but he was one of a group of Irish émigrés centered on Pottsville who played leading roles in Democratic politics between 1836 and 1848. In that year, the Hibernia Benevolent Institution of Pottsville listed the following officers: president, Patrick Fogarty; vice president, Bernard Riley; secretary, Peter Mudey; treasurer, Michael Daly.
It was an eminently respectable and upwardly mobile group. Fogarty was a merchant and civic activist who sat on a commission that helped plan the growth of Pottsville.9 “Riley,” actually Reilly, was an immigrant who became a successful railroad contractor; Reilly Township was named for him. A son, James Bernard Reilly, played a role in the Molly troubles of the 1870s, when he was a lawyer, country prosecutor, and congressman.10 Mudey was a schoolteacher turned publican who was active in Democratic politics.11
Other members of the Irish American community who seemed to play a big role in Hibernian activities included James Cleary of Pottsville, a tavern owner and militia captain; Edward O’Connor, the proprietor of the Pottsville House; John Maginnis of Pottsville and Edward Colehan of Port Carbon, both mine operators, the former from Monaghan and the latter from Galway; Thomas Brady, a doctor; John C. Neville, a one-armed immigrant lawyer; William B. Hull, a Port Carbon barkeep; and the Irish nationalist William Haggerty.
These men were all listed as officers of the Hibernians’ annual St. Patrick’s Day dinners at various times between 1836 and 1848. (The close connection between leadership of the society and the March 17 dinner is evidenced by the lineup for 1848, one of the few for which we know the officers of the Hibernia Benevolent Institution. Its president, Fogarty, and vice president, Reilly, were the chairman and secretary of the St. Patrick’s Day banquet that year.)12
Around 1838, according to O’Dea, the organization began to be called the Ancient Order of Hibernians in New York, though to the public its members were known as “St. Patrick’s Boys.”13 In Schuylkill County, it continued to go by the names Hibernia Benevolent Institution or Hibernian Benevolent Society, through the 1850s and possibly as late as 1870, when it gained a charter from the state and formally adopted the name Ancient Order of Hibernians.
The society was a secret one, and the only clues to its membership and activities are infrequent mentions in newspapers, especially in the latter half of March, when reports on the Hibernians’ annual St. Patrick’s Day banquet were published. The newspaper reports show that those who led the banquet were active during the remainder of the year concerning the same issues as the Hibernian Society’s Ribbon parent in Ireland—politics, embryonic trade unionism, the Irish national struggle, and mutual aid.
On March 17, 1838, the year that the St. Patrick’s Fraternal Society changed its name to the Hibernians, two events attracted the interest of the Miners’ Journal in Pottsville: a funeral and a banquet. The funeral was for James Kinsley, sixty-five, late of Killegney, County Wexford. “Mr. Kinsley,” the newspaper reported, “was a captain of a company in the Rebellion of 1798, and took an active part in behalf of his oppressed countrymen. He was wounded in the battle of Roscommon, in which engagement he bravely fought for twelve successive hours without moving from his position. In 1819, he left his country for the United States, where he has ever since been known as an excellent citizen and an honest man. His remains were accompanied to the tomb, on Monday last, by the St. Patrick’s Society, in full regalia, numbering nearly two hundred, and an immense concourse of people.”
Hugh and James Kinsley, a Port Carbon merchant and coal operator, had played active roles in the St. Patrick’s Day banquet in 1836, the first for which there is any mention in Pottsville. The St. Patrick’s Society that paid homage to the dead hero of ’98 on March 17, 1838, was almost certainly the same organization that was listed under a different name when it held a banquet in Pottsville that night to commemorate St. Patrick’s Day.
The Miners’ Journal reported that “the Anniversary of Ireland’s Patron Saint was celebrated by the Hibernia Benevolent Institution of Pottsville, with a large concourse of invited guests and citizens, in a splendid manner at the Town Hall.” Glasses were lifted to the “martyrs of ’98” and to Daniel O’Connell, “the champion of Ireland.” The organizers of the dinner included two prominent Democrats, O’Connor and Colehan.14
The composition of the group was one reflection of the political influence of Schuylkill County’s growing Irish community. Another was a contest for the allegiance of Irish voters by the Miners’ Journal, a publication with Whig loyalties, and the Pottsville Emporium, a paper founded by Democrats in 1838 as a counterweight to Bannan and edited by Strange Palmer. The Emporium began the rivalry by running a column signed “Erin” that put an Irish slant on the political questions of the day. The Miners’ Journal responded with a column signed “Emmett.”
