Ulster’s exiles it would grieve
If their beardless boy should fall.
—The Cattle Raid of Cooley
In 1863, portions of Carbon County proved even more troublesome to the Republican coal establishment than did Cass Township. For it was in Carbon County that the Molly Maguires made a crucial segue—from draft resistance to attacks on mine bosses. And it was there that the War Department and coal operators first concocted a plot of their own—to smash the mine unions and lower the price of coal for government contracts. When it came to conspiracy, the military–industrial complex made the Mollies look like pikers.
The center of resistance in Carbon County was Banks Township, a mining region along the Luzerne County line dominated by immigrants from Ulster, especially County Donegal.1 There had been little real trouble in the county during the militia draft of 1862—four women were arrested after a crowd of twenty-five stoned enrolling officers in Mauch Chunk in September of that year.2 For unlike in Cass Township and Archbald—an Irish mining village north of Scranton where the military had fired into a stone-throwing crowd, killing one and wounding others—the antidraft emphasis in Carbon County in 1862 seems to have been on political action.
In the fall of that year, up to seven hundred men gathered for an antidraft meeting between Jeansville and Hazleton, just over the Luzerne County line. The meeting was presided over by Peter Dillon, a respected Irish labor leader from Banks Township. Dillon was no friend of the Confederacy—he had volunteered in September to help raise a regiment for the Union Army—but he was unalterably opposed to the militia draft, as he made clear at the meeting. “The substance of what he said was, that the draft should be resisted,” a miner later recalled. “He said that he was a drafted man himself, and as long as there was one left, we should stand loyal to one another.”3
One of the leading concerns voiced by the miners was support for their families. “They agreed that if they did not get the pay for their families to which they were entitled, they would oppose the draft—those drafted men who wanted to go, might go, but those who wished to stay back they would help and secure them,” one miner later testified.4 The last sentence echoes almost precisely the cries of those Cass Township draft resisters who stopped the train filled with conscripted men in Tremont.
The gathering included miners of several nationalities, but this was no ordinary American political meeting. Most of the leaders were Irish, and some of the non-Irish miners were there only because they feared their absence would invite retaliation. The gathering took place in the woods, away from any homes, and guards were stationed on a nearby road.
One “captain” was appointed from each patch—Dillon among them—and each in turn selected a deputy, in much the same way the Cass miners had appointed committeemen for their labor organization. The duties of the captains were “to march along beside the men and keep them in line,” a miner later testified.5 And march they did, in Ribbon array, as soon as the meeting ended. With an American flag at their head, they lined up in two ranks and paraded to Hazleton. This was politics, but it was the politics of Irish Ribbonism, with all the tension and contradictions inherent when a secret society ventures into the public arena with mass meetings.
Some of these Irish miners may have participated in the Cass Township disturbances in October of ’62—there were numerous reports that the draft resisters there came from as far away as Luzerne County. But the next real action in Carbon County didn’t come until the following year. The announcement of a federal draft in March 1863 hardened opposition to conscription, and by early summer, there was talk of violent resistance.
Charles Scrimshaw, a deputy provost marshal from the mining village of Bear Meadow, described a barroom conversation during that period with three Irish miners—Frank Cull, Charles Gallagher, and James Rodgers. “If we have to do any fighting at all, we will do it at home,” Cull told him. Scrimshaw was informed that those Irish miners who had volunteered for the Union Army were no longer considered Irish by their compatriots.6 And newspapers reported that “mob orators” from Banks Township were telling deluded miners that “they must not submit to the Lincoln tyranny, that the object is to draft every Democrat, that they must stand in the doors and resist every officer connected with the draft who comes near them.”7
Another mass meeting against conscription, held in June as work on the draft began throughout Carbon County, offers a glimpse at the rhetoric and dynamics of the movement there. Peter Dillon, the leader of the antidraft meeting the previous fall, attended only briefly, in the company of Rev. John Laughlin, a Catholic priest who favored compliance with the draft. Dillon did not address the crowd; there were plenty of others willing to speak in his place.
George Heycock, a Jeansville miner who attended, described the scene: “Ed Winter rose to make a speech. He said, “You are aware that we came here for the purpose of resisting the draft. We will protect the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was. They think they can compel us, and draft us, and make us go and fight against the Southerners, but if we stick together as a unit, they cannot do it, for the Southerners are fighting for their rights.”
