Says Mollie to her darlin’ sons,
“What tyrant shall we tumble?”
—Molly Maguire ballad
On the night of December 5, 1862, a group of men seized the engine house at the two Wolf Creek collieries of Geo. H. Potts and Co., just north of Minersville in Cass Township, and raked out the fires. They also posted a number of threatening notes, illustrated with coffins and the skull and crossbones. The notes, or “coffin notices,” were signed “Brave sons of Molly.”
The following day, the collieries’ 400 employees went on strike. A settlement was reached on December 10, but only 150 of the men were rehired.1
Wolf Creek was not the only operation affected by labor unrest. A coffin notice was also posted December 5 at the Swatara mine run by Charles Hewitt in neighboring Reilly Township.2 And at about the same time the Wolf Creek men were going on strike, miners fired guns during a “riotous demonstration” at the two slopes of William Goyne’s Phoenix colliery, a short distance away at Phoenix Park in Branch Township.
Trouble flared anew on Saturday, December 13, when two hundred armed men, supposedly strangers to the area, arrived at the Phoenix colliery and forced engineers at the two slopes to put out the fires in the engine boilers. They then ransacked a company store, beat two clerks, and warned that they would kill every man there if the store were reopened or the fires relit without their permission. The rioters “boasted largely of an organization called the ‘Molly Maguires’ to which they belonged, and asserted that it was powerful enough to control the whole coal region,” the Miners’ Journal reported.
Labor unrest was on the rise throughout the West Branch region. Bannan blamed “a movement originating in Cass Township, where a secret association termed the “Molly Maguires” exists, the members of which boast that they can have everything their own way, and that they do not care for the law or its representatives.” According to Bannan, the group claimed that at short notice it could rally three thousand men to violently enforce strikes that dictated wage rates.3 His description strongly suggests that the “Brave sons of Molly” were the same men behind the anti-conscription movement.
There were other echoes of the draft disturbances—on December 27, the Miners’ Journal announced that Charlemagne Tower had been appointed provost marshal to enforce the draft in Schuylkill County. As December drew to close, the name “Molly Maguire,” synonymous with a politically oriented secret society since 1857, was being increasingly associated with the kind of labor issues that Hibernians had been involved with since the strike of 1842. On December 20, the Miners’ Journal spoofed the Mollies with a tale about an Irish immigrant named Mollie Muggins who botched a meal she was cooking for some miners by making it too spicy. It was the last time the name “Molly” would be taken so lightly in the anthracite region.
The joking ended on January 2, 1863, when James Bergen was shot dead in his Coal Castle home. The killing of this onetime member of the militia came a week after Christmas, the day when Schuylkill County’s fantasticals had appeared in the streets to mock militiamen. It was committed by a small band of men who visited the Bergen home and opened fire when they were denied a request for ale. In Ireland and in Philadelphia, small bands of mummers, wren boys, and fantasticals sometimes took vengeance when homeowners and barkeeps rebuffed their requests for money, food, or drink. The sequence of events in Coal Castle—request, refusal, revenge—resonates in the mummer tradition. So does the gunplay.
“Shooting in” the New Year was so much a part of mummer festivities in eastern Pennsylvania that to this day the formal name of the group that parades through Philadelphia each January 1 is “the New Years Shooters and Mummers Association.” Given that the firing of guns was a staple of New Year’s celebrations in Schuylkill County, and that Irishmen bent on vengeance there tended to kill their victims right around the same holiday, the difference between a Molly Maguire and a mummer was, to some degree, reduced to the direction in which his weapon was aimed.
The Coal Castle assassins cheered for Jefferson Davis as they fled, suggesting that the killing of the former Union Army soldier was linked to the antidraft agitation. In his history of the New York City draft riots, Iver Bernstein points out that Irish draft resisters there cheered for Davis as well in the summer of 1863, but he suggests that the cheers conveyed not so much sympathy for the Confederacy as antagonism toward the Republican Party. He cites a clear precedent in the conscription disturbances in Ireland seventy years before: “The most striking historical analogue to this use of pro-Confederate cheering as a rallying point for anti-Republican sentiment was pro-French sloganeering during the violent popular resistance to the Militia Act in Ireland in the summer of 1793.”4 The same may apply to the events in Coal Castle.
James Bergen’s body had been in the ground only a few days when a neighbor, James O’Connor, and “Curry” of nearby Glen Carbon, a former comrade of “Yellow Boy,” were shot and wounded while they walked together. The January shootings occurred in North Cass, a precinct that had handed District Attorney Franklin Gowen a ten-to-one margin of victory three months earlier. Gowen’s biographer, Marvin Schlegel, suggests that the prosecutor’s lack of interest in the pursuing the cases stemmed from concern about alienating Irish Democrats.5
“Cass Township in this county is probably one of the most lawless spots in the country,” roared the Miners’ Journal in reporting the attacks. “The civil authorities are powerless there.”6 The authorities’ impotence was aptly demonstrated by continued trouble at the Wolf Creek collieries, where the arrest of several union activists illuminates the shadowy relationship between the labor committees and the Mollies.
