Well, we’ve been beaten, beaten all to smash,
And now sir, we’ve begun to feel the lash,
As wielded by a gigantic corporation
Which runs the commonwealth and ruins the nation.
—“After the Long Strike”
Oddly enough, the destruction of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s in no small part resulted from the reluctance of a West Branch Irishman to avenge the killing of a Hibernian. At the beginning of the decade, the victim, Edward Cosgrove, twenty-four, was laboring in a Reilly Township mine and living with a relative, Henry Cosgrove, an Irish-born miner with eight children of his own. Edward eventually struck out on his own, moving over Broad Mountain to Shenandoah, where he joined the local AOH lodge. On August 11, 1873, he was gunned down by a Welsh tough, Gomer James, who was arrested, tried for murder, and acquitted.
Escaping judicial punishment for violence against an Irishman could be very dangerous in Schuylkill County, as evidenced by the fate of another Welshman, John Reese, in 1846. Sure enough, there was soon talk among the Mollies about killing James in retaliation, and the task of organizing the job fell to the Shenandoah bodymaster, Michael Lawler, late of Glen Carbon.
But Lawler dawdled. When called to account for the delays, he complained that “it was not his fault that James was not killed, as Cosgrove’s own cousin backed out, when he was the man appointed to do the deed, and of course after Cosgrove’s cousin backed out all the others would not do it.” Lawler’s inaction led to his removal as bodymaster, triggering a chain of events that allowed a detective to deeply penetrate and destroy the entire neo-Ribbon movement in the anthracite region.1 But the groundwork for the Mollies’ decline had been laid by two related developments that made the organization increasingly irrelevant. The first was the rise of a modern labor movement. The second was the culture clash that labor movement triggered on the West Branch, which led many there, like the Cosgroves of Reilly Township, to turn their back on the old ways of the Molly Maguires.
The first industry-wide union of anthracite miners was formed largely because business interests overplayed their strong hand in Harrisburg. The Pennsylvania legislature, especially the Senate, had largely been in the deep pockets of the anthracite corporations since 1833, when senators who investigated the rivalry between individual entrepreneurs and big companies opted against legislating limits on the latter. By 1848, that control was being contested to some degree by Schuylkill Hibernians, whose political activity had, in the words of one admirer, prevented workers from having “their honest earnings filched from them by corporate aristocracies . . . whose armies besiege our Legislature and monopolize legislation.”2
Two decades later, the fight for control of the statehouse was still going on, and the Hibernians were still deeply involved in politics, as the Rea killing made clear. Pat Hester, who was among those first charged in the case, was a supervisor and tax collector in Mount Carmel Township, which put him in a position to hire miners for road repair work. Kelly the Bum, who eventually turned state’s evidence in the case, testified that he had canvassed for Hester on behalf of a state legislature candidate. Kelly said he was well taken care of with food, drink, and a little money when he “traveled around, from here to there, to help elect one of these Mollies.”
Michael Graham, a Hibernian who lived near Mount Carmel and was charged as an accessory after the fact in the Rea case—he had bought Hibernian leader Peter McHugh’s gun for fifteen dollars—was, like Hester, a former township tax collector and supervisor. He was taken into custody on election day 1868 at the polling place for Mount Carmel, which just happened to be his home and bar.3 That same year, Pat Dormer was elected a Schuylkill County supervisor.
But for all their activity on the local level, the Hibernians hadn’t crimped the coal companies’ control of the legislature. Indeed, in 1866, the same year that the legislature approved creation of the Coal and Iron Police, the Senate killed two important mine-safety bills that had been approved by the House because the rate of accidental deaths was soaring in the mines. One would have required the governor to appoint four anthracite mine inspectors—two for Schuylkill County and two for Luzerne County. The other would have required mine operators to enclose with fences any entrances to the pits or air holes into which a pedestrian might stumble.4
In 1867, the industry finally went too far. That year, over the objections of mine operators, the legislature approved an eight-hour day, but business lobbyists succeeded in adding a clause that the law did not apply to contract workers, effectively leaving the issue to the discretion of employers. Some mine operators insisted that their hours and wages would remain unchanged, and that any workers remaining on the job after July 1, 1868, when the law was to take effect, would be assumed to have agreed to this “contract.” Other mine officials insisted that a pay cut would accompany an eight-hour day.5
In the Mahanoy Valley, over Broad Mountain from the West Branch, the coal companies chose the latter course. Their concerted action was made possible by the formation the year before of a trade association, which was said to maintain a blacklist that prevented miners from going to work for new employers unless they had the consent of their old ones.6 That form of serfdom was bad enough, but in late June, Mahanoy Valley mine workers learned that their employers were planning to cut their pay as a result of the shorter day. They angrily stomped out of the pits, and labor unrest spread throughout the county as they engaged in the familiar tactic of marching from colliery to colliery. But in July came something new—a meeting in Mahanoy City attended by twelve to twenty thousand miners that ended in calls for a countywide union. The nucleus of the new union was the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association of St. Clair, a town north of Pottsville, where John Siney had led a successful strike the year before.7
Siney was an Irish immigrant born in 1831 in Queen’s County, just as the Whitefeet were raising hell with landlords and mine owners. His father was a potato grower active in land agitation who was said to have harbored “patriots who lost favor with the English-controlled constabulary.” When John Siney was just five years old, the family was evicted and moved to the English mining center of Wigan.8
There, the younger Siney underwent the transformation from peasant child to industrial worker. He became involved in the labor movement, organizing a local brick makers union and serving as its leader for seven years. He emigrated to the United States in 1863, a year after his wife’s death, and found work in a mine at St. Clair.9 Speaking with Siney at the July mass meeting in Mahanoy City was John Welsh of Forestville, who came from a similar background. He was born in the Ulster border county of Down in 1839, and his family fled the famine for England, where he worked in the coal mines. Welsh, a Civil War veteran, was to have a profound influence on the labor movement in the anthracite region—and by extension on the emergence of a new working-class culture in Cass Township that coincided with the decline of the Molly Maguires there.