Then Patrick Tunney rose to speak, specifically calling to mind Irish resistance to English rule in the 1790s: “The Irishmen never were cowards—see what they did at Bull Run, and at the time of the Rebellion in Ireland—we will not fight for Lincoln’s proclamation.” The meeting considered how best to deal with those did not join the antidraft movement. A group of about three men conferred quietly, and decided to appoint committees to collect the names of men who would resist the draft. “They decided that if anyone should refuse to give his name to the committees, he should be obliged to clear out in 24 hours,” recalled Heycock. Intervention by Dillon’s clerical companion put a quick end to the meeting. When Fr. Laughlin walked through the crowd, pretending to jot down names in a small notebook, the crowd scattered.8
In calling for “the Constitution as it is, and the Union as it was,” the antidraft speakers were merely repeating a Democratic Party campaign slogan.9 But clearing the region of those who would not cooperate in draft resistance was a tactic with deep roots in the Defender tradition—and one employed the previous fall in Cass Township. As the draft widened the region’s political divide, the Irish reflexively moved to enforce communal solidarity.
Those in charge of the draft were already noticing the effects. As early as June 10, E. H. Rauch, the deputy provost marshal in charge of Carbon County, was reporting threats of violence in Banks Township and at the Old Mines near Summit Hill. He requested muskets and ammunition to deal with the problem.10 Nine days later, Rauch wrote to the provost marshal for the 11th congressional district, Samuel Yohe, that he had been unable to find an enrolling officer for Banks Township, despite three attempts, because his choices for the job feared it would “seriously endanger their lives.” Those difficulties led him to suggest the same problematic course that Tower had adopted in Schuylkill County, the use of mine payrolls: “Perhaps the work can be done quite accurately by first getting from the books of [coal] operators the names of men, their estimated ages, nativity.”11
By mid-July, Rauch could report that the Banks enrollment lists would soon be nearly complete, but, expecting trouble in the actual execution of the draft, he recommended the formation of a sort of Home Guard: “The general public opinion here is strongly in favor of a substantial military organization—of citizen volunteers. The program is to organize a company for local service and all I want to know is whether we can get muskets.” The idea was shelved because Pat Sharkey, the brigade inspector for the state militia, was “the most violent Copperhead in the county,” Yohe reported. The provost marshal still wanted a full company of Invalid Guard to help serve draft notices.12 When at last L. Richards, the enrolling officer for Banks, had completed a list, it was a “very imperfect one,” Rauch later testified, made possible only through the cooperation of pro-government coal operators such as George K. Smith of Yorktown.13
That sort of cooperation, coupled with Yohe’s calls for a Home Guard, led to a sharp escalation in tension between Republican draft supporters and the county’s Irish and German Democrats as conscription drew closer in the late summer and fall of 1863. On August 27, a crowd of between fifty and one hundred stomped out of Banks Township and broke open the county jail in Mauch Chunk to free an Irish deserter, Patrick Cull.
John D. Davis and Benjamin Presser of Yorktown, Welsh miners and Lincoln supporters who had failed to clear out after the June antidraft meeting, were badly beaten as they walked together that fall. “They broke my skull in three places,” said Davis, who did not recover for two months. “I do not know why they beat me unless it was because I did not attend the last meeting.” Presser was less fortunate. Two weeks after the beating, he died.
The attacks, as in Cass Township, were not confined to Welshmen and Protestants. A group of men broke into the home of Patrick Shannon, a mine laborer from Frenchtown, between 9:00 and 10:00 P.M. on October 10, 1863. “I was badly beaten so that I was not expected to recover,” Shannon said. “I was obliged to leave the place.” In the melee, a pistol shot grazed his wife’s head. Shannon later identified his assailants as Peter Daly, John Donahoe, John Campbell, John Donahoe, Edward Burn, John Flyn, and Peter Dillon, who “captained” the antidraft meeting the year before.
At least three others were attacked that same night—Bill Davis, a Mrs. Billingsley, and William Heycock, a shoemaker from Jeansville. Heycock offers an entirely different glimpse of Dillon. The labor leader and antidraft activist was not one of the men who attacked him, for Heycock testified that Dillon came to his house after he was beaten and helped dress a four- or five-inch cut on his head, then stayed with him the rest of the night. “I believe it was daylight when he left,” Heycock later said.