The biggest stumbling block to labor peace in the winter of 1862–63 was “dead work”—the driving of gangways and preparation of the coal breasts for the resumption of full-scale mining in the spring. Coal operators traditionally laid off much of their work force and reduced the wages of those who remained. This time around, the miners resisted.
On February 11, 1863, coffin notices signed “Molly Maguire” again went up at the Wolf Creek collieries of Geo. H Potts and Co. Without any apparent cause, a new strike promptly ensued. When no settlement had been reached within five days, W. G. Audenried, an officer of the company, arrived from Philadelphia to investigate. He met with a committee of five men representing the miners, including Darby McManimy and Martin Corrigan.
The committee demanded an increase in pay and the rehiring of all the laid-off workers. Audenried conceded the pay raise and the committee yielded on rehiring all the men. “So ended the conference, and apparently the whole difficulty—to the entire satisfaction of all parties concerned,” the Miners’ Journal reported on March 14. “But, in the meantime, there were other spirits moving, which started fresh complaints, and ruined the whole plan of settlement.”
The “other spirits” came in the person of Thomas Keefe, a stranger to Wolf Creek who arrived the day before the settlement, ordering the pumping engineers to cease work. He repeated the message at the company store—much as the Molly Maguires at Phoenix Park had done. When Audenried questioned his authority to issue orders, Keefe replied in the cryptic tones of Ribbonism that he had been ordered to appear at a meeting “over the mountain” and had come on this errand for fear of his life. Audenried considered having him arrested, but was too busy with labor negotiations to attend to it.
On Thursday, with a settlement reached and the miners poised to go back to work, new coffin notices went up at the mine. They threatened anyone who reentered the pits until certain superintendents had been fired. The offending bosses were themselves warned to quit the premises, and informed that if they tore down the notices, as they had done others, the penalty would be “instant death.”
The union men who had negotiated the settlement then set out to Forestville, to see who had posted the latest notices, “whether their own men or some other persons,” the Miners’ Journal reported. Along the way, in Minersville, who should they run into but the very folks who had posted the notices? They were union men, out to stiffen the spines of the Wolf Creek brethren.
“These men said ‘Why don’t you discharge your bosses as we have done ours,’ ” the Miners’ Journal reported. The Wolf Creek boys took the hint and returned to the mine with a new ultimatum. Written by Corrigan and delivered by him and McManimy on Friday, a letter demanded the dismissal of the bosses on the grounds that they had torn down the coffin notices and wrongfully discharged a workman.
The union’s defense of threatening notes signed by “Molly Maguire” bespoke a close link with the secret society; Audenried, who had had quite enough by this point, arranged for the arrest on conspiracy charges of Corrigan, McManimy, and Keefe.7 The Miners’ Journal had no doubt about who was behind the Wolf Creek trouble: “Leagued together in a secret association known as the ‘Molly Maguires,’ these men have dictated to their employers what bosses shall be discharged or employed . . . these things cannot longer be tolerated.”8
The outcome of the March trial of the three accused conspirators offered Bannan and the coal operators little consolation. In his charge to the jury, the judge recommended the acquittal of Corrigan and McManimy, but suggested complicity on the part of Keefe. The jury returned a not guilty verdict after three hours of deliberation.9
The Wolf Creek case offers a glimpse of the complicated dynamics of the chaotic West Branch labor scene. Clearly there were labor committees at each colliery that negotiated with management. Equally clear is that these committees were not completely autonomous. There were “other spirits” at work—a shadowy organization that called strikes and enforced regional conformity in labor settlements using traditional Ribbon methods. Those methods were violence or the threat of violence, delivered anonymously under the auspices of “Molly Maguire”—a nickname for the Hibernian Society.
The coffin notices make clear that the name Molly Maguire was embraced, adopted, and defended by the union, and was not simply invented by Bannan.
More than a decade after these notices were posted, a Pinkerton spy—in a report on an 1875 meeting of eighteen Hibernian bodymasters, or local chapter leaders, at the Town Hall in Pottsville—offered a glimpse of the means by which such warning notices were approved. “After adjournment, John Reagan of St. Clair gave Frank McAndrew, B.M. [bodymaster] of Shenandoah, a threatening notice to post in front of the long chute at Turkey Run colliery. The notice was to the following effect,” the spy reported. “ ‘To the Union men now in the Union. I would have you take your tools out of this place. This is my first notice, but if I have to come back again it will be a different requisition.’ The above notice was put up by two men (M.M.’s) belonging to the Shenandoah division by the orders of Frank McAndrews and was intended to intimidate the Cornishmen working at Turkey Run so that they would quit work and thereby have an opening for Reagan and his brother to get a job for the balance of the winter.”10 Aside from highlighting one of the Hibernian Society’s more prosaic activities—finding work for its members—the report makes it clear that a Molly coffin notice had to be approved by a Hibernian bodymaster.
