Altho’ I’m in a foreign land,
From the cause I’ll ne’er retire,
May heaven smile on every chil’
That belongs to Molly Maguire!
—Molly Maguire ballad
The murder of John Reese was more than an echo from the Old World. It was a harbinger for the new one.
In the summer of 1846, Reese, a Welshman, shot and killed an Irish neighbor, Thomas Collahan, in Delaware Mines, a heavily Irish patch near St. Clair. When Reese was acquitted on grounds of self-defense, his former neighbors were not pleased. They were even less pleased when, following his release, Reese insisted that he and his family visit his brother before leaving the county for good. Their route took them back through Delaware Mines, and Reese made the mistake of stopping to chat with some of his former neighbors.
The last house he visited was that of a Mrs. Brennan, who asked the wan, drawn Reese if it was really him. When he replied that it was, she signaled to a man who was standing nearby with a pick. The man’s face had been whitened—a familiar motif in Whiteboy crimes—and he was disguised in borrowed clothes. When the Reese party moved off, the whitefaced man rushed after them and swung his pick, hitting Reese in the head. As Reese’s sister cried for help, onlookers laughed and clapped while the attacker escaped. The date was December 30, and for the Irish of Delaware Mines, justice had been served.
Reese died at his brother’s house early the next morning, and a former neighbor and Irish immigrant, Martin Shay, was charged with his murder on January 2. Defense witnesses swore that Shay was working in a mine a mile away at the time of the killing. They said he was too mild-mannered a man to commit murder. They pointed to other suspects. But the prosecutors, who included John Bannan and the noted Democrat Francis W. Hughes, pointed out that Shay had time to leave the mine and return. They insinuated that the killing was the work of a conspiracy and that Shay, who seemed to have no other motive, was the appointed executioner. The jury, which included not a single Irishman (another harbinger), returned a guilty verdict and Shay was sentenced to death.1
Shortly thereafter, a concerted and remarkably successful effort to obtain a pardon for Shay was begun by Peter F. Mudey, the secretary of the Hibernia Benevolent Institution of Pottsville; Edward O’Connor, another Hibernian leader; and Strange Palmer, who in addition to editing the local Democratic paper, the Emporium, happened to be a judge.
In January 1848, the three led a meeting in Pottsville that passed a resolution urging that the death penalty be replaced by “the more humane and equally efficient punishment of imprisonment for life.” Gov. Francis Shunk, a Democrat, pardoned Shay after Hughes, the prosecutor, found in a review of the case that there was “strong doubt of the defendant’s guilt.” The statement says as much about Hughes’s indebtedness to Irish Democratic votes as it does about Shay’s guilt or innocence, and the governor’s critics gleefully seized on the issue of the pardon.2
As Anthony F. C. Wallace points out, the case was remarkable, from beginning to end, as an example of the rough, alternative justice of the Irish countryside being transferred to the hills of Pennsylvania. A killer set free by the judicial system is executed on behalf of—indeed in front of—the community, in classic secret society style: by a man in whiteface, near a holiday. The community provides his defense through alibis, and when that fails, members of a neo-Ribbon group rally the community to obtain a pardon through political pressure.
There is nothing to indicate that the Hibernian Society had any role in planning the killing, which has never been considered a Molly Maguire murder. But the Mollies were in some ways more than an organization—they were a mind-set as well. If, as Karl Marx noted in 1859, Ireland produced agrarian secret societies the way a woodland sprouts mushrooms, that stemmed from a conviction that the system was rotten, that the law was a stacked deck, and that conspiratorial violence was justified as a means to balance the scales of justice. If nothing else, the Reese murder case showed how that mind-set had been transplanted to Pennsylvania.
In fact, the Shay case was but a particularly vivid demonstration of the degree to which Irish folkways in general were sinking roots into the hills of Schuylkill County. The trend did not go unnoticed. “The manners, customs and mode of thought of the Irish people” had been transplanted wholesale to the anthracite region, a long-standing resident noted a few decades after the famine.3 It was a trend that accelerated with the arrival of each new refugee from Ireland.
And there were plenty of new arrivals. In the sixteen years from the start of the great famine to the opening of the Civil War, Schuylkill County’s Irish population soared. In 1840, the county had 29,053 residents. By 1850, that had doubled, to 60,713, 15 percent of whom were Irish. In 1860, there were 89,510 residents, a quarter of them Irish.4
Famine immigrants arrived in the anthracite region by a variety of routes. Shipping lines had long connected Philadelphia with Ulster ports; many pre-famine immigrants, once they had established themselves in the anthracite region, brought over their relatives, paying the cost of their passage—$24 in 1842—to shipping agents such as Bannan. Others came through Canada, working for a time in Nova Scotia. However they arrived in Philadelphia, immigrants could pay the Reading Railroad $2.50 for a second-class fare to Pottsville.5
The less fortunate—and there were thousands after 1845—could take a canal boat, walk, or work for the railroad instead of riding it. Arriving in the anthracite region, the immigrants found a ready market for their unskilled labor, especially in the growing West Branch collieries.
It has been suggested that the famine Irish, inured to hardship, were particularly suited to rough-and-tumble mining regions like the West Branch. If the food was bad and the housing poor, at least it was on offer, thanks to the Heckschers, who controlled 75 percent of the workforce in Cass Township. Cass was the ultimate company town, and that fact encouraged a collective response to industrial conditions.6 There, the immigrants reconstructed a semblance of communal life, for the coal patches were as small and remote as the clachans many had left behind, and every bit as impoverished. Everyone knew one another; many were related. The men all worked together in a dangerous job, bonding as “butties.” “The very smallness of the patch threw [residents] together on terms of intimacy,” the folklorist George Korson wrote. “There was a sharing of meager worldly possessions and an expression of sympathy in times of illness or trouble.”7
The rhythms of life and work on the West Branch, too, proved remarkably similar to that of the Irish countryside. The bulk of the work in the mines was done between March and November, much as it was on an Irish farm. An old resident of Minersville explained the colliery calendar of the 1800s to a Works Progress Administration folklorist in 1939. “During the summer months the mines worked steadily, but about the third week of November the canal would freeze, and there would be little or no activity at the mines,” recalled Albert MacClay. “Shortly after the 17th of March, the railroads would again begin to send cars in and work would be resumed.”8
Many of the Old World folk patterns persisted in the New World for generations after the famine, and in some cases became permanent fixtures. Halloween, which was brought to the United States by Irish immigrants, is one of the best examples. In the anthracite region, groups of young men and boys from the collieries visited homes in the neighborhood and put on a performance, much like the strawboys who would crash into the kitchens of Irish country homes, repeating verse and dancing with the female inhabitants.