Amid the mounting violence, the idea of a Home Guard was revived, this time by George K. Smith, the Yorktown coal operator. Smith was organizing a volunteer company and had secured one hundred muskets and a thousand rounds of ammunition, which were stored in Mauch Chunk, Rauch recalled.14
And the coal operator was helping the government in other ways. When it proved impossible to deliver draft notices in Banks Township, George Ulrich, a clerk in Smith company store, devised a stratagem. “The man that brought [the draft notices] there wanted me to take them and serve them to the men and I said, ‘no,’ but he might lay them on the counter and when the men came in I would tell them to look through them and see if there was anything that belonged to them.”15 The idea did not work too well. On October 22, the day the township’s 139 conscripts were to report for duty, a grand total of three showed up. That same day, Yohe reported that he would need one hundred troops to serve draft notices in Banks.16
With the entry of armed troops, events soon spiraled out of control. The trouble began October 29, when a military force was sent out to serve draft notices, beginning at Bear Meadow, where Rauch reported great difficulty in obtaining the names of individuals: “Children from 12 to 14 years of age denied any knowledge of the names of their parents, and wives denied knowing the names of their husbands.”
Attempts to move on to Jeansville, just down the road, were frustrated by the vigilance of the draft resisters, who posted guards to warn of troop movements, as their Cass Township counterparts had done the year before. “The route between Janesville [sic] and Bear Meadows was well picketed by these people, and signal guns were fired on the approach of the military,” Rauch said.
Warned that a large group of draft resisters had gathered in Jeansville, Rauch sent for reinforcements—150 troops from the 10th New Jersey Infantry in nearby Hazleton—and resolved to move into Jeansville the next morning. Rauch said that when the Invalid Guard unit entered on October 30, it found the town filled with idlers loafing on the streets in groups of between ten and fifty. “These were all dispersed by the cavalry, and not allowed to appear in the streets,” he said.17
A newspaper account offers a somewhat different take, suggesting that it was the presence of the troops that brought residents out of their homes. The soldiers found Jeansville “perfectly quiet” on Friday, the New York Times reported. “But in the course of half an hour, the streets began to fill, and the mob to cluster along the sidewalks.” Capt. Yates, the commanding officer, ordered the cavalry to clear the street, determined to nip in the bud what he saw as an incipient New York–style draft riot. In course of this five-minute operation, “one Buckshot was badly sabred,” the Times reported. “He is at this time passing the last moments of his rebellious life.”18
A fuller picture of what transpired on the streets of Jeansville emerges from an indignant letter sent to President Lincoln by E. Greenlough Scott, a young Pottsville lawyer who traveling through town that day with William Audenried, the West Branch mine boss, who verified his account. Scott painted so vivid a picture of a town terrorized by a drunken soldiery that the letter is worth quoting at length:
As we entered Jeansville, we saw, in the middle of the street, a detachment of Invalid soldiers at rest—arms stacked. A squad of cavalry was at the other end of the street, a few individual cavalrymen remaining with the infantry. Not a full grown citizen was in sight, and, but for the pale and terrified faces of the women who were bold enough to look from their window, one might well have thought the place untenanted. As we dismounted at the tavern, before which the troops rested, we saw through the window a number of people—citizens.
Astonished at this state of affairs, I addressed the officer—“Well, lieutenant, is there any difficulty here?”
“No sir, none.”
“Are you stationed here then?”
“No sir, we are stationed at Hazleton. We have come here to serve notices.”
“Is there any truth in what we heard—that a rebel flag was raised here?”
“Not that I know of—there’s copper enough to do it. This is a damned hard hole.”
“Why, how is it that the place is deserted?”
“Because we won’t let them come out. When we first got here, we ordered every one of them in. Do you see those fellows in the barroom? They can’t come out—we slashed four or five of them this morning.”
“Slashed! What’s that?”
“Why, we cut them with sabers, or the cavalry fellows did.”
“Did they resist? Was there any difficulty at all?”
“No, but there might have been—you can’t trust these fellows.”
. . . After a few more remarks, without expressing an opinion of those who took such counsel of their fears, we went toward the buggy to resume our journey, when the scene to which I particularly desire to call your attention occurred.
As we were starting, my attention was suddenly directed to a cavalryman who, from where the commander of the detachment and one or two officers were standing, spurred rapidly towards a boy, who I had not observed, with the evident intention of running or cutting him down. The boy, who could not have been over 15 or 16 years of age, was standing before a house not three or four rods off and was to all appearances there from curiosity. In fact, so intent was he on staring at the unwonted spectacle of a soldier-company, that he did not perceive the soldier till the horse nearly upon him. He then turned to fly. The soldier cut at him with his drawn saber. The officers set up a shout of laughter, which of course, was chimed in with by the men.
“Run in the house,” cried a few voices.
The boy made for the door, but the soldier was too close. He turned and ran toward the rear of the house. I wish you to observe, that the boy clearly evinced a disposition to comply with the advice or order, whichever it was. But, it seems, he had not done enough, for amid the laughter and hurrahs of the officer and men, the soldier pursued him into the yard, cutting at him until the boy got into the house. Whether the boy was cut or not, I do not know, but I trust he escaped through the awkwardness of the soldier, which was as great as the malignity of the officer.