Siney, Welsh, and several other Irish and British miners formed the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, a countywide organization to “gather the workmen into a fraternal and beneficial association, remove the bitterness existing among them, break up the class prejudices that were a fruitful source of many of their sufferings, and to educate them to a higher plane of moral and intellectual life.”10
The leadership’s first job was to lend the union a degree of respectability. A band of striking miners had marched from Locust Gap and Mount Carmel to the Mahanoy Valley and then the West Branch before heading off to the northern coal field in Luzerne County to enlist support for the eight-hour strike there. Rumors were filtering back that the marchers were exacting “donations” of food and drink at stores, bars, and farms along the way. Such behavior was typical of mummers and Molly Maguires in the Old Country, and it is hard to believe that the West Branch labor committees of the Civil War–era would have had a problem with it. But the leadership of the new union was determined to do away with the old ways and address their grievances in a manner befitting industrial workers, not peasants. While coal executives fumed that “the eight-hour raiders” were the “scum of the Molly Maguires,” the union leaders created a fund to make good the losses of farmers, innkeepers, and merchants.11
The union’s achievements in the 1868 strike were limited—in September, Schuylkill County miners won higher pay, but not a shorter day. Though its success with the coal operators was less than complete, the new approach that the union represented brought miners to its banner in droves. On March 17, 1869, in a meeting in Hazleton, the Schuylkill County Workingmen’s Benevolent Association was expanded to include representatives from all six counties of the anthracite region.12 An industry-wide union was born that St. Patrick’s Day, and its president was John Siney.
Two months later, the Pennsylvania state legislature legalized labor unions. (It would be another three years before they won the right to strike, ending the threat of conspiracy charges, so long as they didn’t interfere with those who continued working.)13 Growing worker solidarity and political clout were quickly matched by a consolidation of corporate power. Following the lead of the Mahanoy Valley mine operators, coal companies in four other parts of Schuylkill County had formed trade associations in 1868, and on November 19, 1869, those associations came together in the Anthracite Board of the Trade of the Schuylkill Coal Region.14
The first test of strength came in the state legislature, where the union successfully pressed for passage of a mine-safety bill that required state inspections of collieries. The measure, signed into law on April 12, 1869, was the first such law in the country, but the union’s victory was less than complete—the measure applied only to Schuylkill County. In the Senate, which had killed a similar bill just three years before, union-supported attempts to broaden the legislation to cover all coal mines had been killed by Samuel G. Turner, a coal dealer from Luzerne County. He hadn’t even bothered to read the legislation but felt comfortable talking about why it wasn’t needed in Luzerne. “I can now remember but one instance where firedamp explosions resulted in injury to miners in the county,” said Turner, referring to combustible mine gases.15
Less than five months later, he had reason to regret those words. On September 5, the greatest mine disaster in American history until then killed more than one hundred workers in the Steuben shaft of the Nanticoke Coal Company in Avondale, Luzerne County. A coroner’s jury found that sparks from a furnace at the bottom of the shaft had set fire to wooden brattices above it, but that didn’t stop mine officials from spreading the word that Irish arsonists were to blame—the mine had just reopened after a strike.
Siney appeared on the scene and made a speech that seared the souls of many who heard it, including a young Irish American named Terence Vincent Powderly. “You can do nothing to win these dead back to life,” Siney told the crowd. “But you can help me to win fair treatment and justice for living men who risk life and health in their daily toil.”
Powderly went on to lead the Knights of Labor, but he never forgot the charred bodies of the miners being pulled from the pits, the mother he saw kneeling in silent grief over the body of her boy, or Siney, “standing on the desolate hillside at Avondale,” daring to talk about justice in the realm of King Coal. “When I listened to John Siney, I could see Christ in his face and hear a new Sermon on the Mount,” Powderly recalled. “I thereby resolved to do my part, humble though it might be, to improve the condition of those who worked for a living.”16
Powderly was not the only overnight convert. Sen. Turner suddenly saw the light and championed a mine-safety law, but his political career was as dead as the men of Avondale. The miners turned their back on him in the next election, and Turner, a Democrat, lost. In the postwar era, he was only one of several Democrats who were more than willing to do the bidding of the coal companies.