This is not to say that all coffin notices were the work of the Mollies—anonymous warnings are easily counterfeited. A notice posted at Richard Kear’s Gap colliery in Cass Township in 1864 had this odd ending: “Sind by the real boys this time—so you beter loock out.” Because it had been signed by “the real boys” this time, it appears that an unauthorized notice had been posted earlier.11
Anonymous coffin notices weren’t the only form of labor–management communication, and bosses weren’t the only targets. When violence wasn’t being threatened, the colliery committees handled correspondence in a very straightforward manner.
In a letter dated March 3, 1863, the Heckscherville committee informed Charles Heckscher that “we have come to the following agreement that there will be no work in the different collieries from this date until the Heckscherville Colliery starts by some other person than Thomas Verner.” Verner, who had a reputation for not paying his men promptly, had bought out the previous operator of the mine, Heckscher nephew Eugene Borda, who earned the gratitude of his workers by defying orders to lay them off in the hard and hungry autumn of 1857. (The question of who operated the mine was thus, a least potentially, a matter of survival.) The curious coincidence that Verner had the very same name as the first grand master of the Orange Order may have aggravated his situation.
Eight days after that letter, the committee sent another to Heckscher: “The men from all your works held a mass meeting this day and came to agreement to stop the carts from hauling fuel to the pumping engines tomorrow.”12 There were no threats of violence here—and no mention of Molly Maguire.
By March 14, labor unrest had stopped all work at five large West Branch collieries, including Heckscherville and Wolf Creek. The issue was the union’s demand that that the miners name their own bosses, and the collieries linked to the Forest Improvement Company were a particular target. The Miners’ Journal reported that “the proprietors are determined that [the mines] may fill up and rot down before they permit a mob to control any of their operations any longer.”13 That convinced the Heckscherville strikers to allow the pumps to be restarted—each day the mines filled with water would keep them closed for up to ten—but Verner was driven away by death threats when he tried to take possession of the Borda mine.14 But by March 28, as the strike spread, “regulators” stopped the pumps in Thomaston and Heckscherville, though Wolf Creek restarted after an agreement that the workers could strike only over wages, the Miners’ Journal reported.
At the Otto colliery in Reilly Township, Supt. David Muir had a close call with a large body of strikers who marched in from Cass when he reopened the mine. He described the unfolding threat in a series of notes to Peter Heckscher:
New Mines, April 1, 1863:
I am sorry to hear the men intend making an attempt to stop the white ash colliery and to punish the men that was at work today. We are very poorly situated for want of anything to defend ourselves with. I hope you will try to send us assistance from Pottsville or Minersville as soon as possible. I will keep a vigilant lookout and do all in my power to prevent anything from being done, but you know the state of this place at present. Therefore I insist that you use your endeavor to send us assistance as soon as possible.
New Mines, undated:
The mob of upwards of 100 men has been here. They passed past my house and I am afraid they will commit some outrage. It looks awful and no protection here.
Minersville, April 2, 1863:
I sent a pencil note to you this morning stating that the mob had made its appearance at the Otto and that there was about 100 men, but when I wrote the note I had not seen the whole of them—there must have been upwards of 200. They went first to the Red Ash slope and then to the White Ash breaker and fired a few shots, fortunately there was no one there. I had about 35 men—all that could be mustered—last night and we all left about 3/4 of an hour before they came so you can see that we were very fortunate in not being captured. They went from the breaker to Dewartville . . . and commenced calling at each of the men’s houses that were at work yesterday. There was a number of shots fired, but I have not heard whether there was anyone shot or not. They were making a general call at every house (in the Stone Row) where anyone had worked yesterday. There are a number of the men who has escaped and I have seen them here, but I cannot say whether they all escaped or not. Dear sir, in my opinion, it is impossible to work the colliery, unless there is sufficient protection got for the men.
P.S.: Since writing the other day my daughter has come into Minersville and she informs me that the mob was in my house and searched every corner for me. They left my house and went to my son-in-law’s but did not succeed in finding him as he was from home. My daughter likewise informs me that David Jones was very badly beaten on the head by the mob but did not hear of any other being hurt by them.
New Mines, April 3, 1863:
I write to inform you that all is quiet at this place at present. The pumping engines are still at work. It was fortunate for me being from home yesterday when the mob came to my house. They swore it was good for me for if they had catched me I would not be anymore.15
The continuing West Branch labor unrest was driving the coal establishment to distraction and gaining national attention, with newspapers up and down the East Coast weighing in on the issue as coal prices climbed.