A Pottsville librarian, Edith Patterson, recalled in 1939 that as young girl she used to look forward to the visit of these breaker boys on Halloween, when “they appeared in the large kitchen, ready to sing and dance.” The master of the house, Audenried mine superintendent Edward L. Bullock, would reward the boys with “a distribution of nickels all around” when they sang a song in his honor.9 Coordinated performances by small bands of trickor-treaters remained an integral element of Halloween in Cass Township well into the 1930s. The groups practiced beforehand, and then sang, danced, or recited poetry in the homes they visited.10
The echoes of the Old World were not limited to Halloween. On May 1, “Maying parties” of young men and women visited the countryside, and up until the twentieth century, English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh immigrants observed Midsummer’s Day much as they had in the British Isles. On June 25, there would be a “community celebration held at twilight around huge bonfires built of flour or cracker barrels placed one on top of another around a pole set in the ground and extending some distance in the air,” a member of the WPA Federal Writers’ Project reported after interviewing older county residents in 1939. “The barrels were filled with excelsior or other flammable material and when set on fire lit up the surrounding countryside.”11 At Christmastime, mummers visited farm homes in southern Schuylkill County, though mummery does not seem to have spread to the mining region until the era just before the Civil War, when, as we shall see, it developed strong political overtones.
In addition to holiday customs, many other Irish folkways and superstitions were transplanted to the coal fields. One of the best documented is the Irish wake. Mourners came from far and near, without invitation, to pay their respects to the deceased, remaining with the body all night. Food and drink were abundant. Friends and relatives renewed acquaintances and discussed the news of the day. “Sometimes games were indulged in to keep people awake, and pranks perpetrated on individuals for the general amusement of the gathering,” a WPA folklorist in the anthracite region reported. “Irish keeners or ‘paid criers’ were part of every community . . . Upon entering a corpse house, one was usually greeted by one of these professional criers who went into a heart-rending period of lamentation in which was stressed the virtues of the deceased and his particular friendship for you. One was slightly embarrassed, especially if he did not know the dead person so well, but this embarrassment was suddenly changed to amazement when the wailer was seen to sit down and engage in some humorous banter, only to arise again to greet the next visitor with a like performance.”12
There were also instances of the charivaris, or “rough music,” that the English historian E. P. Thompson found so common in the British Isles. In these cases, the community noisily mocked the participants in a remarriage, or in a marriage held to be a misalliance. Such rough music, in the form of the “ceffyl pren,” or wooden horse, was closely associated with the Rebecca rioters in Wales in the late 1830s and early 1840s. It survived past the midpoint of the twentieth century in Ireland, where unpopular marriages were “marked by noisy gatherings of young men” who serenaded the couple with horns.13
A similar form of rough music—the “calithumpian” band—was a common feature at Schuylkill County weddings. Young people angry at not being invited would create a din in front of the wedding house with instruments like tin horns, whistles, conch shells, drums, and crude fiddles.14 In 1864, five Schuylkill County Irishmen—Bartholomew Boyle, Patrick Whalen, Michael Whalen, Peter Gallagher, and John Kelley—were convicted of riot for leading a “horse fiddle” concert for Bridget Munks on the night before her April wedding in Ashland, just north of the West Branch region. Munks, who ran a shebeen (she was probably a widow), succeeded in having the defendants fined six cents apiece.15
Peasant superstitions—“hobgoblins, ghosts, witches, fairies, banshees and many signs and omens”—were also transplanted wholesale to the hills of Pennsylvania.16 An Irish immigrant in Scranton told a reporter in 1877 that “some years ago,” the friends of an Irish mine worker killed by a cave-in insisted that fairies had taken him.17 On a moonlit night, some “in fun and some in earnest,” they went to what was believed to be a fairy gathering spot, in hopes of getting the dead man back by throwing an object.* In Coal Castle, the burning mine served as a sort of holy well. And everywhere there were the informal, music-filled get-togethers that the Irish call a ceili. They were sometimes held at the end of a hard day in the mines, in a company-owned house. After the furniture was carried out and the bottles broken open, the dancing began. Fiddlers called out reels, jigs, and breakdowns as the slanting rays of the setting sun caught the coal dust kicked up by a drumbeat of dancing feet.18
If the old customs survived, it was in part because the old language persisted—Irish-speaking immigrants who arrived in the anthracite region in the late 1840s found priests who ministered to them in their own language, and Irish was still spoken extensively in part of the coal fields into the late 1870s.19 As these immigrants poured into sparsely populated, developing mining areas like the West Branch, the opportunities for assimilation were limited. English, Welsh, and American-born miners dominated towns like Minersville and Llewellyn. Many of the Irish preferred communal life among their own in the rural townships, in hamlets clustered around the collieries—Coal Castle, Heckscherville, Glen Carbon, Forestville, and Branchdale.
Compounding the ethnic segregation was class stratification. A state labor report that discussed the condition of antebellum anthracite miners outlined the process, pointing out that periodic overproduction led to inadequate wages and privation: “As the mass of the working class sank . . . deeper into poverty, hopelessness and degradation, the line dividing them from the employing class, and their better paid and provided confidential servants such as superintendents, store keepers, clerks, etc., was widened day by day, until they were completely separated in feeling, habits of thoughts, purposes, interest and sympathy, as if they were separate people in races and civilization.”20
Thus, Irish labor helped transform Schuylkill County into a flourishing bastion of American free enterprise, even as the laborers’ lifestyle, language, religion, and customs turned the hills outside Minersville into something entirely different—a small slice of rural Ireland with a culture and a consciousness all its own. This contradiction may have existed elsewhere in the nation, but in few places was it quite so profound as on the West Branch. There, the boomtown ethos of the coal operators clashed head-on with the premodern mentality of their employees, who were for the most part peasants with picks and shovels, many of them Irish speakers who would never have emigrated had the alternative been something other than slow death in a dank hovel.21
To help resolve some of the tensions between Ireland’s agricultural past and America’s industrial present, the immigrants on the West Branch decided to carve out their own political fiefdom. The new entity was called Cass Township.
Until 1848, the vast bulk of the West Branch mining region lay in Branch Township, to the north, south, and west of Minersville. Irish Democrats dominated the northern part of the township, which included Coal Castle, Heckscherville, and Forestville. They seceded in 1848. The Democratic Party nominated the diplomat Lewis Cass as its presidential candidate that year, and the township was named in his honor—an unmistakable sign of its political proclivities.22
The split from Branch Township, like a much bigger secession in 1861, was not accomplished without bloodshed. In February 1848, an election-day riot broke out at a polling place in Llewellyn, Branch Township. The Miners’ Journal reported that “the disturbance was engendered by the feeling of animosity existing between Irish Catholics and native Americans, the former voting a ticket composed exclusively of Irishmen, and the latter of Americans. There seemed to be a predetermination by the former to overawe the latter in the exercise of their elective privilege.”23
In an incident that had all the earmarks of an election-day brawl in Ireland, a club-wielding crowd beat seventeen people. Even the Democratic Pottsville Emporium was appalled, referring to the incident at the tavern of Philip Kehres as “unprovoked, brutal and murderous.” A dozen men were indicted for riot, nine were convicted, and two identified as leaders were sentenced to thirty days of hard labor.24
The names connected with the incident offer a glimpse of the leadership of the West Branch Irish community. Edward Connelly of Branchdale and Francis Gallagher of Forestville, two bar owners and civic leaders, were arrested then freed after it became clear that they had not taken part in the violence.