In the spring of 1869, while Turner was blocking mine-safety measures, the Reading Railroad appointed as its acting president Gowen, the Democratic former Schuylkill County district attorney who signed on with the New York and Schuylkill after the war. Gowen, who never managed to prosecute the killers of James Bergen but did have Bergen’s widow hauled into court for running a shebeen, always had a keen understanding of where power lay, and how to cozy up to it. In 1863, it lay with those Cass Township Democrats who had helped elect him, the Molly Maguires. In 1869, it lay with the coal companies.
Gowen quickly moved to exponentially increase the railroad’s power by entering the mining business on a sweeping scale, transforming the Reading from a shipper of coal into the main producer of it in the Schuylkill field. With Gowen’s assumption of power, the principals were all in place for a climactic power struggle between Siney, Welsh, and the union on the one hand, and Gowen and the Anthracite Board of Trade on the other.
To understand how that struggle played out on the West Branch, it is important to turn to another, smaller clash, one between the culture in which the Mollies were rooted—old, Gaelic, and peasant—and an emerging working-class ethos profoundly influenced by the rise of Workingmen’s Benevolent Association.
In a sense, the culture clash between those trying to recreate the Irish peasant way of life and those trying to assimilate had always played out in Cass Township. That conflict provided the context for the slaying of James Bergen, whose repeated enlistments in the military betrayed an unmistakable urge to assimilate.
The difference, after 1867, was that those who wanted to leave behind the old ways gained the upper hand. A curious calm descended on the West Branch that year as the echoing footfalls of Littlehale’s fleeing killers faded into the hills around Glen Carbon. He was at the end of a long line of men to be killed there by a small band of Irish gunmen, in the classic Whiteboy style.
To understand why the West Branch assassinations ended—and why the Cosgrove family wanted no part of any new ones—consider an anecdote about Reilly Township, where they lived, that was related in 1957 by Harry Murphy, an eighty-year-old former official of the United Mine Workers. It concerns a young man who turned his back on the Mollies and the Gaelic culture of which they were part and parcel: “Me father told me about this. He went to a dance one night near Branchdale. Women and men in working clothes were dancing to Irish tunes played by an old Irish fiddler. The other dancers were talking Irish, which me father couldn’t understand. The fiddler was a friend of me father’s and he called him outside and said, ‘They’re all Mollies having this dance,’ and the two of ’em, my father and the fiddler, they dusted out of the place.”17
All over the West Branch, young men were turning their back on the Molly Maguires and the peasant mind-set and lifestyle that produced them. In part this was because many Mollies had turned their back on the West Branch, fleeing wartime military occupation, relentless postwar purges of union militants, and unemployment. Their departure and the subsequent arrival of the WBA opened new cultural horizons for young second-generation Irish Americans, whose perspectives were no longer limited by the dark, lowering clouds of Irish history. Their language was English, not Irish. Their music was the regimen of a band, not a freewheeling fiddle. Their hero was not a mythical Irishwoman, but a very real neighbor, John Welsh, a Civil War veteran who had taken a leading role in the union, which saw as one of its prime responsibilities the elevation of the miners’ intellectual life.
One of the best examples of the new outlook was the Forestville Literary Society, which rose—and fell—with the union. Founded around 1870 for “the promotion of all classes of the community,” the society instituted a constitution “based upon the parliamentary laws observed and adopted by the W.B.A. of Schuylkill County.” Like the union, the group encompassed young men of all nationalities, but second-generation Irish Americans were in the majority. If members like James Lynch and Terrance O’Connor were typical, their parents had supported the government during the war.
Lynch’s father, William, a mine worker who had emigrated from Cavan before the famine, had contributed to a fund for the relief of sick and wounded soldiers. He had a son, Edward, in the service. Like Welsh, O’Connor’s father, James, was a famine immigrant from Ulster and a war veteran. He had served in a militia unit, the Schuylkill Guards of Minersville, for three months after the opening of hostilities.18
Before it collapsed in 1876, after the union was crushed, the literary society embodied all the lofty ideals of the WBA, featuring readings, poetry, dialogues, and debate. Many members were mine laborers who had observed the labor tumult of the Civil War from their perches in the towering coal breakers, where boys as young as ten separated anthracite from slag. The labor orientation of the literary society is clear in such debates as “Resolved: That suspension [a strike] is a benefit.” That topic speaks volumes about conditions in the mines, but another shows that these young men had their sights on horizons more distant than the next coal breast: “Resolved: That the professions offer a better opening to a young man than mercantile or mechanical pursuits.”
The literary society was part of a larger working-class cultural renaissance—a Forestville music group was formed about the same time, by members of some of the same families, including Jim Lynch and Terrance O’Connor’s brother James.19 With band practices and formal rules of debate, the young mine workers were imposing on themselves a degree of regimentation that mimicked the discipline of the union, and was utterly at odds with the informal gatherings and barroom debates that had long been the rule on the West Branch. The war itself must have played an important role in this new discipline—Welsh was by no means the only Cass resident who had spent time in the Union Army, internalizing the values of teamwork.