When Emmett alleged in 1840 that Martin Van Buren harbored prejudice against the Catholic Church, forty-two leading Schuylkill County Irishmen signed a statement condemning “the fervour of political rancour” and “those who perpetuate the unhappy demons of religious discord.” The letter insisted that both political parties treat members of the county’s Irish community as “American citizens, and not as Irishmen,” but it is worth noting that the statement was issued only after Bannan attempted to lure Irish American voters away from the Democratic Party to the Whigs. Members of the Hibernian Society played a key role in the statement—twenty-four of forty-two signatories appeared at the society’s St. Patrick’s Day banquet between 1838 and 1844.15
The annual St. Patrick’s Day festivities that the society sponsored underlined its growing clout. As early as 1840, the “St. Patrick’s Society” mustered 230 members for its March 17 parade. Two of the parade’s five leaders—Cleary and Thomas Quin—were members of the Schuylkill County Democratic Committee. The Hibernian banquet that evening was hosted by O’Connor and attended by numerous members of the Democratic committee. Also on hand were two Catholic priests—a sign the new organization had not yet run afoul of the Church.16
The parade doubled in size the following year, with five hundred delegates turning out, including contingents from Port Carbon and Minersville. In 1842, the number in the procession rose to nearly eight hundred.17
The society and its members were becoming a force to be reckoned with, and in more than just local politics. Two interrelated events in 1842 demonstrated the Schuylkill County Hibernians’ growing influence. One was a bitter international debate over Irish American attitudes toward slavery. The other was a strike by 1,500 West Branch miners.
The slavery debate grew out of the formation at O’Connor’s hotel on February 15, 1841, of the Pottsville Repeal Association, a branch of a national organization formed to support Daniel O’Connell’s campaign to overturn the union between Britain and Ireland. Hibernians played a leading role in the group. Among the leaders of the Repeal Association were Haggerty, Cleary, Colehan, Neville, Brady, Fogarty, George Dougherty, and James Downey—all prominent in the Hibernians’ banquet at O’Connor’s in March.18
By July, the Pottsville Repeal Association had 204 members, and in February 1842, Haggerty served as a vice president of the National Repeal Convention at the old State House in Philadelphia, where a heated debate arose on a proposal to repudiate O’Connell’s vociferous opposition to American slavery. The proposal was rejected but the issue would not go way.19
Support for the repeal movement suffered a serious blow not long after the national convention, amid growing publicity about an Irish resolution condemning slavery in the United States. It was signed by O’Connell, Rev. Theobald Mathew (the Catholic leader of the Irish temperance movement), and tens of thousands of others in Ireland. “Irishmen and Irishwomen! Treat the colored people as your equals—as brethren,” the resolution exhorted.
The call to embrace abolition and treat blacks as brethren was anathema to the Irish Catholic Democrats of Schuylkill County, whose party condoned slavery. A March meeting in Pottsville of the “friends of Ireland,” led by Hibernian Democrats O’Connor and Haggerty, condemned the O’Connell resolution in the strongest terms. Echoing the 1840 statement by forty-two leading Irishmen in the Erin versus Emmett controversy, the meeting proclaimed “that we do not form a distinct class of the community, but consider ourselves in every respect as citizens of this great and glorious republic—that we look upon every attempt to address us otherwise than as citizens upon the subject of the abolition of negro slavery or on any other subject, as base and iniquitous.”20 Few things, it seems, aroused the fury of Schuylkill County’s Irish leaders more than that which posed a threat to their community’s allegiance to the Democratic Party.
The Pottsville meeting announced its opinion that the signatures of O’Connell and Mathew were forgeries and claimed that slavery in the United States was the fault of Great Britain.21 Thereafter, mention of the Pottsville Repeal Association faded in local newspapers; the Pottsville Emporium, a Democratic newspaper, noted on August 5, 1843, that “the violent and denunciatory course of O’Connell towards this country has had the effect to dampen the ardor of Repealers.”