Two other men were convicted of leading the riot—Philip Mohan and “Big John Kelly.” The former was most likely a member of the prominent and politically active Mohan clan, which played a continuing role in the Cass Township secession: the final settlement between Branch and Cass was concluded at the home of John Mohan, in 1861.25
The second leader, John Kelly, quickly became prominent in the affairs of the new township. He was born in Ireland around 1812, and arrived in Branch Township with his wife, Ann, sometime between 1837 and 1840. A decade later, Kelly listed his occupation as laborer in the 1850 census, but he was clearly a man on the move.26 That same year he gained a license to sell liquor, and he served, along with Richard Heckscher of the Forest Improvement Company, as one of Cass Township’s representatives on the county committee that arranged the Fourth of July celebration in Pottsville.27
Kelly was elected a Cass Township supervisor in March 1853, and just two weeks later was granted a license for a tavern in Primrose, between Minersville and Forestville. The tavern served as something of a community center, eventually becoming a polling place for the South Cass precinct.28
There are also hints that Kelly may have been involved in Hibernian affairs. On March 17, 1854, a John Kelly rose from his chair at the Pottsville banquet of the Young Men’s Hibernia Benevolent Association and lifted his glass to “the daughters of the Emerald isle—celebrated throughout the world for their virtue, integrity and industry.”29 The name is a common one, but the John Kelly most likely to have joined other county Democrats like Meyer Strouse at the Middle Ward Hotel that year was the up-and-coming Cass Township politician, bar owner, and civic leader. Kelly was listed as an innkeeper worth $500 in the 1860 census. He died of natural causes at age forty-seven in October of that year.30
Kelly’s story demonstrates the possibilities that the creation of Cass Township opened to immigrants, who were swiftly elected to positions like constable, auditor, and school board member. Up in northern end of the township, Patrick O’Connor of Coal Castle, a native of County Limerick, had a career remarkably similar to Kelly’s. Like Kelly, he was working as an immigrant mine laborer in 1850. In 1853, the same year that Kelly became a Cass supervisor, O’Connor was elected auditor. Like Kelly, he subsequently gained a license for a tavern that became a polling place. And finally, like Kelly, O’Connor did not live to see the Civil War, dying in 1858 at about age forty-six. The two were buried in the same cemetery—St. Vincent’s in Minersville, a stone’s throw from the inn that Charles Mohan ran before he, too, died in the late 1850s.31 Kelly and O’Connor typified the new sort of civic leaders who were emerging in the hills—hungry immigrants, fresh from the pits, who managed to improve their hard lot through the Democratic Party, barroom politics, and a certain dexterity with their fists.
In Kelly’s case especially, the portrait that emerges is that of the classic Ribbonman—a hardheaded publican and community leader. He bears something of a resemblance to a prominent figure in folklore about the origin of the Pennsylvania Molly Maguires. In his book Lament for the Molly Maguires, Arthur Lewis discusses an oral tradition that the Mollies got their start in a Cass Township tavern run by one Jeremiah Reilly in the late 1840s, during a period of sectarian riots in the villages surrounding Pottsville. Reilly was described as a former Ribbonman who led an assault on a bar in Yorkville, just outside Pottsville, because some of its English and Welsh regulars had assaulted a priest who was passing by after celebrating Mass in Cass Township.32
The tradition cannot be verified. Census records for 1850 show no Jeremiah Reilly in Cass Township, and he does not turn up in lists of local bar owners, as do John Kelly and Patrick O’Connor. In fact, he does not turn up anywhere in contemporary references to Cass Township.
But there are a lot of intriguing similarities between the real-life Kelly and the legendary Reilly: both were two-fisted Cass Irishmen who served as civic leaders. Both not only owned bars, but also were involved in a riot at a bar outside Pottsville owned by a member of another ethnic group. And there is documentary evidence to suggest that a few years after his death, Kelly’s bar did in fact play a central role in the birth of the Pennsylvania Mollies. It may well be that stories about Kelly were transmuted over the generations into folklore about “Reilly.”
The stories of Kelly and Reilly make clear that there were a series of riots in the villages around Pottsville in 1848. Like the polling-place donnybrook in Llewellyn, the trigger was politics. When the general election rolled around in November, a brawl broke out in Middleport after Patrick Reddington, late of County Roscommon, threatened some voters as they prepared to cast their ballots. Several people were severely beaten; Reddington and five others were later convicted of riot.33
At Mount Carbon that same day, Irish employees of the Reading Railroad challenged Whig voters to a fight. Several people were badly beaten, though it appears no charges were filed—much to the displeasure of the Miners’ Journal.34
The following year offered clear evidence that the growing clout of the county’s newest immigrants extended beyond election-day head bashing. The Irish, allied with German farmers and some English and Welsh miners, helped the Democratic Party regain control of Schuylkill County from the Whigs in 1849.35
The political differences between the two parties were profound. Whigs placed a strong emphasis on moral crusades, supporting enforcement of Sabbath laws and prohibition on alcohol sales, insisting that rum and beer shops had turned Schuylkill County into a “crime and pauper factory” and that “nothing short of a prohibitory law can ever reach the root of evil, or effectually cure the moral leprosy” of drunkenness.36 The Whigs also supported tougher rules for naturalization, proposing a waiting period of twenty-one years before an immigrant could become a citizen.
The Democrats opposed limitations on immigration, fought new regulations on Sunday sales and drinking, and greeted famine immigrants with open arms. The Pottsville Emporium announced in 1847 that “the Democratic party welcomes these ‘oppressed and starving poor’ [from Ireland] whether Roman Catholics or Protestants, to the shores of our beloved country, where they need no longer be oppressed—where they need no longer endure the pangs of starvation.”37
Having learned a lesson in 1849, Bannan, the Whigs’ chief spokesman in Schuylkill County, courted the Irish vote in the elections of 1852 by attempting to tar Democratic candidates such as Franklin Pierce as anti-Catholic or anti-immigrant. He also argued that Democratic support for free trade strengthened the English economy at the expense of Ireland. Those arguments carried little weight among Irish Democrats, and Pierce carried the county, defeating Winfield Scott. Bannan, disgusted, swore publicly to never again seek Catholic support.38
The election offers one measure of the impact of Irish political enclaves like Cass Township. The percentage of the Irish Catholics in the township in 1850 has been estimated at up to 65 percent. In 1852, the Democrats won 66 percent of the votes cast in Cass.39
As Irish Catholic political power grew in Schuylkill County, so did opposition to it. The leader of the anti-Catholic crusade was Benjamin Bannan; its chief organ was his newspaper. Irish Catholics posed a fundamental challenge to Bannan’s vision of Schuylkill County as a bastion of free enterprise where independent mine operators lived in harmony with their upwardly mobile employees.40
Most of the Irish mine laborers of the West Branch were far from upwardly mobile—they had little chance for advancement, thanks to their lack of experience and the discrimination of English, Welsh, and Scottish foremen. They did not live in harmony with small, independent mine owners, because the mines were owned by a huge corporation, the Forest Improvement Company. Nothing about Cass Township or its inhabitants fit Bannan’s worldview, and he grew to hate them for it.41
When Bannan railed against the drunkenness of Irish Catholic miners, he pointed to the number of shebeens in Cass Township. When he damned the Catholic Church for its role in politics, he pointed to Cass Township. When he blasted voter fraud by Democrats, he cited Cass Township.42 In fact, as the careers of John Kelly and Patrick O’Connor prove, the most reliable path to upward mobility in Cass Township was through Democratic Party politics and the ownership of a tavern, and Bannan abhorred the former only slightly more than the latter.