A remarkable degree of energy, optimism, and organization was required for the new cultural pursuits, and the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association deserves much of the credit—a state report from the early 1870s found that the union gave “direction in the right way to the superabundant vigor and vivacity of youth.”20 It is not hard to picture the young men of South Cass, after a day of backbreaking labor, heading down the road for the Forestville School House, lines of verse or logic or music running through their heads, as Mine Hill towered above, a deeper black against the night sky. At the door to the tavern at the crossroads, the hard men doubtless pointed and laughed over their porter, and perhaps did worse as the young debaters and musicians passed. They could laugh all they wanted, but their day was all but done, at least on the West Branch.
When a Pinkerton spy visited Glen Carbon in October 1873, an informant told him that he “had not heard anything of the Molly Maguires for some time, he believed that most of the members had left.” To be sure, some Hibernians stayed, clinging to the old ways even as they adjusted to the new. Luke Mohan’s son, Thomas, was active in both the AOH and the labor movement, running for secretary of the county miners’ union in 1874.21 But he was never implicated in any crime, demonstrating that a Hibernian and union man did not necessarily a Molly make.
In a history of the Mollies published a scant few years after the last were hanged, Dunne’s companion the night before his murder, Francis Dewees, offered a twofold explanation—motive and opportunity—for the shift in the organization’s locus from the southern anthracite field to the middle one. The opportunity was simple—the war stimulated demand for coal, which led to the development of the middle coal fields when the Mine Hill and Schuylkill Railroad was extended from the West Branch over Broad Mountain to the Mahanoy Valley.22 The motive Dewees cited was a bit more complex—a feud within the Irish community, between natives of County Kilkenny and some other counties in Ireland. According to Dewees, the Kilkenny men were once well represented in the Mollies of Cass Township but region-wide found themselves in the minority overall, and eventually left or were forced out, forming a rival group called the Sheet Irons or the Chain Gang. “In the course of time the Kilkenny men became the most powerful in that section of the county,” he wrote of the West Branch. “And the great majority of the ‘Mollies’ in Cass and adjoining townships, finding that retaliation followed very quickly any outrage upon a Kilkenny man, beat a retreat and settled in force over the Broad Mountain and in the Mahanoy Valley.”23
Dewees’s thesis has a few points in its favor. The lists of West Branch union activists whom the coal operators wanted arrested in the Civil War were indeed rife with names straight out of County Kilkenny, like Brennan. The Mollies did fade south of the mountain. And there was a conflict between Mollies and Kilkenny natives in the Mahanoy Valley during the 1870s. But there is little or no evidence that the Mollies were driven en masse from the West Branch in the 1860s by a more powerful group of Irish thugs. There is, on the contrary, ample documentation of the flight of many union activists and draft opponents from the West Branch amid military occupation, postwar purges by employers, and mine shutdowns—factors that Dewees ignores.
His explanation becomes plausible if that flight is taken into account, if we assume “Kilkennymen” was a something of synonym for “experienced mine workers,” and if the simple geographic feud he cites is subsumed into a larger cultural clash. Because Kilkenny had a long history of anthracite mining, immigrants from there had more experience and rose more quickly in the workforce. They assimilated faster than did immigrants from other Irish counties. The forced flight of many of the most hard-core Mollies during and after the war may have tipped the scales in Cass Township in favor of the more experienced, more assimilated miners, encouraging others members of the order to join their brethren over the mountain.
The shift was clear in “What Makes Us Strike?” a Schuylkill County ballad from the 1870s that is structured as a conversation between a miner and an inquisitive visitor to the county:
“How far to Pottsville?” Stranger, did you say?
I guess it’s ’bout a dozen miles away,
Straight out in that direction—o’er the hill.
“Do any Mollies lie in wait to kill?”
Oh, no, You’re south of the mountain,
And murdering Mollies, sir, you needn’t count on.
You see we’re civilized on this side,
And do not deadly weapons hide
No Mollies lie in wait to kill, “because you’re south of the mountain”—Broad Mountain—and “we’re civilized on this side.” The ballad goes on to explore the causes of labor unrest in the coal region—“the work is hard, we oft get hurt, and sometimes lost, pard.” Reading Railroad President Franklin Gowen is damned as “the great conspirer against our price, our liberties, our rights, and the instigator of one-half our fights.” Significantly, the miner turns down the offer of a drink—“Some miners like their whiskey, but I don’t. / In fact, to tell the truth, I can’t afford it.” The entire composition is designed to portray the miners of the southern anthracite field as sober, hardworking, and independent, to counter the notion that they were “lazy, bloody, reckless men” who emerged from the pits only “to burn a breaker, kill a boss, or fight.” It ends with a rather plaintive plea: “And mind, tell them we’re like other men.”24
Another ballad, “The Phoenix Park Colliery,” sheds some light on the transformation of the workforce at the mine where armed Irishmen were first heard to use the term “Molly Maguire,” in December 1862. The lyrics are undated, but were certainly written after 1870:
For three hard months I worked there
And divil a cent I drew;
I walked right into Minersville
And swore Bill Brown I’d sue.25
Any West Branch Irishman who preferred lawsuits to coffin notices was one who had made the transformation from shovel-wielding peasant to American industrial worker. Indeed, an October 12, 1879, retrospective in the New York Times, after the last of the Mollies was hanged, described the early members of the order as “peasant-miners” among whom “local prejudices, customs and modes of thought and action survived the passage across the ocean.” The Mollies, the Times said, “transferred to the American coal operators their old hostility to the Irish landlords, and the conflicts which everywhere seem inevitable between employer and employed were thus additionally embittered by much of the hatred of the Celts for their Saxon conquerors, by Roman Catholics for a Protestant ruling class, and by tenants on precarious leases for their landlords, who, they firmly believe, have robbed them of their birthrights.” But by the 1870s, the heavily Irish workforce of the West Branch, which had been in the United States for decades, was on their way to becoming much like “other men” in that they relied on an industrial union, rather than neo-Ribbonism, to advance their economic interests.