But even as enthusiasm for the cause faded in Schuylkill County, the Pottsville proclamation critical of O’Connell began to generate international controversy when it was picked up by New York newspapers and disseminated far and wide. An English-language newspaper in Paris, Galignani’s Messenger, reprinted portions of it, marveling at “the Pottsville paddies, who evidently deem themselves of no small consequence in those parts.”22
The Dublin Monitor viewed the proclamation with “grief, indignation and astonishment,” and asked, “Have you, Messrs. O’Connor, Haggerty and Co.—your names tell you to be Irish—so soon forgotten the rod held over you at home? Have you so soon sided with the oppressor?” The Monitor mocked the notion that O’Connell’s signature was a forgery: “There is no real doubt of the genuineness of the address, either at home or with you. You, gentlemen of Pottsville, know it—you feel it to be genuine; but the pro-slavery spirit has caught some of Ireland’s sons in America in its grasp.”23
The fiery response to the Pottsville proclamation led to one last broadside by the anthracite Irish, from the hand of Brady, a Democratic politician who had served as vice president of the Schuylkill County Hibernians’ St. Patrick’s Day banquet the year before. In the debate over slavery, “there was no vulgar epithet too opprobrious” for the abolitionists to heap on the Irish of Pottsville, Brady complained. Where O’Connell’s proclamation urged Irishmen to join the abolition cause, Brady, rather disingenuously, saw a call for miscegenation. Abolitionists, he argued, were attempting to provoke a civil war: “They seek to cause revolution; to ensanguine a country once hallowed by the blood of freemen, now with the blood of civil strife.”24
The heated rhetoric that O’Connor and Haggerty generated may have had something to do with a yawning gulf in perceptions about their standing to challenge an international figure like O’Connell. The Pottsville men viewed the town as the national headquarters of the Hibernian Society, and themselves as leaders of the American Irish. Newspapers in Dublin and Paris saw them as self-important nobodies from a remote town in the hinterlands.
Thomas Davis, a native or Ireland long resident in Rhode Island, offered some socioeconomic context for Irish American tolerance of slavery at an abolition meeting in Dublin’s Royal Exchange. “The Africans in America are hewers of wood and drawers of water,” he said. “The Irish come out to labor likewise, and thus the two classes come into juxtaposition; and I know not that I have seen bitterer hatred manifested than by the Irish toward the Africans.”25
Even as Davis and Brady waged this debate, another issue was coming to the fore in the hills outside Pottsville. It would bring Hibernian leaders and rank-and-file Irish mine workers into a fierce confrontation with the local power structure. And the denouement would involve blacklisting, labor competition, and racial violence.
On May 17, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad began service between the anthracite region and its coal wharves in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia. Less than two months later, on July 7, West Branch mine workers met in Minersville and decided to strike.
The two events were by no means coincidental.
“The immediate effect” of the Reading’s completion, says an 1881 history of Schuylkill County, was a “rivalry between the canal and railroad companies for the coal traffic.” As the competitors slashed rates for the transportation of coal, mining companies cut prices, glutting the market. Low prices meant low wages and only partial employment for the mine workers, who were “reduced to great suffering.”26
At a time when a minimum of $6.00 a week was needed to sustain a worker, weekly wages fell to $5.25 for miners and $4.20 for mine laborers. Even that paltry sum was often paid in company scrip or “store orders” that forced employees to patronize company stores whose limited merchandise was matched only by their high prices.27
“The possession of the order alone, without any money, may leave them in a miserable situation,” the Pottsville Emporium wrote of the miners:
A wife or child may be very sick, and the storekeeper has no medicine. A physician may be required, who cannot be paid in store goods, and cannot be expected to attend without being paid for his services . . . There may be actual wants which the storekeeper cannot supply. He may have no flour, no meat, no butter, and if he has he may refuse to let the workman have either of them on the order, for these are cash articles. But there is no choice. The poor man must take what there is, at such prices as the merchant shall dictate. In many instances these prices are exorbitant and outrageous and even where this is not the case, there is always room for suspicion that the workingman has been unjustly dealt with. This result of all this has been that the poor man, laboring hard for weeks and months, has found himself at the end of the year, not only, without a cent, but actually in debt to his employer to a large amount.28
For some Irish immigrants, the company store doubtless recalled the hated practice of landlords in Ireland who required their tenants to have their oats ground at the landlord’s mill at exorbitant prices.29 Some coal operators had cash flow problems so dire that mine workers who were owed a large sum in back wages were said to have been refused twelve cents in cash to buy medicine for a sick child, and two dollars to buy a coffin for a dead one.30
By early July, the mine workers of the West Branch were fed up. At least 1,500, “principally natives of Ireland,” according to the Miners’ Journal, walked off the job, demanding an end to the company store system.