As a man, I was outraged, and, as one who had once been a soldier, grieved to see conduct which the spirit of true discipline would regard with abhorrence, and soldierly honor hold in contempt.
Let it be granted that the place was as represented; that it was necessary to confine the men temporarily to dwellings, and to summarily punish the refractory. There nonetheless remains the fact that under the eyes of an officer of the United States Army, an armed man spurred on an unarmed boy and endeavored to cut him down. . . . But what could you expect from a commanding officer who, as I saw him an hour afterward, invites enlisted men to drink liquor at a public bar? . . .
Let us ask ourselves two questions:
Can we decently express surprise now if we hear that these poor people, whose condition is despair and whose leaders are their passions, with such an example before them commit acts of violence?
How will these ignorant people regard the government—as a beneficent friend, or a deadly enemy?19
They were trenchant questions, but they would go unanswered.
The troops searched several house for weapons and confiscated about two dozen guns, then departed. When military authorities were questioned about the unit’s conduct, they disavowed all responsibility: “In regard to the outrages committed by the soldiers of the 10th New Jersey, the reports state clearly that the officers and soldiers did not act on their own responsibility, but as an auxiliary force of the provost marshal of the district, on his requisition and by his orders.”20
The Irish of Jeansville were left to pick up the pieces in houses raided for arms, with memories of a boy chased through his yard by a saber-wielding trooper, of civilians cut down in the streets, of soldiers laughing and drinking while residents cowered behind their curtains. Some would continue to pursue a political solution—another antidraft meeting was held November 3 in front of the Treskow Hotel, where Allen Craig, of the Carbon County Democratic Committee, argued that the draft was unconstitutional “because it was a political subject.”21
But others in Banks Township had had enough of politics—the season of vengeance was nigh. Halloween, the traditional opening of Whiteboy and strawboy activity, fell just one day after the raid on Jeansville. As attorney Scott penned his outrage to Lincoln, some Carbon County Irishmen were contemplating an outrage of another sort.
Their intended victim, the coal operator Smith, was aware of the danger, but he persisted. When Rauch and the troops returned to Yorktown on November 4 to again try to serve draft notices, Smith gave them a map that showed where the drafted men lived. “We used this map to good advantage,” Rauch later recalled, “but did not inform as to where we obtained it.”22
There was little enough need for that. While the troops were serving draft notices, they stopped at Smith’s company store and were served food and refreshments by the clerk, Ulrich. And as the troops ate, Smith, the provost marshal and the captain of the company, went upstairs to talk.23
The coal operator had good reason to cooperate with the military—a few days before, he and other leading mine officials in the township had been warned by a committee to halt operations until the government suspended the draft. With coal production and the draft reduced to a zero-sum game, Smith, a staunch supporter of the government, had little choice but to gamble on a military solution to his problem.
It was a bad bet.
As the troops prepared to leave Yorktown on November 4, Rauch recalled, Smith’s wife “strongly appealed to me to have the soldiers retained there, predicting that they would all be murdered as soon as the soldiers left.” Rauch ignored the plea, though the mood was ugly. Ulrich recalled an incident the next day. “Owen Gallagher was in our store, and one of our clerks, Thomas Horn, said something to him about the draft. Gallagher said, ‘Oh, to hell with your draft. There will be war at your own firesides before tomorrow.’ ”24
A few nights earlier, there had been a gathering in a swamp between Hazleton and Frenchtown. It was the sort of nocturnal meeting that had been held in Ireland for generations, on the side of windswept hills, in the back rooms of pubs. It was presided over by a “captain,” alleged to be James McDonnell. The proceedings were secret. The agenda was murder.
Fifteen years later, a witness would tell a Carbon County court that those in attendance were all members of the organization that came to be known as the Ancient Order of Hibernians. “It had three names . . . it was called the Molly Maguires and the Buckshots,” testified Charles Mulhearn, a convicted member serving time for murder in the Schuylkill County prison. “They were everyone Mollies or Buckshots. It was Molly Maguires or Buckshots they were at that time.” Smith was their target, because “he was after the drafted men,” Mulhearn testified. McDonnell told him the organization was “protecting” the draftees.