That is not to say the new generation of Irish mine workers were the sober, docile workers Bannan had always wanted. “The Phoenix Park Colliery” contained lines like “remember boys, when payday comes / You’ll all know how to fight.” And when an officer of the Forestville band, William J. Dormer, chiseled his name deep into a rock near the West-West Falls, he and his butties made sure to carve images of beer kegs and bottles beside it. The Workingmen’s Benevolent Association could not prevent drunken payday brawls, but it did offer a way to redress grievances that fell short of killing the mine superintendent or burning the company store.
The decline in Molly Maguire violence in the West Branch after 1867 cannot be understood outside the context of the new miners’ union. The speed with which the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association spread throughout the anthracite region bespeaks a growing maturity and class consciousness on the part of the region’s mine workers. Molly Maguire violence was a toxic by-product of the long and painful process by which Irish peasants transformed themselves into American industrial workers, and that transition was more advanced in the West Branch than it was anywhere else. Irish mine workers there had moved from the disorganized strike of 1842 to the short-lived Bates union of 1849 to the Ribbon-influenced local labor committees of the Civil War to the modern type of labor union that the WBA constituted in 1868–69.
As the workforce matured and assimilated, Gaelic declined in Cass Township, the inevitable result of death, the shrinking use of Gaelic in Ireland after the famine, and the fact that newer immigrants from Gaelic-speaking areas of Ireland like West Donegal were settling elsewhere—in the booming middle coal fields, or at the eastern end of the lower coal fields, around Coaldale in Schuylkill County and Summit Hill in Carbon County.
For example, Peter McHugh, a Gaelic speaker convicted in the Rea killing, came to the United States in 1864 from West Donegal and eventually settled in the middle coal fields; Daniel Kelly, another Gaelic-speaking Donegal native who arrived in 1865, spent much of his time wandering the middle coal fields. And two men convicted for Molly Maguire killings in the mid-1870s, James Roarity and Alexander Campbell, were both born in the Irish-speaking area around Dungloe, Donegal, and arrived in the United States in 1869 and 1868, respectively, with Roarity settling in Coaldale and Campbell in Summit Hill.26
With a fresh infusion of Gaelic speakers—the oxygen that the Molly Maguires needed to survive—these areas would be the focus of secret society activity in the 1870s. Not coincidentally, the towns “north of the mountain” in the middle coal fields—Shenandoah, Girardville, Mahanoy City, and Big Mine Run—were founded much later than those of the West Branch, so the community’s experience in labor relations was as shallow as the new mine shafts.
In the West Branch collieries, which grew deeper every year, there was a corresponding depth of experience in mining and sophistication in labor relations. A quarter century of labor unrest had taught most miners of the West Branch that something more than Ribbon muscle was needed—namely, a multiethnic, centralized union powerful enough to confront the operators at the negotiating table and in the legislature. The few who clung to the Molly Maguire approach were reduced to the odd election-day beating or act of industrial sabotage. They would have quickly become totally irrelevant, and this story would have had a vastly different ending, had not one of those acts of sabotage incurred the wrath of the Reading Railroad. For the Reading brought in detectives, and Michael Lawler’s downfall allowed one of those detectives unprecedented access to the secrets of the society.
The long, sad story of the anthracite labor troubles of the 1870s has been exhaustively documented elsewhere, and it will receive only brief treatment here, for the denouement involved many individuals and incidents from the Civil War era.27 When Gowen took control of the Reading Railroad, he quickly learned that the key to profits was the uninterrupted shipment of coal. This lesson was underlined in April 1870, when the company’s railcars rattled to a halt after the Anthracite Board of Trade locked out the mine workers of the Schuylkill field to force the union to accept a pay cut. Gowen brokered a compromise, one-year agreement that was quickly accepted by the union, for the workers of the Northern Field in Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties had stayed on the job, thereby undermining the strike. Early the next year, the union won some minor gains in a new contract that was quickly ratified. It seemed, for a moment, that the industry had achieved a degree of stability, at least in the Schuylkill field.