The very name of Cass Township was repugnant to the Whig newspaper publisher, for it honored a leading Democrat whom Bannan regularly disparaged in the pages of his newspaper.43 In the wake of the 1852 election, Bannan launched a venomous nativist campaign, accusing the Irish of not respecting the Sabbath, opposing the public school system, and blocking passage of a temperance law. He urged that Catholics be banished from the Whig Party, contending that their priests politically controlled them.
The lack of upward mobility among the Irish Catholic mine workers certainly played an important role in Bannan’s thinking, and in many ways his attitude mirrored the old sectarian animosities of his father’s Belfast. But his fury at growing Irish Catholic political strength may well have been linked to the realization that as a shipping and remittance agent, he had helped to bring so many of these Catholic Democrats to Schuylkill County over the previous two decades. At times Bannan sounded like he was desperately trying to convince himself that the damage Catholic immigration had done to the Whig cause in Schuylkill County was not irreversible.
“You are the minority,” Bannan warned Catholics amid an 1853 debate over the use of tax dollars for Catholic schools. “You are in the power of the Protestants, and must ever remain so, as long as you remain in this country.”44 Bannan’s campaign was not purely nativist, for it was open to Protestant immigrants who had their own grudges against Irish Catholics. As waves of Irish immigrants replaced workers in the mines of England, Scotland, and Wales, miners from those lands flocked to the burgeoning Schuylkill coal fields.
The Pottsville Emporium reported at the height of the famine that “during the past week a considerable accession was made to our mining population by the arrival of emigrants from Scotland. They allege that the poverty-stricken laborers from Ireland flood their country and so reduce the wages that they must emigrate or suffer privation greater than they have yet endured. They announce more acoming.”45
These English, Scottish, and Welsh miners, displaced from jobs in their native lands by famine immigrants, soon found themselves working beside other Irish émigrés in the anthracite region. Ethnic tensions were further exacerbated when these more experienced miners, inculcated with the values of the industrial revolution, were quickly appointed to supervisory positions.
In late March 1855, for example, a Scottish boss at the Brook and Breury colliery in Branchdale, John Beveridge, was beaten within an inch of his life in a midnight attack on his home, supposedly because he refused to employ several Irishmen. The attack took place at a time of heightened sectarian and labor–management tensions. Just days before, Bannan had raised the notion in the Miners’ Journal that all Protestants should vote against Catholic candidates. And workers at the Forest Improvement Company’s mines in Branchdale were on strike at the time.
In response to the attack on Beveridge, three militia companies from Pottsville marched on Branchdale and, in a series of surprise 4:00 A.M. raids, arrested twenty-eight suspects, although just four men had participated in the beating. The sweeping nature of the arrests ensured that many strikers were rounded up, too.46 As they marched the Irishmen back to Pottsville, the militia units added insult to injury with the music they played—“The Boyne Water,” an Orange anthem from Ulster that celebrated the defeat of Catholic Ireland.
When the Anthracite Gazette of Pottsville suggested that the tune was inappropriately sectarian, Bannan rushed to the defense of the militia, accusing Irish Catholics of introducing their old prejudices to the county as he pointed out that “The Boyne Water” happened to be one of the militia’s favorite tunes. While the controversy raged in the pages of the county’s newspapers, the sheriff who called out the militia denied a report that he had asked that the tune not be played.47
Most of the Branchdale defendants were freed—there was no evidence against them. But among those who landed in Schuylkill County court in the first court session after March were a couple of men who would become noted Molly leaders—Pat Hester and Pat Dormer.48 The details of the cases remain murky, but Hester was living near Branchdale when the militia marched in, and Dormer had been active in labor issues since the aftermath of the 1842 strike.
In the weeks after the Branchdale affair, labor trouble became entangled with ethnic strife. In mid-April, the owner of a strikebound colliery on the Yoe Tract near Pottsville fired every employee who would not return to work—Irish to a man—and replaced them with English and German workers. When the inevitable retaliation came, three blocks of houses went up in flames and a number of strikebreakers were threatened. The militia was called out again and staged its customary 4:00 A.M. raids, this time commanded by the mine owner himself. As at Branchdale, a number of men were arrested. And as at Branchdale, most were released for lack of evidence.49
The scene was repeated in mid-May, with a strike at the Gordon, Bedell and Co. colliery at Woodville near Tremont, where nonstrikers were beaten and driven from their homes. An overeager local militia unit swung into action, accompanied by “martial music,” only to be disappointed by the news that the sheriff had no need of their assistance. That did not stop the mine owners from hiring a squad of twelve militiamen as guards, turning the armed forces of the state into a private army for the protection of corporate property. The Miners’ Journal felt the move was perfectly justified—Bannan had just advised Tremont residents facing violence by “Irish ruffians” to take the law into their own hands.50
To Irish Catholics, it seemed that the game was rigged. Efforts to advance their economic interests through collective action like strikes were inevitably met by religious bigotry, economic oppression, and government coercion, all of it endorsed by the local newspaper.
Bannan’s anti-Catholic crusade came not only during a sensitive period in anthracite industrial relations, but at a volatile time in American politics. Whig support for the Kansas–Nebraska Act in March 1854 sounded the death knell of that party, for it repealed the Missouri Compromise, which banned the extension of slavery into those territories. Northern Whigs who opposed slavery fled the party in droves—many, like Bannan, into the waiting arms of the anti-immigrant and anti-slavery Know Nothings.51
By 1855, Bannan was urging voters to support the nativists in all ten state and local contests in Schuylkill County. He provided extensive coverage of Know Nothing political meetings in Pottsville, including one where it was resolved that “self preservation compels us to extend the term of Naturalization in the future, to protect those precious rights and privileges (of American citizenship) from the insidious attacks of the Jesuits of Europe.”52
When the Know Nothings were defeated in October of that year, Bannan blamed alcohol and Catholicism. But the nativist party had already run aground on the same reef that sank the Whigs, slavery. The trouble began at a national convention in June 1855, when Know Nothings from the South succeeded in pushing through a resolution that endorsed the status quo on slavery, which left open the possibility that the “peculiar institution” would spread to territories. Northern delegates walked out in protest. The walkout was repeated in February 1856, when Millard Fillmore was nominated as the Know Nothing candidate for president. Northern nativists bolted the party and formed a new one, the North Americans, and sought an alliance with the emerging Republican Party.