And so, on November 5, as men warned of “murder on your own doorstep by tomorrow,” Smith and his wife traveled to Mauch Chunk. He returned home suffering from a severe headache, and retired to his room. A fearful Mrs. Smith asked the store clerk, Ulrich, to stand watch in the house, armed with a pistol. When two men arrived later in the evening, purportedly with an urgent message for Smith, Ulrich and Mrs. Smith grew suspicious. One of the strangers drew a revolver and fired a shot. As Ulrich struggled with the two, a mob of about twenty-five broke into the house. They were “fixed up with big coats and their faces were blackened and false whiskers,” a witness recalled. Another described the mob as “disguised and blackened, and with disguising clothes.” The witnesses could have been describing a New Year’s fantastical parade, a Halloween strawboy procession, or a team of Whiteboy assassins. In a sense, they were describing all three.
Smith came downstairs to investigate the disturbance, and Ulrich and one of the intruders, Long John Donahue, were wounded in the ensuing melee. After the mob fled with Donahue in tow, Mrs. Smith’s sister found the coal operator shot in the head, lying in his nightshirt in a dining room thick with gun smoke and blood.25 He was the first mine official assassinated by the Molly Maguires. He would not be the last.
The day after the killing, a “reliable union man” from Audenried, which straddled the Carbon–Schuylkill County line at Banks Township, described the situation there in a letter to Charlemagne Tower: “The reign of terror is now commenced in earnest up here—yesterday a party of men came from Hazleton and notified us to stop work immediately, otherwise the breakers would be ‘pulled or burned down.’ They said ‘the war has gone on long enough and they were determined to put a stop to it.’ ” In another letter on November 7, the same correspondent reported that six English and Welsh miners had fled Honey Brook and Audenried the day before, “and more are going away today.”
In a November 7 report to military authorities, Tower passed along those tidbits and reported a conversation in Pottsville about the murder of Smith: “This is only the beginning of what we shall see here,” he recorded the brother-in-law of Francis Hughes as saying. “There will be a complete revolution through this country before we are through.”26
Tower could not have been happy to learn that several suspects in Smith’s murder had been freed from the Mauch Chunk jail by a mob of Banks Irishmen, and that just four days after the killing, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled that the federal draft was unconstitutional. (The court later reversed itself.)27
Tower termed the murder of Smith a rebellion, and recommended that “the United States flag should be raised at once on the house of Smith, and a sufficient force be quartered there, to keep it flying and overawe all the rebels.”28 In fact, the federal government and the coal establishment were soon considering measures far more extensive than the mere raising of a flag. Within days of the Smith killing, a plan was forwarded to President Lincoln to break the back of draft resistance and smash the embryonic miners’ unions through the use of overwhelming military force, thus lowering the cost of labor and the price the government paid for coal.
The plan was first laid out by Col. Charles Albright, former commander of the 34th Pennsylvania Militia, a Mauch Chunk resident with intimate ties to the coal industry. In a November 9 letter to Lincoln, he tied labor troubles to draft resistance, and said the men behind the troubles “were Irish, and call themselves ‘Buckshots.’ ” “They have caused the high price of coal more than any one thing,” Albright complained. “Many of them with the work they do make from one hundred to two hundred dollars a month.”
The solution he offered was simple, if brutal: “A military force of several thousand men should be sent to the coal regions, martial law enforced, and summary justice dealt out to these traitors. Protections should be afforded to those willing to work, and those who will not work should be sent to work on military fortifications during the continuance of the war. It will not be safe to have them about. Nothing but thorough work will answer. I understand a committee of coal men will call upon you and make a more full explanation of the whole matter.”29
The speed with which the government acted on the plan makes clear that Lincoln took it very seriously indeed. Within days of the letter’s arrival, Gen. Darius Couch, the Union Army commander for eastern Pennsylvania, was dispatched to discuss the plan with the coal operators of Carbon County. “The operators who I saw proposed this—that if they could be assured of the protection of the general government until the work was accomplished, they would discharged the bad characters and employ new men, having eventually a body of men that could be controlled,” Couch reported to Assistant Adjutant Gene. E. D. Townsend on November 13. He added that the operation would take three months, and that once begun it should not be stopped “until the work is thoroughly done, otherwise two-thirds of the anthracite region would stop sending coal to market.”30
Couch endorsed the plan, and it was implemented. A few days later, on November 16, Rauch, the deputy provost marshal for Carbon County, gave his superior, Yohe, an overview of the situation:
An organization exists throughout the Middle Coal Field, of Irishmen, known as “Buckshots,” for the avowed purpose of resisting the draft. This organization is formidable at Old Beaver Meadow Mines, Colerain, Jeanesville, Yorktown, Audenried, Frenchtown and the vicinity of Hazleton in Luzerne County. It was not possible to obtain any information from the Irish at either of these places, and we are indebted to Englishmen, Welshmen, Protestant Irish and leading citizens of American birth for the necessary information to enable us to find the drafted men. Mr. G. K. Smith, being SUSPECTED of giving me certain information as to the domicile of drafted men was murdered in the most brutal murder, in his home and in presence of his family.