That, of course, was an illusion. The trouble began in the Northern Field, where workers had stayed on the job for high pay during the 1870 strike, then been hit with a drastic wage cut just after Gowen’s compromise had ended the southern strike. On January 10, 1871, the northern WBA quit the pits in an attempt to win back what was lost, and they appealed to the southern miners to join them. Siney opposed the move, but was voted down by militants who saw an opportunity to at last end a debilitating regional rift and create an effective, industry-wide organization.
It very nearly worked. Within a month, many coal operators were ready to accede to the union’s demands. But they had not counted on Gowen. The railroad president, angered by what he viewed as the union’s betrayal, raised his freight rates 100 percent, making it impossible for any mine operator who had settled with the union to resume shipping. The action spurred widespread outrage, and hearings on the issue were held in March by the Pennsylvania State Senate, a body certain to give the Reading a sympathetic ear. Sure enough, Gowen was allowed to deflect questions about the rate increase and place the union on trial at the hearings, with sly insinuations that it was somehow linked to “an association which votes in secret, at night, that men’s lives shall be taken, and that they shall be shot before their wives, in cold blood.”
The strike collapsed the following month when the union accepted an offer of arbitration. Among the four labor leaders who argued the union’s position in the arbitration proceedings was Michael Lawler.28 After three strikes in three years, Gowen concluded that the railroad needed to monopolize not only the transportation of coal, but its production and distribution as well, borrowing a page from the corporations that controlled the northern anthracite fields.
To achieve a monopoly, Gowen had to overcome several obstacles. His railroad’s state charter barred it from mining operations, so the legislature would have to be finessed. The independent mine operators who still dominated the Southern Coal Field would then have to be either bought out or brought to heel. And last but by no means least, he would have to crush not only the new mine workers union, but also the Hibernian order, that longstanding locus of labor militancy among the Irish.
The legislature proved the lowest hurdle to Gowen’s ambitions. In January 1871, he sought to create a front company through a friendly lawmaker, who drew up a bill chartering the Franklin Coal Company, inserting in fine print a provision granting the Reading the right to own coal lands. An opponent in the Pennsylvania State Senate, Esaias Billingfelt, smelled a rat and grilled the sponsor about who was behind the measure. When the sponsor finally admitted that it was the Reading, the Senate struck the provision.
Gowen was undeterred. He began buying coal lands under his own name and convinced friends of the company to do the same, promising he would take the property off their hands at a 6 percent profit once he had straightened things out in the Senate. They didn’t have long to wait. Six months later, Gowen tried the front-company ploy again, seeking a charter for the Laurel Improvement Coal Company that would have given the Reading the right to own coal lands. Once more Sen. Billingfelt ferreted out the truth, and the offending provision was struck by a margin of three votes. The Senate then adjourned for lunch, and the chicanery began in earnest. When senators returned, three opponents of the Reading were mysteriously absent, and one had changed his mind. The morning’s vote was reconsidered, the provision favoring the railroad reinserted, and, this time, the Reading won.29
Outraged independents accused the company of bribery. “Whilst I believe the majority of our legislators are not proverbial for their mental acumen, I never supposed they were such a set of consummate asses as to confer extraordinary privileges, so sadly subversive to the interests of their constituents, upon corporations without compensation to themselves,” wrote one leading independent operator, Benjamin B. Thomas. In language that echoed the dire words of the Senate’s debate over coal corporations some thirty-five years before, he warned that the Reading and the Legislature were in cahoots to crush the independents and subjugate workers, “rendering the idea of representative government a scoff and a byword.” Bannan damned the underhanded way the bill was passed, and complained that “the Reading Railroad Company are now master of the situation,” though he blamed the union for this sorry situation.30
The future was now clear for the independent coal operators of the Schuylkill region. Squeezed by the union on the one hand and the Reading on the other, many sold out to the railroad, which bought more than sixty-five thousand acres of coal land in 1871. By 1874, that number had risen to more than one hundred thousand acres, and by the end of the following year, the buying spree had left the company and its Laurel Run subsidiary, now renamed the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, with a bonded debt of $75 million.31
A continuous supply of coal was now vital if the company was to pay off the debt; to guarantee that supply, the company would have to subjugate its workers. That meant smashing the two organizations that the workers relied on for succor and support—the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, as the group became known after 1870. For that job, the Reading turned to the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
It is somehow fitting that the Pinkertons, who would ring down the curtain on the Mollies in such dramatic fashion, made their entrance in Glen Carbon, near the wellspring of both the West Branch and the secret society.