The Republicans nominated John Fremont as their presidential candidates; the Democrats, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. Bannan moved with the North Americans into an alliance with the Republicans—and into stronger opposition to slavery. Claiming a common ground between the two parties, he contended that the Republicans, like the North Americans, not only opposed slavery, but also the “growth of the Papal power in this country.”
Buchanan’s victory led to the demise of the Know Nothings and helped push Bannan even further into the Republican camp, where he would remain, despite the party’s rejection of nativism. Bannan’s anti-Catholic diatribes would never completely disappear, but they never again matched the stridency of the Know Nothing era.53
The anti-immigrant backlash that Bannan spearheaded may well have borne some strange fruit, though. For it is a curious fact that just as Bannan’s culture war against the Irish Catholics of the anthracite region was reaching a climax, a particularly political form of mummery emerged in the coal towns. There is reason to think that the two developments were related.
On December 25, 1855, an odd sight greeted residents of Pottsville. A group of rowdies from nearby Port Carbon, the last stop on the Schuylkill Canal, were marching through town like demented militiamen in a display of mock patriotism.
“On Christmas day, amid the pelting of a pitiless storm, some twenty individuals belonging to Port Carbon, entered and paraded through the streets of our borough,” the Miners’ Journal reported:
They were arrayed in every imaginable burlesque costume, and wore tiles apparently manufactured from damaged hardware, and discarded hats reduced to a shocking bad state. The captain wielded with herculean grasp a long wooden scimitar, and manoevered his men with a military skill to the music of a well soaked fife and drum, operated by well soaked performers. A member of the company bore upon a fragile stick a piece of not the whitest muslin we ever saw, upon which was inscribed “Santa Anna Life guard—O, git out.” The Falstaffian army created much amusement, and if the weather had been pleasant, the array on the part of the Guards would, we presume, have been more formidable, in point of numbers.54
The spectacle, like many others in Schuylkill County in the mid-1800s, would at first seem incomprehensible. But placed in the context of the day, everything about it makes sense. For 1855 was not only the year in which Bannan’s anti-Catholic crusade climaxed, but the year in which the militia of Schuylkill County had broken mine strikes and humiliated Irish Catholics by playing an Orange anthem. The “well soaked” fantasticals appeared to be mocking not only Bannan’s calls for sobriety, but also mine operators’ calls for troops and the militia’s choice of music.
Holiday customs in the region had long contained elements of mummery. As far back as 1829, residents in the farming area of southern Schuylkill County were parading from house to house in disguise, firing volleys on New Year’s Eve. Gunplay was noted in mining districts as well, and it sometimes led to trouble. In 1851 a young man named Alexander Cowan accidentally shot himself as he and others fired guns outside the Potts colliery. In Minersville, drunken German mummers appeared on the streets in fancy costumes on Shrove Tuesday, cutting “quite a ridiculous figure” as they kept up the Fastnacht festivities of their native land.55
After the arrival of Irish famine refugees, however, Schuylkill County mummery developed political overtones. The change was related to developments in Philadelphia, where English and Swedish settlers had been disguising themselves in women’s clothes, blackface and masks at Christmastime for generations. According to one account, the first parade of mummers was held during the War of 1812 by Jackson’s Rangers, a sort of home guard of boys too young to serve. On New Year’s Day they paraded on horseback from home to home, reciting a rhyme.56
Despite an official ban on masquerades, mummery was well entrenched in Philadelphia by 1820, and it flourished in the years that followed amid a fresh influx of arrivals from the British Isles; nineteenth-century mummery in the city had a distinctly immigrant flavor.57 And in the two decades before the potato famine, opposition to the state’s militia system began to influence the masked home-visiting and firing of guns that had long been the hallmark of Philadelphia mummery.
The opposition stemmed from an 1822 reorganization of the Commonwealth’s militia. Under the new law, all men between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five were required to muster regularly for drill on pain of a fifty-cent fine.58 There was a vast gulf between these units and some volunteer militia companies that amounted to clubs for the scions of Philadelphia’s leading families. For these upper-class volunteers—today’s First Troop Philadelphia City Calvary is a surviving example—musters were a social event of the first order, allowing members to show off their smart uniforms.
In some ways, the volunteer militia units were mirror images of the mummers. They paraded regularly, in a festive atmosphere, accompanied by musicians. Their annual cycle of public displays—at Christmas, Washington’s birthday in February, Muster Day in May, the Fourth of July, and an October 22 reenactment of the Battle of Red Bank near Camden, New Jersey—in some ways mimicked the old festive calendar of the Irish countryside, whose highlights fell in December, February, May, late June, and October. But the purposes for which the militia and the mummers marched could not have been more different. The disciplined parades of the volunteer militia symbolized social order, not the rowdy social inversion of the mummers. Instead of bringing the community together, the militias tended to emphasize social divisions with uniforms that ostentatiously displayed the wearers’ wealth.59
No wonder the volunteers were so resented by the working class, for whom muster day, or “battalion day,” merely meant a lot of pointless parading and a day’s lost wages. Tradesmen, who were known to stage raucous, militant “strike parades” when they staged walkouts for higher wages, knew exactly how to react: they rebelled through the age-old weapon of mockery.*
In 1825, the 84th Regiment, an infantry unit drawn from the city’s working-class Northern Liberties neighborhood, elected as its colonel John Pluck, a bowlegged hunchback who had long been the object of ridicule. Pluck became something of a celebrity, and joined in the spirit during a militia parade by sporting an enormous woman’s bonnet, a huge sword, and spurs half a yard long.
Soon, workers were showing up drunk for militia drill, in tattered clothing that spoofed the military’s penchant for uniforms, wearing blackface and wielding weapons that ranged from brooms to dead fish. Styled “fantasticals,” they were accompanied by callithumpian bands that produced their usual cacophony with “conch-shells, old cracked instruments, stones, shingles, tin-horns, speaking trumpets, here and there a bassoon, old kettles, pot-lids, dozens of cow-bells strung upon poles and iron hoops.” All it all, it made for some very rough music, but that was the point. The fantasticals, Susan G. Davis says, were poking fun at the “brilliantly dressed, well-disciplined, obedient network of young men from good families” who served in volunteer units.
Opposition to the militia system became a plank in the Democratic Party’s platform, and Democratic politicians in Philadelphia played a leading role in the fantasticals’ chicanery. The use of blackface, rooted in the British Isles tradition of mummery, took on a new meaning with the race riots that periodically wracked the city.