In New York, higher ferry fares between Manhattan and Brooklyn were blamed on strike-related spikes in the cost of anthracite, though the Union Ferry Company neglected to reduce fares once coal prices fell. Complaining in April that “the high price of coal” had become a bitter joke used to justify “all sort of extortion,” the Times dispatched a reporter to the anthracite valleys of Pennsylvania to find out what was behind all the labor unrest. The resulting story described the miners’ union responsible for the strikes as a well-organized secret society that had appeared about six months before—in other words, right after the draft disturbances.
The union, or “association,” had a strike fund and a clear economic policy of using scattered strikes to reduce the amount of coal produced, keeping prices and wages high. The Times found that “the strikes among the coal mines are an index of prosperity—of high wages, not of low; of independence, not of want.” The reason was simple: When wages were low, the miners couldn’t afford to strike.
And in a direct slap at Bannan’s contention that the strikes were some kind of Copperhead conspiracy, the Times reporter noted that he hadn’t heard word of sympathy for the South. “There may be Copperheads in the mining region,” he wrote. “But if so, they are remarkably quiet.”
Reports of labor outrages were also overblown, he found, noting that strikes were, for the most part, “not of a lawless or violent character.” There was, the article said, one exception to this rule—Heckscherville: “The miners at that place are a lawless set of ruffians, and have long been the terror of their immediate neighbors, and the pest of the whole mining region.”
It was an assessment that would not have been disputed by David Muir of the Otto mines in Reilly Township, Elizabeth Bergen of Coal Castle, or Benjamin Bannan. In fact it seems likely that the Times reporter had talked to Bannan, for his description of the Heckscherville miners reads like something right out of the Miners’ Journal: “The ‘Molly McGuires,’ as the Hoecksherville miners are called, are a lawless whisky-drinking set of outlaws whom even the priest has lost control over, and who, like the rebels of the South, can only be brought to their senses by brute force.” Despite some invective about “mercurial Irishmen,” the article noted that these whiskey-swilling outlaws were also dutifully pumping the water from the mines (though they had the cheek to send the Heckschers a bill for their labors).
By the end of his visit to the anthracite region, the Times reporter had clearly been won over to the miners’ point of view: “Those who are disposed to grumble about ‘the high price of coal,’ should pay one visit to the mines, descend into a few of those dark, damp and dangerous collieries, behold the grim faces of the men who earn their bread in those unhealthy subterranean caverns, and they would emerge with the settled conviction that the men who will pass such a life for the sake of a living, are entitled to all they can get, even though they struck for higher wages every other day in the year.”16
The Times wasn’t the only big-city newspaper to sympathize with the miners. The Boston Pilot, an Irish American newspaper edited by Patrick Donahue, launched a blistering attack that spring on the “murderous mines, gross dishonesty and absolute selfishness” of the Schuylkill County operators. Citing as a source a friend who had often traveled to Schuylkill County, the Pilot denied that the workers were the “debauched, drunken set of rioters” described by the Miners’ Journal, which it dismissed as a Know Nothing rag.
“How many mines in Schuylkill County are ventilated with a just regard for human life?” asked Donahue. “Let the fact that over 100 men are burned to death and blown to pieces by ‘fire-damp’ explosions in those mines answer the question. How many mines in the region are safe in their equipment of ropes, chains, windlasses, propping, slope railroads and engines? If the government mining engineers of Wales had authority over these mines, they would close them all at once, and have the owners sentenced to penal servitude for years.”
Donahue also highlighted the inequities of the company store system, pointing out that when miners were burned at work, they had to buy their own balm at company stores with inflated prices. He summed up the miners’ situation succinctly: “The mines in which they work are murderous, the payment they get is due bills backed by extortion, and the compassion they get for injuries is a hard bargain.” The strikes would continue, he warned, until legislation was passed to make the mines safe and the operators honest.17
Bannan, speaking for the coal establishment, offered a far different solution—troops: “As the government is deeply interested in procuring the large quantities of coal she requires, at reasonable rates, we would advise the operators in Cass township, and wherever outrages on property are attempted, to apply for a national force to protect their collieries under the provost marshal of the district—and if necessary, declare martial law.”18
The Times article a few weeks later alluded to this call for federal intervention, even as it dismissed it: “Some of the citizens of Pottsville are in favor of the General Government taking hold of the matter, which they say she has a right to do in view of the interest she has in supplying the market with coal; but it is not likely, as it is certainly not necessary.”19
Federal intervention may not have been necessary, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen. The provost marshal of the district, whom Bannan had called on to declare martial law, was Charlemagne Tower, the coal operator and former district attorney. He could be counted on to assure the government the “reasonable rates” that the Miners’ Journal had demanded. And at the height of the 1863 West Branch strikes, Congress handed him the means to do just that.