In the first part of October 1873, Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the renowned detective agency, traveled to Philadelphia to meet with Gowen. According to Pinkerton’s sensational and self-serving account of the case, the Reading president told him, “The coal fields are infested by a most desperate class of men, banded together for the worst purposes—called by some, the Buckshots, by others, the Molly Maguires—and they are making sad havoc with the country. It is a secret organization, has its meeting in out-of-the-way places, and its members, I have been convinced ever since my residence in Pottsville and my connection with the criminal courts as District Attorney in the county of Schuylkill, are guilty of a majority of all of the murders and other deeds of outrage, which, for many years, have been committed in the neighborhood.”32
The trouble in Glen Carbon involved the burning of a coal breaker and the dispatch of an empty railcar down the track. When Pinkerton sent in two detectives—identified in reports only as S.M. and W.R.H.—their main concern seemed to be reports of tampering with the railroad switches and signals. One was told by a resident that most of the Mollies had moved on. Among those who remained were Jim Brennan, Jim Whitmore, and “McCluskey,” the resident said.* The Mollies were still active in politics—a coal operator, Martin Brennan, confided to S.M. that he had just been badly beaten by a Molly, Jim Burns, “because he did not vote the same as Burns.” Not everyone was so forthcoming. The detectives talked with carpenters who were building a wooden chute to help quench the fire in the slope, but “they seemed to be afraid to express any opinion as to the origin of the fire.” They queried a fireman at the nearby Taylorsville colliery about who had sent empty railcars down the track, but couldn’t get any satisfactory answers.33
Pinkerton quickly realized that another type of detective—one who would blend in a little better—was needed. The ideal candidate would be a Catholic native of the Ulster borderlands with an intimate knowledge of the region’s violent peasant secret societies. Pinkerton just happened to have such a man in his employ in Chicago—James McParlan, who was born in 1844 in the parish of Mullaghbrack, just north of Markethill in County Armagh. It was the very spot, oddly enough, where the precursors of the Protestant Peep O’Day Boys had planned their depredations against local Catholics in the barn of the “widow M’P—n” in the 1780s, leading to the formation of the Defenders.34 There does not seem to be any doubt, however, that McParlan’s family was Catholic, and in the black famine year of 1847 his parish priest fulminated about the causes of the disaster then sweeping the land. Rev. Thomas Hanley cited worldliness, inactivity, Sabbath-breaking, and neglect of church ordinances, before coming to what he considered the worst:
Murder, that most treacherous and damnable of crimes—treacherous, for the assassin walks abroad wearing the day-light robe of charity and peace—salutes you by the way—engages in conversation—watches his opportunity—plies his secret dagger—effects his deadly purpose—then flies back to his hiding place, glutted, but marked with blood—damnable, for if there is one more than another, who, should he die unrepenting and unforgiven, shall suffer the extreme of hell’s torment, and hell’s punishment, it will be the assassin, who, unprovoked, and with cool and calculating premeditation, waylays his fellow-man, and sends the innocent victim to an unmerited and untimely grave.35
McParlan, as Pinkerton quickly discovered, was every bit as appalled by secret society violence as his old parish priest, but had a far better understanding of its origins, for he recognized that the Molly Maguires were in many ways a symptom of the famine, not its cause. When Pinkerton asked him on October 8 to write a report on the origins of the Mollies in Ireland, McParlan took just two days to produce a remarkably detailed seven-page document that pointed directly to the potato blight: “Some of the people in the provinces of Ulster and Connaught resolved not to starve,” he wrote. “They immediately organized under the name of Molly McGuire.”36 He said the organization spread to England, Scotland, and the United States when it was suppressed in Ireland, and had been renamed the Ancient Order of Hibernians, though he seemed somewhat at a loss about why Pinkerton would be so interested in the topic. “I presume by the time you have got this read you will get tired as most of it or in fact all of it may not be very interesting to you,” McParlan added in a postscript to his boss.
He could not have been more wrong. Pinkerton was fascinated with the subject, and McParlan’s report convinced him that the Ulsterman was perfect for a very special assignment in the anthracite region. McParlan seems to have had one other qualification—it appears that as recently as 1870, he had been working as a Chicago barkeep, experience that would stand him in good stead in the saloons and shebeens of Schuylkill County.37 He agreed to go undercover and infiltrate the Mollies. On October 27, McParlan entered Schuylkill County under the guise of a counterfeiter named James McKenna who was on the run for a murder in Buffalo, New York.
It was an oddly quiet time in the hard coal fields. With the union taking up miners’ grievances, the Hibernians had stood down from their roles as avengers. The Mollies had not killed anyone since December 1871, when Morgan Powell, a Welsh mine boss in Summit Hill, Carbon County, had been gunned down. In Schuylkill County, there had been only one murder since Barney Dolan took over as county delegate of the AOH in 1868—that of Patrick Burns, a Tuscarora mine boss who was killed on April 15, 1870.
McParlan’s real work began in November, when he toured the west end of the county as a tramp, stopping in Swatara, a mining village on the edge of the West Branch region that had been the site of much trouble during the Civil War. Finding no signs of Molly Maguire activity, he doubled back toward Pottsville, taking refuge from a snowstorm in a Minersville tavern, and sharing a conversation with Hugh Mohan, who was the state secretary of the Emerald Beneficial Organization, a rival to the AOH.
That conversation aroused some suspicion when McParlan returned to Pottsville and stopped in the Sheridan House, a Centre Street saloon run by the former county commissioner and reputed Molly leader Pat Dormer, a gray-haired veteran of the Hibernians. McParlan impressed Dormer by dancing a jig, singing the Molly Maguire ballad, and winning a barroom brawl. But one of the hard men, Daniel Kelly, aka Kelly the Bum, had his doubts, wrote Allan Pinkerton, who recorded the following conversation in The Molly Maguires and the Detectives:
“Didn’t I see you at Minersville, not long ago, in company with Hugh Mahan?”