It began peaceably enough on Thursday, July 7, with a procession through the streets of Minersville by 1,000 strikers, “preceded by music.” The mine workers were addressed by several speakers who exhorted them to act moderately but firmly, “to commit no act which could possibly tend to breach the peace.” On Friday, 2,300 men gathered in the town for more speeches. A tentative settlement was reached, but it collapsed the next day and things started to turn ugly.
On Saturday, July 9, several hundred miners armed with clubs marched down a railroad track from the West Branch to the county seat, Pottsville. They drove a few workers from their jobs, and then headed off to nearby Mount Carbon, where they sent more workers home. The strikers’ unexpected arrival in the county seat gave rise to the coal establishment’s enduring nightmare—wild miners stomping out of the hills to wreak havoc in the heart of Pottsville.
That evening, alarmed residents of Minersville asked for help, and two companies of local militia were dispatched. They arrived to find the town quiet, but Pottsville authorities called up two other militia companies, just in case.
On Monday, authorities in Pottsville received word of another march to the town by up to a thousand men gathered at Mount Laffee, just north of the county seat. The sheriff and burgess met the marchers at the borough limits and asked all those carrying sticks or clubs to cast them aside. When the marchers complied, they were permitted to enter Pottsville, where they were addressed by District Attorney Francis Hughes, a prominent Democrat, and several others. The meeting, which was “characterized by moderation and decorum throughout,” ended with the formation of a committee to take up the miners’ grievances with the coal operators, the Pottsville Emporium reported. The committee included several leading Irish Democrats who were active in the Hibernian Society—Brady, O’Connor, and Colehan, himself a mine operator.
The grievances were simply stated:
We protest therefore against the order system, firstly because by it we lose one-third if not one-half of our hard earnings, secondly because we are obliged to deal in places where we do not wish to deal; thirdly because we cannot get such goods as we want and we are obliged to take such as we do not want, fourthly because such goods as will command prices from other persons we cannot get at all; fifthly because it is an immoral mode of doing business; sixthly, and most especially, because it takes from us the only pleasure enjoyed by the workingman, of spending his earnings where and in what manner he pleases.31
The plea failed to sway the coal companies or their chief spokesman, Bannan, for the strike and the intervention of the committee challenged his cherished belief that the coal industry comprised independent, fair-minded businessmen and sturdy, independent workingmen who could work out their differences on an individual basis because their economic interests were perfectly aligned.
“Combinations or general turnout have never been known to result beneficially to the workingmen of any district in which they have taken place,” Bannan warned in print. “Our advice to the miners and laborers of this region then is, to drop all coalition—allow no one to dictate to you—consult with your employer—go to him, if you want to work, and after making your contract, go peaceably to your duties as good and well meaning citizens should; always remembering that your interests are identical, and that whatever benefits him, will also benefit you.”
For Bannan, the problem was not grasping mine owners who compensated for their lack of capital by shortchanging safety and their men. It was “fiends in human shape” who had “for their own selfish and base political purposes, endeavored to excite the miners and laborers of this region against their employers, by false and malicious representations.”32
Those fiends, Bannan made clear, were the members of the committee that had been formed to present the miners’ case. He denounced them as “narrow-minded and bigoted partisans,” a clear reference to Democrats like O’Connor and Brady.