The “Buckshots” are all armed, and frequently meet in secret places, two or three times weekly. At Jeanesville we searched a number of houses for arms and about 15 pieces—guns of different kinds—were found and taken to Hazleton by Capt. Hopper (I believe it is his name), the senior military officer present.
The 10th Regt. of New Jersey Infantry is now in the region, and judiciously distributed at Hazleton, Jeanesville, Treskow, Audenried, Beaver Meadow and Mauch Chunk—numbering about 500 men, exclusive of about 50 cavalry. The leading coal operators declare their determination to expel from their mines all “Buckshots” and other bad characters, which they can only do if protected by the military. The character of the “Buckshots” is not to resist officers and soldiers, but only to assassinate well disposed citizens. They are too cowardly to show fair fight. They number, in the whole region, several thousand, but they are only so many assassins.
About 45 “Buckshots” have been arrested in the vicinity of Yorktown and they are now in charge of Maj. Genl. Sigel at Reading. They expect to make more arrests of notorious characters, and expel all evil disposed men from the region.31
Soon, up to seventy civilians were under military arrest for resisting the draft and disloyalty—mostly Irishmen, but some Germans and native-born Americans, confined in the dank recesses of Fort Mifflin, where they were kept in the dark on any number of levels. John Donlin, an arrested miner, recalled, “I was held four months without any official knowledge of the cause of my arrest, nor did I know why I was held, until I was carried into the courtroom for trial.”32
The prisoners included respected community leaders like Peter Dillon and gunmaker Conrad Horn, and poor miners like John Chapman, who had twenty-five cents on him when he was arrested at Yorktown on November 9. Many, but not all, of the detained Irishmen were from Donegal—Donlin, for example, had emigrated from Longford in 1853.
Wherever they were from in Ireland, those arrested in Carbon County could claim protection as British subjects if they had not been naturalized—an issue that went straight to the heart of the disloyalty charge. Donlin, for one, wrote to the British ambassador that he was “entirely innocent,” adding, “I never became a citizen of the U.S. and never voted at any election held within the U.S.”33
It did Donlin little good. When another Irishmen arrested for disloyalty, Michael O’Donnell, made a similar appeal, Gen. Couch cut to the real issue—the government’s need for cheap coal to fuel the navy ships blockading the Confederacy. “If O’Donnell obtains his release, 44 others will ask for the same, no doubt,” Couch wrote his superiors in Washington. “The interests of the country will not permit these men to go back to the mines at present. Life is safe there now: The operators are controlling their mines instead of a gang of cowardly ruffians, traitors, and murderers; coal is being produced more surely and as stated to me more plentifully, the price of which will probably steadily decrease until it reaches the proper point.”34
On the scales of military justice, the balance between national security and civil liberties would prove lopsided indeed. With habeas corpus suspended, the military could hold anyone it wanted, even if it had no legal basis to do so. “One thing is clear,” Couch wrote to Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel, his subordinate in Reading: “That those men who have been arrested against whom no charges can be preferred should not at present be set at liberty.” The problem, Couch pointed out, was that “the U.S. could not try men for offenses that are exclusively state ones”—such as the killing of Smith.35 Another was more delicate—there was not an ounce of proof that the vast majority of those caught in the government’s dragnet had committed any crime at all.
But that did little to deter the War Department, after due consideration, from proceeding with its pacification plan. For Secretary of War Stanton and General-in-Chief H. W. Halleck were “not unmindful of the great interests at stake and . . . disposed to lend every assistance to the operators in carrying out the proposed reforms. There are plenty of troops on the ground to protect” the coal operators in “whatever is desired.” Coach suggested a meeting with the coal operators to arrive at “a uniform understanding” of the course to be adopted.36
The meeting with the Hazleton coal baron Aria Pardee and other leading mine operators went so well that military authorities saw in the Carbon County operation a blueprint for the suppression of militant miners throughout the entire anthracite region. “I recently met at Reading, Pa., a committee of the coal men of Lehigh Valley,” Couch wrote his superiors in Washington on December 10. “Everything is working excellently in that district. Some of the worst characters having been arrested by Genl. Sigel, others have fled from the region and the operators are again getting their mines under proper control. So soon as the other two anthracite districts viz. Schuylkill and Wyoming agree to certain propositions, the bad characters will be cleared out of the country, the supply of coal increased with less number of miners—and matters will probably resume the quiet of before the war.”37
Charles Albright, who had first proposed the pacification program, was designated to develop a case against the arrested men, in cooperation with their former employers. He was confident of convictions: “Without question I think there will be evidence enough to convict many of the defendants. . . . I shall continue my investigations and think that by the time the military commission is convened the cases will be ready for trial.”38
In late January, as the courts-martial of the seventy civilians drew closer, it was decided that the cases be tried in Mauch Chunk, rather than Reading, for the convenience of the coal operators. And while others agreed on the strength of the government’s case, Albright himself begged off on the actual prosecution of the case just days before the courts-martial opened on January 26.39 Soon, the army began to have some doubts.