The racial component of the fantastical tradition was underlined as it spread beyond muster day to celebrations of the Fourth of July and Christmas. Over time, Davis writes, Yuletide mummers “borrowed parodies of military dress and style and grafted them on to older seasonal folk dramas. Fantasticals and callithumpians performed in Christmas streets; their burlesques retained anti-militia, anti-authority resonances.” They also maintained an element of racism—one fantastical group named itself the “Crows” after Jim Crow.60 And the fantasticals could be a violent. Roaring from tavern to tavern, they were known to beat any barkeep who refused them a free drink. More than one New Year’s fantastical procession ended in a killing.61
The fantasticals’ brand of anti-militia mummery, with its overtones of class anger, violence, and racism, spread far beyond Philadelphia. By the early 1830s fantasticals were turning up in Albany, a major canal center, and New York City. In the latter, they became especially prevalent around Thanksgiving, and were mostly Irish and working class.62
In Easton, Pennsylvania, a canal hub on the Delaware that linked Philadelphia to the anthracite region, working-class fantasticals decked out in false whiskers marched on January 1, 1834, under the command of a mythical “Col. Sheffler,” blowing tin horns and banging on old pots, their faces masked or painted. One banner bore the motto “Success to the malicious system.”63
As Joseph J. Holmes noted in his study of the state militia’s decline, public ridicule was probably more damaging to Pennsylvania’s compulsory military system than were any of its other many problems, which included shortages of men, officers, equipment, and training. “Institutions cannot normally withstand being scoffed at and mocked by the public,” he noted. If mockery was the weapon that finally did in mandatory militia service, it was the mummers who wielded it to the most devastating effect. The Pennsylvania state legislature finally abandoned the compulsory militia in April 1858, but not before the fantasticals had reached Schuylkill County.64
The groundwork for them had been well laid. By 1853, muster days had become a drunken farce in the county—the Miners’ Journal ran its report on the annual militia drill under the dateline “Military Broken Head Quarters, May 23.” The accompanying story was filled with so many snide references to alcohol that one reader felt compelled to respond. “A great deal of drunkenness and disorderly conduct did prevail, more than I have seen before,” wrote “a Citizen.” “Several Captains marched the men under their command home sooner than they would have done, had a different state of affairs prevailed among the congregation of ‘rowdies’ which seemed to pour in from every direction.”65
Just two years after “rowdies” disrupted Schuylkill County’s militia drill, they put in another appearance, as the fantasticals of the “Santa Anna Life Guard” marched through Pottsville on Christmas Day, 1855. The name “Santa Anna” referred to the Mexican general defeated by Texans in their bid for independence, and demonstrates the fantasticals’ predilection for naming their formations after vanquished enemies of the United States. The slogan “O, git out” that appeared with it neatly summarized the views of many laboring men on the use of the militia in labor disturbances.66
The fantasticals appeared again, two years later, in Cressona, by the Schuylkill south of Pottsville. “The day succeeding Christmas was rather more lively out-doors,” the Miners’ Journal reported:
The prominent feature of the day was a burlesque, by some of the “fast men” of the place. With but few exceptions the horses looked as though a peck of oats would be an extremely welcome luxury. The riders were not very warlike, but everybody thought they were “funny.” By means of paint and outré clothing, most of them were beyond recognition. The regimentals embraced all sorts of style and kinds of colors. The hats were of very original shapes. In some cases, the head, “the palace of the soul,” was surmounted by a steeple, hideous enough to be the residence of a Hindoo Idol. The music consisted of the voice of the lieutenant, tin horns and ten penny whistles.67
The ethnic background of the fantasticals who marched in Port Carbon and Cressona is not made clear by the Miners’ Journal. However, it’s worth noting that this form of mummery, which appeared a few dozen miles away in Easton as early as 1834, did not show up in Schuylkill County until more than two decades later, after there had been a massive influx of Irish immigrants to the coal fields. In Philadelphia and New York, the fantasticals had close connections to the immigrant and Irish communities. It is probably no accident that Schuylkill County’s first reported troupe of fantasticals, with their working-class, Democratic, and racial overtones, surfaced in the canal town of Port Carbon.
The town was home to a significant number of Irish boatmen who regularly journeyed to and from the fantasticals’ birthplace, Philadelphia. Port Carbon was an early center of the heavily Democratic Hibernian Society, a direct descendant of the Defenders who had led opposition to a militia draft in Ireland. Hibernian leaders had made their racial views clear in the O’Connell abolition controversy. Furthermore, the canals of Ireland had long been Ribbon strongholds, and it seems likely that Hibernian boatmen in Port Carbon were well versed in the subversive subtext of mummery.
Cressona, where the fantasticals put in their next appearance, was also a major transportation center with direct links to Philadelphia—it was home to the shops and roundhouse of the Mine Hill and Schuylkill Haven Railroad, and later the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. The year the fantasticals appeared there was, like 1855, one in which the militia had broken a mine strike, this one at the Heckscher collieries in Cass Township.68
Davis has suggested that street performances like those of the mummer fantasticals were rites of solidarity that immigrants used to create images of an alternative social order. The year of their first recorded march in Schuylkill County just happened to be the one in which Port Carbon’s Irish most needed an alternative to nativist hectoring about sobriety, piety, and productivity. The callithumpian tunes that the fantasticals played on their fife and drums served as a cultural counterpoint to the “The Boyne Waters” played by the militia.
The clash may have been cultural, but sometimes real blood flowed when Irish American mummers brought the noisy customs of the Old Country to the doorsteps of their native-born neighbors in the anthracite region. On December 31, 1876, nine-year-old John Boyle was among “a lot of mischievous boys, dressed in fantastic costume” who were going door to door in Mount Pleasant, in the manner of Irish mummers. The boys “by their noise disturbed and annoyed” the inhabitants of one house, and when they refused to leave (probably because they’d been denied a treat), things turned ugly. Alfred D. Minnick, a young company store clerk who was visiting the home, tried to frighten the boys with a pistol, and it went off, killing young Boyle. No charges were brought against Minnick. It’s not known exactly how Boyle was dressed, but some young Schuylkill County fantasticals were known to don women’s clothing, like the mummers and Mollies of Ireland.69
Just as the fantasticals were emerging in Schuylkill County, the name Molly Maguire began to appear in print there. In 1857, Bannan complained in the Miners’ Journal about the heavily political nature of speeches at the Hibernians’ annual St. Patrick’s Day banquet, and of a heavily political Irish American secret society called the Molly Maguires. His failure to realize that the two groups were one in the same says as much about the changing nature of the Hibernians as it does about Bannan’s estrangement from the county’s Irish American community.
Regular mention of the Hibernian Society dried up in the Miners’ Journal just as Irish immigration hit flood tide in 1848—probably in reaction to that influx. But we do know that the period 1845–55 was one of explosive rank-and-file growth for the Hibernians in the hard coal fields, and one of decline for its longtime Pottsville leadership. Within a decade of the onset of the famine, the society had made “rapid progress” throughout the anthracite region, spreading to Luzerne, Lehigh, Columbia, Lackawanna, Northumberland, and Carbon Counties, the official history of the order says.70
The Hibernians worked hard to relieve the suffering that was filling their ranks. In February 1847, the secretary of the Hibernia Benevolent Institution of Pottsville, the publican and schoolteacher Peter F. Mudey, called a special meeting of the society, “to take into consideration the propriety of contributing a sum of money . . . to aid the sufferers in Ireland.”