Bannan’s antipathy toward the Hibernian committeemen was matched by the coal operators, who refused to meet with them.33 As the strike dragged on, events took a violent turn.
In late June a Minersville tailor named Birne, described as one of the leaders of the strike, was charged with beating a Llewellyn mine owner and several mine workers. A grand jury handed down twelve indictments in the case.34 Threatening letters were left at several collieries whose employees continued to work, warning that they would be killed if they did not join the strike. The home of a miner who continued working at Samuel Heilner’s colliery in Cass Township was attacked by twenty or thirty people throwing stones. A mine foreman fired a shotgun into the crowd, felling two people, and then went to Llewellyn for help. When he returned with several men, the crowd had dispersed. Barney McElroy of Minersville was arrested the next day and charged with riot.35
If violence was a sign of desperation, the miners were clearly in trouble. In the first week of August, the strike collapsed and its leaders were blacklisted, Bannan noted with satisfaction. “Many of those who had good situations cannot now find employment,” the Miners’ Journal reported. “Nearly all the ringleaders who have not been arrested have absconded—and we are pleased to learn that the operators generally manifest a disposition not to employ any who took a prominent part in the late difficulties.”36
While Bannan and the coal operators gloated over their victory, Hibernian leaders organized relief measures for those left destitute by the suppression of the strike. Serving on the relief committee with Brady and Colahan was a young Pat Dormer, who thirty years later would play a small but crucial role in the Molly Maguire story. The group also petitioned for pardons for those convicted of strike-related crimes and launched an unsuccessful campaign to have the state legislature outlaw the cause of the strike—payment in company scrip redeemable only at company stores.37
There was one last ugly note to be struck. Hundreds of Irish miners, out of work because of the strike, had made their way to Philadelphia, where simmering economic, sectarian, and racial tensions were just beginning to boil over in late July. The city was in the throes of an economic slump, and a mass protest meeting of the unemployed was planned for Monday, August 1. For many Irish Catholics, the issue of unemployment was intertwined with that of race, for they viewed freed blacks as competitors in the labor market. Old sectarian tensions were also at work—Irish Catholics were said to be making clubs in late July, in preparation for an early August battle with Protestants. It was hinted that some of those making clubs were strangers to the city—perhaps the West Branch Irishmen.
The pot boiled over on August 1. As the unemployed prepared to march outside the old State House—Independence Hall—word spread of a riot involving another procession in Moyamensing, just south of the city limits. There, black immigrants who were parading under a temperance banner to commemorate the abolition of slavery in their native West Indies were confronted by a group of young white men. A riot ensued. When word of it reached Independence Hall—the site of that heated debate on slavery at the Repeal Convention just six months earlier—many of the unemployed quickly forgot about their own procession. They hastened south, where they were reported to have “joined most cordially in the ferocious attack on the colored people.”
Fierce fighting lasted for three days, with a black church and temperance hall burned, at least sixteen people hospitalized, several killed, and hundreds of blacks forced to flee the city. The Irish, primed for a sectarian brawl, were in the forefront of it all, even finding time for the long-planned green–orange battle on August 1 or August 2. “Some hundreds” of anthracite miners from the Pottsville region, in Philadelphia as a result of the strike, were singled out as having been “actively engaged” in the racial violence.38
The actions of the unemployed miners cannot be fully understood outside the context of the abolition debate. As Pottsville Hibernian leaders like Brady were taking up the cudgels against abolition and the blacklisting of miners, their blacklisted followers in Philadelphia were wielding clubs against freed blacks commemorating the abolition of slavery in the West Indies.
Richard Allen, the Dublin correspondent of The Liberator, summed it up on September 19 when he wrote of “how annoyed, how disgusted” he was that Irishmen had taken a leading role in the Philadelphia riots, and of the “sickening feeling” that he had when he read Brady’s letter from Pottsville. “The truth is, our countrymen are enthusiastic in their right or wrong,” he wrote. “If enlisted on the wrong side, they are a terrible engine of oppression. The wrong path once taken, they know no bounds. Their natural enthusiasm perverted makes them a terrible foe.”39
Slavery would remain at the top of the nation’s agenda for the next two decades, and the events of 1842 conditioned the response of many anthracite Irishmen to the crisis that erupted in 1861. Likewise, the grievances that caused the strike of 1842 would remain—a familiar pattern in the coal fields. Chained to the company store system, miners were gouged above ground and mutilated below it.