After a military commission began trying the case, the officer in charge, Col. Henry O. Ryerson of the 10th New Jersey, wrote a damning outline of the difficulties in proving the defendants had been disloyal and had resisted the March 1863 federal conscription law (several faced additional counts of harboring deserters and helping them escape). “The judge advocate informs me, since the commencement of the trial, there are but two against whom any evidence can be brought,” wrote Ryerson. “He also informs me of the whole number now confined in Fort Mifflin that there are but three or four against whom he has any evidence, with the exception of those who are implicated in the murder of George K. Smith, whom this commission cannot try . . . From my own observations since the commencement of this investigation, I am satisfied that in the outset a great many arrests were injudiciously made.”
The glaring holes in the prosecution’s case posed an obvious problem: if the men were tried, acquitted, and freed, Ryerson wrote, it would be a triumph for opponents of the government. Allowing them to return to their houses “after a fair trial and acquittal for the want of proof against them will be very bad upon the community. . . . If sufficient evidence cannot be produced to convict them, in my judgment it will be far more injurious to the interests of the government to have them tried and acquitted, than to release them without a trial under certain conditions.” Ryerson suggested that the prisoners against whom there was no evidence “be released, upon condition that they take the oath of allegiance and enter a solemn pledge to conduct themselves hereafter as good and loyal citizens.”40
And, indeed, charges against most of the men were subsequently dropped. What is interesting, in light of Ryerson’s statement that there was evidence against only two, is that his military commission nonetheless managed to convict no fewer than thirteen defendants. The legal machinations required for that feat are best illustrated by the trial of Peter Dillon.
Though the bulk of the prosecution’s case was based on his actions during the antidraft meeting in the fall of 1862, Dillon stood accused of violating a law enacted six months after that meeting. He denied any involvement in a “combination” against the draft, and the defense moved that all references to his actions before March 1863 be stricken, confident that Dillon could not be convicted for his brief attendance at the meeting in June 1863.
That confidence proved misplaced. In denying the defense motion and convicting Dillon, the judge advocate admitted the holes in the prosecution’s case. It is rare in such cases, he said, to find “direct and positive evidence of a criminal combination.” “The prisoner is clearly proved to have been present at the meeting held in June 1863, the object of which was to resist the draft. The evidence shows that the prisoner was engaged as president of the meeting held in the fall of 1862.”41
One can only wonder what was most damning—Dillon’s leadership of the fall meeting, his ambiguous role in a series of beatings a year later (he was acquitted on those charges), or the testimony of J. G. Lewis Degenhardt, superintendent of the German Pennsylvania Coal Company in Treskow. “I have always been under the impression that Peter Dillon had great influence among his countrymen,” Degenhardt told the military commission. “Of late the opinion has been forced on me . . . that he has used his influence in a dangerous way . . . Whenever strikes for higher wages were made, I found Peter Dillon to be prominent among the leaders; afterwards he would usually come to us and try to effect a compromise.”42
In other words, he was a community leader who was not afraid to confront the coal operators. And it seems he was a Hibernian, if one can believe the first sentence of the first specification of the first charge against him: “That the said Peter Dillon, did, on or about the first day of August, 1863, unite, confederate and combine with Edward Winters and many other disloyal persons, whose names are unknown, and form or unite with a society or organization commonly known and called by the name of Buck Shots.”43
Dillon, a widowed father of three, one of them not yet a year old, was sentenced to five years of hard labor. “The interests of the country” would not permit him to go free. He was joined by Donlin and eleven other defendants, six of them Irishmen, all convicted of disloyalty to the United States and resisting the draft. (O’Donnell was apparently among those released after signing a pledge of loyalty.)