That same month a public meeting had been held in Pottsville to create a relief fund for famine victims. Appointed to the fund’s standing committee were several men prominent in the Hibernians’ annual March 17 banquet that year, including Neville, O’Connor, and Brady. Also serving on the committee was one who most assuredly did not attend the banquet—Benjamin Bannan. Charles Mohan represented the town of Minersville.71
On March 27, the Pottsville Emporium reported that Michael Daly had contributed $500 to the relief fund from the “Hibernia Benevolent Society, Pottsville.” But the effort to alleviate the horrors of hunger proved every bit as futile as a campaign to aid the abortive Young Ireland rising a year later, an event that sparked a new wave of Irish nationalist activity in Schuylkill County. A meeting was held in Pottsville on August 17, 1848, less than two weeks after Young Ireland’s stillborn rising in Tipperary. The anthracite Irish, not realizing the rising was already over, collected $405 for arms. At a meeting chaired by Hibernian banquet regulars Colehan, Patrick Fogarty, and the newcomer Bernard Reilly, a railroad contractor born in County Cavan, a letter was read from William Haslet Mitchel, the brother of imprisoned Young Ireland leader John Mitchel. It made an impression—within two weeks the Mitchel Guards, a nascent militia unit, and a Mitchel Club had been formed in Pottsville, with Neville as president of the latter.72
The newer immigrants now joining the society in large numbers were far poorer than the coal operators, professional men, and Pottsville politicians who had led it in the pre-famine era. The transfer of the society’s national headquarters from Schuylkill County to New York City around 1853, coupled with the growing numbers of poor Irish immigrants in the remote coal townships where jobs were plentiful, diluted the influence of longtime Pottsville leaders such as Brady. Mudey, the secretary of the society, had moved to Philadelphia and taken a job as a dry goods salesman in 1849. The Hibernians, who for years had been holding banquets at Mudey’s tavern, Town Hall in Pottsville, where forced to find a new venue.
One sign of a new generation of Hibernian leadership was the emergence in 1854 of the Young Men’s Hibernia Benevolent Association of Schuylkill County. The first banquet of this branch of the society attracted several men who had been involved in the effort to aid Young Ireland in 1848, including John Neville, Thomas Farrell, and John Maginnis. Also on hand was John Kelly.73
The exact process by which the Pottsville elite lost control of the society is unknown, but both the Hibernians and the Ribbonmen before them were notoriously riven with factions. At some point a bodymaster from Branchdale, Mount Laffee, or Glen Carbon may simply have amassed enough votes from the men with dirt under their fingernails to oust the professionals from Pottsville.
A nineteenth-century New York Times report about the origins of the Molly Maguires said that while the organization was founded to provide asylum for fugitive Ribbonmen, the order “gradually passed into the hands of men of desperate character, both fugitives from Ireland and naturalized citizens of the coal regions, and they utilized it for purposes of their own.”
The article focused on the Buckshots, as the Mollies of Carbon County were originally known. It made a few points worth noting about the behavior of the secret society before the Civil War. The first is that it did not engage in premeditated murder (though some beating victims died after being “given the raps,” the killing was not intentional). The second was that “the raps” were, in effect, a means of policing the communal ethos of the Irish. Members of the community who refused to buy a raffle ticket or contribute to whatever cause the Buckshots were collecting for left themselves vulnerable to a beating. Outsiders, at least in the 1850s, were generally left alone.74
Whatever the evolution of the organization, what can be said for certain is that the changing of the guard was complete by 1867, when a former Forestville resident, Barney Dolan, was elected the organization’s leader in Schuylkill County. His predecessor is unknown, but two developments suggest that the tipping point may have come a decade earlier.
The first is that the Hibernian Society was growing more overtly partisan. In 1857, Bannan complained that a harangue by the Democrat Francis Hughes had made the Hibernian Society’s March 17 banquet “political in complexion.” In his complaint, the first of its kind, Bannan suggested that the St. Patrick’s Day festivities were degenerating amid “party matters and philippics.”75
The changing character of the Hibernian Society was also reflected in a nickname for the group that began to gain currency in the latter half of the 1850s—“the Molly Maguires.” The name appeared in print for the first time in the anthracite region in October 1857. “ ‘The Molly Maguires—A new and exclusively Catholic secret organization . . . has recently spring up in our Eastern cities,” the Miners’ Journal reported in autumn 1857:
It was originally started as an offset to “Know-Nothingism,” but since the decline of that order has been found so useful in controlling the Native Democracy, with whom the Maguires are politically associated, that it is kept up with increased zeal. The fundamental principle of the new organization is to “taboo” every political aspirant that is not of the Romish faith, unless they will aid and assist the members. Under its practical working, every Locofoco convention is in effect so “packed” beforehand, and so admirably managed by the secret drill of its members, that the Native Democrats are thrust to the wall with no hope of political preferment. So powerful has it already become, that it is even said to control in a measure the action of the dignitaries of the government in their appointments to office.
Bannan went on to cite clerical opposition to the organization in a Philadelphia parish, St. Philip de Neri:
[The Rev. Cantwell] understood from good authority, that certain persons of his church had regularly enrolled themselves as members of a secret political organization, and as such, were not fit to belong to this church. If he succeeded in ascertaining their names, he would certainly excommunicate them from membership; for such societies, in a country like this, are not only entirely useless, but calculated to bring reproach upon the religion which the members profess, and to array the native-born population in opposition to the church. He felt assured that the members of the “Molly Maguire” have adopted a course that must eventually bring disgrace upon them, and he could see nothing but disaster as the result of their secret political labors.
In a separate item, the newspaper linked the Mollies to election fraud in Philadelphia.76
The priest at St. Philip de Neri had good cause for concern—nativist rioters had targeted the church in 1844 amid rumors of an arms cache there.77 Those bloody July riots may have been the reason that some parishioners felt a need to affiliate with a neo-Ribbon organization.
Just one week after printing Fr. Cantwell’s condemnation, Bannan published a speech by Lemuel Todd, chairman of the American Republican State Committee, that cited “the advances of that foreign priestly influence, which, through the aid of the ‘Molly Maguire’ and other like associations, aims to, and in some districts, does actually control the nominations of the Democratic party.”
The original Miners’ Journal article wasn’t based on the paper’s own reporting—it was essentially a rehash of an article that appeared in the Philadelphia Sunday Transcript. Other newspapers picked up the Transcript article, and their rewrites offered details that Bannan skipped. The Chicago Journal, for example, made it clear that “Molly Maguire” was merely a nickname for the new order, or how it “was known in street parlance.” Its description underlined the organization’s likeness to the Hibernian order: “It is bound by oaths, is strictly organized with presiding and subordinate officers, pass-words, signs, grips, degrees, etc.”78 The emphasis in all these accounts is entirely on the political activity of an Irish Catholic secret society (either vehemently opposed by the clergy or utterly controlled by it), with nary a mention of violence.