The relentless toll of mine accidents is suggested by an item in the Pottsville Emporium on August 10, 1844: “We are again called upon to chronicle another awful accident and loss of life in the mines—indeed the hearts sickens at the frequent repetition of these distressing scenes. . . . The last accident to which we refer above occurred on Friday night of last week, in the mines of Messers. Milnes and Spencer on the West Norwegian, about 2½ miles from Pottsville—the same place at which but a few days since, a poor fellow, Patrick Devaney, was ground to death in a coal breaker.” Three miners on the night shift—Henry Fox, Jonathan Nixon, and John Ricket—had been assigned a particularly dangerous task: drilling through to a nearby abandoned shaft that had filled with water, so that it could be drained. They succeeded all too well. “The water burst upon them with such tremendous force as to fill the mine in the course of 10 minutes,” the Emporium reported. “It is supposed that the men were dashed down the gangway and instantaneously killed.”
The newspapers of the day offered a steady stream of such short, grim stories about sudden death in the mines. And there was another, equally dire danger that generally went unreported: the slow accumulation of inhaled coal dust that caused black lung, or “miner’s asthma.”
In all that follows, it is important not to forget this constant drumbeat of death. In normal times, it was mere background music. But when mine disasters claimed handfuls of men at a time, the beat grew deafening. It would eventually subside, but it never, ever went away. The role of lax mine safety in fomenting violence is made clear by an anonymous death threat delivered to one West Branch mine superintendent: “It’s better one damned bugger should die than a whole crew.”40
Poor working conditions were a fixed part of the scene, like poor pay and company stores. The latter issues, festering since 1842, erupted anew after seven years. The catalyst, once again, was the Reading Railroad. In 1849, after seven years of competition, the Reading reached an accord with the Schuylkill Navigation Company that set coal tonnage quotas and rates. Competition between the railroad and the canal had led to the strike of 1842; collusion would have the same effect in 1849.
On March 9, coal operators concerned about the cost of transportation and the influence of commodities speculators met in Pottsville to impose a moratorium on the shipment of coal until prices stabilized. The suspension lasted from March 19 until May 2. It played right into the hands of a new union movement headed by John Bates, an English Chartist who had emigrated to St. Clair, north of Pottsville. When the operators prepared to resume operations on May 2, the miners struck, demanding higher pay.
An English miner on the West Branch explained the origins and success of the strike in a letter to a friend at home:
All the miners and laborers have been standing out for more wages a fortnight, all over the country, or nearly all, and a good turn out we had. The miners wanted nine dollars a week, the inside laborers five dollars and a half a week. All the coal masters had turned out for more price on the coal, against the merchants of Philadelphia and New York six weeks and would not let their coal go down to the city. As soon as they were agreed, we stood out, and we got all we asked. . . . We have also made an end of store orders; all our payments are to be made in cash. The masters did not like it, but the men were all determined and now we believe the Union will go on. The masters formed a Union last summer, something like a secret order, and that was the cause of the strike. So we followed their footsteps and we shall form a society called the “Association of Miners and Laborers of Schuylkill County.”41
There is no evidence that members of the Hibernian Society played any important role in the new union. It was composed of committees at each mine, overseen by a Central Committee that had veto power over local labor settlements.
Bannan spoke for the many of the operators when he declared that “it would be better to let our colliers rot, and our region become a wilderness, than such tyranny should be engrafted on the business of this region by a few restless spirits.”42 He had little to worry about. Bates’s union collapsed within a year, and the mine operators were once more free to slash wages and pay out the pittance in store orders.
While the Irish of the West Branch region were finding their efforts to establish a lasting labor movement frustrated, they could at least point to advances on another front—politics. There, the Hibernian Society was achieving a measure of success in resisting corporate power.