Any hope that the sentences would deter further outbreaks was dashed before spring could fade into summer, as the federal draft of 1864 commenced. “The miners in the vicinity of Hazleton, Luzerne Co. have been rather rebellious,” an army captain in Pottsville reported. “But the cavalry under command of Lt. D. I. Pislee have succeeded in keeping them straight.”44
Given the cavalry’s performance in Jeansville eight months earlier, one can well imagine what “keeping them straight” meant. And indeed, as there had been after Jeansville, there were consequences to the cavalry’s dragooning of the countryside. “The detachment of cavalry in Carbon County while out serving notice on the drafted men were fired upon by about 18 bushwhackers, but no one hurt,” Capt. Hullinger reported from Pottsville a month later. “It was in the mountains and the party could not be arrested.”
The populace, he said, was “in great dread of the coming draft,” but that hadn’t stopped labor unrest. “All the railroads and coal mines have been stopped from operations by the miners and the railroad men. Since the first of this month they have struck for higher wages. They will not allow the mines to be worked nor the railroads to be used. There has not been a pound of coal shipped from this region since the first of the month. As a general thing they are very civil but very determined to have the advance in wages.”45 And so, as Dillon and his compatriots were consigned to the dismal recesses of a Philadelphia prison filled with Confederate POWs, nothing was resolved in Carbon County, where miners fought a civil war of their own, in the mountains and in the mines.
Thanks to the letters of some other Pennsylvanians who were imprisoned on similarly trumped-up charges of draft resistance in September 1864, we have a picture of the treatment of the civilian detainees in the dank “bomb-proofs” that served as cells at Fort Mifflin. “Our treatment was inhuman,” wrote James McHenry. “When first taken and incarcerated in this cell, not a stool or bench to rest our weary limbs . . . Forty-four of us in one cell, without even a separate place to attend the calls of nature, its is no wonder that one of our number was soon laid in his resting place, and many others prostrated by disease.”46
McHenry and the others were accused of taking part in the “Fishingcreek Confederacy” in Columbia County, a Democratic bastion where an assistant provost marshal, J. Stewart Robinson, was killed in the course of hunting for draft dodgers on August 1, 1864. After the killing, incredible rumors circulated that hundreds of draft resisters had holed up in a fort in the Fishingcreek Valley that was supposed to include four cannon. At the height of the Civil War, one thousand Union troops were dispatched to dragoon the area, arresting one hundred local residents in the process. Their commander, Gen. George Cadwalader, soon determined that he was engaged in a wild goose chase, but in an echo of the Carbon County case, forty-four of the detainees went before a military commission so the authorities could save face.47
The Columbia County case had another important element in common with the Carbon County prosecutions—it was the brainchild of Charles Albright. Months after it became clear that the Fishingcreek Confederacy was a fabrication, Albright was crowing to fellow Republicans about his role in the case, claiming that “he not only broke up the organization and secured the arrest and commitment to Fort Mifflin of about 40 of the ringleaders, among them two prominent officers of the County, but he convinced the disaffected that they had better take prompt measure to respond to the demands of the Government.”48
Most of the thirteen defendants convicted by the Mauch Chunk military court remained in custody until just a few months before the end of the war. Among the first to be pardoned was Donlin, whose wife, according to family lore, made a personal plea to Lincoln after a remarkable trek to Washington on foot. With warring armies on either side of her, she carried their newborn baby in an old shawl, sleeping in hayricks at night. Margaret Donlin camped out in front of the White House one morning after exhausting her pleas elsewhere and all her money on food, the story goes. At 7:00 A.M., after two days without food, she encountered the gaunt president as he stepped from the executive mansion. When she told the man before her that he looked a lot like pictures she had seen of the president, he replied, “I am Mr. Lincoln.” After she related her sorrowful tale, Lincoln invited her into the White House and had breakfast with her, then gave her money for a train ride home and promised to see her husband released, according to the story.
There is nothing in War Department documents about Margaret Donlin’s remarkable odyssey, but it is a matter of record that Lincoln personally ordered her husband’s release, well before all the others, in Pardon 12, Special Order No. 313, dated December 30, 1864. Decades later, at her ranch on the plains of Nebraska, Margaret Donlin kept a portrait of Lincoln and told any who would listen, “He was the greatest man who ever lived, and the kindest.”49 The story offers an anthracite twist on the old Irish tradition of the aggrieved camping at the doorstep of the king, going without food until a wrong had been righted.
It would take a little longer for the other wrongs to be righted: it was not until February 24, 1865, that Peter Dillon rejoined his young children, and the other men convicted in the tribunals walked out of Fort Mifflin—a damned hard hole if ever there was one.50