The currency of “Molly Maguires” as a moniker for Hibernians is interesting, for there were any number of secret Irish societies from which to choose a nickname—Ribbonmen, Whitefeet, Rockites, Caravets, Terry Alts. But Molly Maguires was the most logical choice because the Hibernians had gained their 1836 charter from the Northern Union grouping of Ribbonmen. Famine immigrants who had watched the metamorphosis of Northern Union Ribbonmen into “Mollies” in the Ulster borderlands would naturally have used that nickname for the American offshoot of the secret society.
The name surfaced amid the Panic of 1857, which brought labor unrest, unemployment, and widespread hunger to the anthracite region. Irish mine workers struck the Heckscher collieries in Branchdale in the spring of that year, seeking the dismissal of the inside boss because he was an Englishmen. “The Irish think there are too many Englishmen, Scotchmen & Welshmen at the mines & are affrayed to loose the control,” the mine’s superintendent, Eugene Borda, wrote to Charlemagne Tower, his lawyer, who just happened to be the district attorney. “I am informed just now [that the workers] are threatening to burn the breakers and have threatened the engineer at the pumping engine who is affrayed to remain at his work. I want you to call upon the Sheriff and get a strong force to protect our works.”79
By autumn, amid the worsening economic situation, Borda was more concerned with getting his mine workers fed than with getting them arrested. He appealed to the Heckschers for help. “Hunger knows no law and it begins to tell dreadfully in many parts of [Schuylkill] County,” he wrote. “Men have had but little work this summer and are idle now with nothing coming and positively starving.” With unemployment and food prices at unparalleled heights, Borda argued strenuously against an order to lay off the workforce: “We are in a powder keg, and a spark will be enough to bring ruin all around. You must not therefore tell me discharge hands and do not pay them, it cannot be done without increasing risks. The operators must come together in faith [and] distribute food in the shape of bread.”80 A decade after fleeing the potato famine, the Irish mine workers of Cass Township were once more looking starvation in the face.
The explosion Borda feared did not come, but the following year brought little relief. Mine workers in Ashland went on strike for higher wages in May 1858, complaining that they could not even afford the tools of their trade, like blasting powder. Spurred on in part by canal boatmen who were involved in a labor dispute of their own, the Ashland miners tried to make the strike general, marching throughout the region to shut down other collieries. Some on the West Branch joined in.
As Schuylkill County mine strikes went, this was a fairly peaceful one. There were no shootings and no beatings. The strikers resolved “not to get drunk, bellow, make threats, give insults, stop those who want to work from doing so, annoy persons,” or break the law, and they mostly stuck to it, with the exception of some stone-throwing at a Mount Laffee mine and some anonymous threats—all of which got them exactly nowhere with the anthracite establishment.
The Miners’ Journal offered the strikers a stark choice: “work or starve.” Then a full regiment of state militia was brought in to break the strike and arrest its leaders on conspiracy charges. The mustering of the militia against avowedly peaceful miners constituted such an overreaction that even the Miners’ Journal mocked it.
District Attorney Charlemagne Tower, a coal operator, nonetheless obtained conspiracy convictions against at least two leaders of the strike for “endeavoring in an unlawful manner to raise wages.”81 The use of troops and criminal charges to break a peaceful strike would soon have dire consequences for the industry, for it taught mine workers that to succeed, strikes would have to be run from the shadows, by men ready to use violence.
Watching all these events with close interest was another coal operator, Franklin Gowen. He and a partner leased a Mount Laffee colliery at the beginning of 1858. The mine failed the following, and Gowen embarked on the study a law, a path that would soon make him the county prosecutor.82
As the decade drew to a close, immigration had effectively transformed certain mining regions of Schuylkill County into another—and for mine workers, more dangerous—version of Ireland. This proved especially true in Cass Township, where by 1860 up to 78 percent of mine laborers and 70 percent of miners were Irish natives.
To a remarkable degree, life on the West Branch had come to resemble that which the immigrants had left behind. Just a decade after the failure of the potato crops had decimated the townlands, those who fled it were again living a rural, communal existence among their own, the old language and customs largely intact. They faced the familiar threats of dire poverty and starvation, thanks to callous absentee mine owners who had effectively turned the anthracite region into an internal colony. As in Ireland, the agents of those owners relied on military force to put down those who attempted to advance their economic interests by collective action.
Irish Catholic immigrants also faced a vicious strain of religious bigotry fostered by the chief spokesman for the coal establishment, Benjamin Bannan, which echoed the Orange taunts of his father’s Ulster. And to round it all out, there was a neo-Ribbon society nicknamed the Molly Maguires to whom these immigrants could turn for succor and support in the face of these hard times.
In fact, by the end of the 1850s, the only aspect of West Branch society that differed significantly from that of the Ulster borderlands was the political strength of the Irish Catholic community. Though the anthracite region was riven by deep economic, social, and religious fault lines, even the poorest Irish immigrants could obtain the right to vote. It was a right they exercised early and perhaps often, to their clear advantage. But for all their growing electoral clout throughout the region, on the West Branch the Irish lost an entire cadre of seasoned political leaders in the years leading up to the Civil War—John Kelly and Patrick O’Connor in Cass Township, and Charles and Michael Mohan in Minersville.
With the coming of the Civil War, the Protestant, Republican mining establishment would try to use the wartime expansion of federal power in an effort to curtail the voting rights of their longtime enemies, the Irish Catholic Democrats who worked the mines. This time, there would indeed be an explosion—perhaps because so many of the community leaders who could have stopped it were gone.
The outlines of the struggle to come were foreshadowed to an eerie degree by the street theater and formal drama of the 1850s. For the upper classes, there was Mars in Mahantango, an anonymous play printed on Bannan’s presses in 1852. Its theme was the marriage of Schuylkill County’s military leadership to its mining establishment (Mahantango Street, named for a local creek, was one of the more desirable addresses in Pottsville). In the romantic comedy, Brigadier General Maxwell of the county militia weds Caradori, the daughter of “a wealthy coal operator,” rescuing her from her father’s financial ruin.83 For the lower classes, there was the mocking street theater of the fantasticals, which emerged in 1855 as a drunken, cacophonous call to arms just as Bannan’s Kulturkampf against Irish Catholics was reaching its climax. And for the nativists, there was an uglier form of folk drama, as the Hibernians discovered when they gathered for the annual St. Patrick’s Day procession on March 17, 1857. “In the morning, an effigy of St. Patrick, his neck decorated with a string of potatoes, was discovered hanging from a telegraph wire at center and Market streets,” the Miners’ Journal reported on March 21. “About 8 o’clock it was removed, by order of the chief burgess.”
It was almost as if every side in the coming drama needed to rehearse their roles before assuming them in earnest—anti-militia mummers marching through the streets in paramilitary array, the military wooing and saving the coal establishment, and last but by no means least, Protestants slipping a noose around the neck of the Hibernians’ patron saint.