A Philadelphian who could not attend the Hibernians’ 1848 St. Patrick’s Day banquet in Pottsville offered a telling glimpse of the group’s political clout. Addressing “Messrs. Patrick Fogarty, Michael Cochran, John Maginnis, Edward Colehan, Edward O’Connor and George S. Hookey, committee of arrangement of the Pottsville Hibernia Benevolent Institution,” J. Silver wrote, “Without your aid at the polls, the laboring producers of our country would have been eaten up, as in Ireland, and their honest earning filched from them by corporate aristocracies . . . whose armies besiege our Legislatures and monopolize legislation.”43
The anticorporate note—the idea that big business was illicitly using the legislature to stack the deck against honest workingmen—would be struck again and again for the next 150 years by anthracite Irishmen connected to the Hibernians. And Silver’s letter reflected more than mere hyperbole—Cochran, Colehan, and O’Connor all served as vice presidents of a Democratic mass meeting in Pottsville that year, as did several guests at the March 17, 1848, banquet.
The Hibernians’ entry into politics was by no means easy or welcome, even in the Democratic Party. When Mudey ran for a state legislature seat in 1840, challenging the endorsed Democratic candidate, he was denounced as a “usurper” and “tool of the Whigs” in a pamphlet circulated among German Democrats. Signed “Many Democrats,” it pointed out that Mudey was “an Irishmen by birth, a Catholic by profession.”44
In 1843, Strange Palmer’s son, Robert, complained in the Pottsville Emporium of a “determination to support none but Irish candidates and Catholic candidates.”45 In 1844, the political “grasping” of the Schuylkill Irish was condemned by another Pottsville newspaper, Francis Wynkoop’s Anthracite Gazette. “If we designate them the Roman Catholic Party, they must look to their own political acts for the reason,” Wynkoop wrote. “It is no fault of Americans that this title is applied to them. By their secret combination—by their political scheming—by the language of their acknowledged journals, they have courted the appellation. . . . They are unlike the other naturalized citizens of the country in many respects. In the first place, they are bound together, united, consolidated—in the next they are continually struggling, jostling and grasping for office.”46
Wynkoop was not alone in seeing Irish Democrats as a political threat—the Miners’ Journal blamed bloc voting by the Irish for the defeat of Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay in Schuylkill County in 1844.47 The “secret combination” Wynkoop condemned was almost certainly the Hibernian Society. The Irish brought to the Schuylkill County political scene an unprecedented degree of savvy and ethnic solidarity—likely due in part to experience with Ribbon agitation in Ulster.48 Of seven regulars at the Hibernian banquets whose place of birth can be traced, three—James Downey of Fermanagh, John Maginnis of Monaghan, and John Gaynor of Cavan—came from south Ulster. Downey and Maginnis were members of the Schuylkill County Democratic Committee. Two other politically active Hibernian regulars, William B. Hull and John Curry, came to Port Carbon from the Ulster coal town of Ballycastle, a stronghold of the Ribbon Society and of the United Irishmen before that. Hull served as president of the Hibernian’s first St. Patrick’s Day banquet, in 1836.49
The Hibernians’ political activity and their role in the 1842 strike and slavery debate demonstrate that by the time the potato famine began in 1845, a neo-Ribbon movement was already flourishing among the anthracite region’s Irish Catholics. Its leaders—a doctor, coal operators, publicans, and politicians—were respected members of the community. Centered in Pottsville, with chapters in the canal town of Port Carbon and the West Branch coal center of Minersville, the Hibernian Society wielded influence that extended well beyond local Democratic politics to the state, national, and international scenes, as evidenced by Haggerty’s role in the National Repeal Convention and the furor over the Pottsville proclamation on emancipation.
By 1845, Hibernian leaders had demonstrated a deep interest in Democratic politics, a firm commitment to labor activity on behalf of Irish mine workers, and an acute fear of the emancipation of slaves. The society needed only a huge influx of Irish immigrants to give it real muscle. When it came as a result of the famine, that influx forever altered the nature of the society, moving its center of gravity from the county seat of Pottsville to the Irish coal patches in the hills. It was there, in the hills, that Pottsville’s Hibernian leaders soon found themselves involved in a sensational murder case involving an Irish mine worker charged in a Whiteboy-style execution.