“Sure, and may you did! You might as well as not, at laste, fur I war wid him, at tat place, only the last month sometime!”
Kelly scanned the face of the detective sharply for a second, and then resumed:
“Do you chance to belong to the Emeralds? The benevolent society of that name is what I mane!”
“No I do not!”
“Well, I know Mahan to be a mimber, and he’s been making himself very free wid lashings of people, herebouts, within the past few weeks, inviten them to join, and I didn’t know but that you were wan.”38
With any doubts about his membership in a nonviolent Irish benevolent society laid to rest, McParlan went on to further ingratiate himself with Dormer. In January 1874, he made an even better contact, when Dormer introduced him to Lawler, the Shenandoah bodymaster, mine contractor, and former Glen Carbon resident. When the conversation turned to reports that the Reading planned to import five thousand workers to break the union, Lawler showed he could bluster with the best of them. “You must know that I am a man of learning and some sound sense and know the workings of this region,” the bodymaster boasted. “And if President Gowen undertakes to do this—in place of requiring the State Militia to protect those new men in the mines and protect his breakers, shafts and depots from the torch—he will require them all to protect his own life.”39
McParlan’s reaction must have impressed Lawler, who told the detective that if times were not so hard, he would hire him. In fact, Lawler did something much better, taking the newcomer under his wing and inducting him into Shenandoah lodge of the Ancient Order of Hibernians on April 15, 1874. With a ready supply of cash to keep his hard-drinking butties in booze, McParlan steadily rose in their esteem. (At one point early on he was introduced by a Pottsville publican as “one of the old school”—a sure sign of respect in an organization that was itself a throwback.)40
Much has been written about accusations that McParlan served as an agent provocateur during his years undercover. Regardless of what he did or did not do to prevent specific acts of bloodshed, a few points are certain. The first is that Molly assassinations had been reduced to little more than a memory at the time McParlan joined the Hibernians. The second is that within months of his induction, longtime Hibernian leaders who had kept a lid on violence were removed, a process in which the detective played at least some small part. The third is that they were replaced by men more willing to spill blood.
On April 17, two days after McParlan became a Hibernian, the Miners’ Journal dismissed as “totally without foundation” reports of a murderous secret organization of miners. “There might have at one day existed a society known as the ‘Molly Maguires,’ the object of which was revenge for fancied wrongs to any of its members,” the paper opined. “But whether it is kept up now is more than we can say.”41
A Molly Maguire ballad about McParlan recorded in the 1930s struck much the same note:
He came among these people
At a very quiet time
And bragged himself to be a plotter
In a most atrocious crime . . . 42
One factor in the decline in violence was the leadership of West Branch veterans like Barney Dolan, the county delegate, and Michael Lawler, the Shenandoah bodymaster, who did their best to rein in a rambunctious rank and file. In addition to stalling the revenge killing of Gomer James, Lawler prevented another Wildgoose Lodge when he sidetracked a plan to burn down a mine patch where two Mollies had been beaten, and then shoot its inhabitants as they fled the blaze.43 And as the New York Times put it, “Barney Dolan was a man who sought to rule rather by ‘moral suasion’ than by brute force.”44
But Lawler and Dolan were ousted soon after McParlan joined the order. Allan Pinkerton went to some pains in The Molly Maguires and the Detectives to refute the notion that McParlan acted as an agent provocateur, but a close reading of his account suggests that if nothing else, the detective was an agent of change. While he may not have deliberately provoked violence, his efforts to gain a better perch within the organization to do his spying seem to have had a domino effect that contributed to the violence.
There are perils in trying to sort out the internal politics of a secret society well over a century after the fact, but Pinkerton’s account suggests that the key to the situation lay in McParlan’s friendship with Frank McAndrew, an illiterate native of County Mayo who wanted to succeed Lawler as Shenandoah bodymaster. Lawler at first appeared reluctant to induct McParlan into the Hibernians, fearing another vote for his rival. But then McParlan promised to help Lawler get an even better position—county delegate. When the detective promised “to do his utmost to put Lawler in Dolan’s position,” the former chuckled with satisfaction and promised to make McParlan a member at the very next meeting.45
McParlan was as good as his word. When, in July, Dolan had Lawler ousted for refusing to avenge the Cosgrove killing, McParlan helped McAndrew become bodymaster. All this turbulence proved highly advantageous to McParlan. Because McAndrew could not read or write, the detective was appointed secretary of the lodge at a July 15 meeting, a move that gave him cover to gather information, write it down, and move around.
When the secretary of the Pennsylvania AOH visited the bar of Tom Fisher, the Carbon County Hibernian leader, McParlan put in a bad word about Dolan. McParlan agreed with others that Dolan should be banned from the organization for life for cursing a bishop. Dolan was indeed expelled, on August 31, and in a telling passage, Pinkerton notes that while Dolan was stunned by the decision, it came as no surprise to the detective. But Lawler’s hopes to replace Dolan had been dashed, and Jack Kehoe, the Girardville bodymaster, was named county leader in his stead.46
Dolan’s departure ended one of the quietest periods of the Molly era. During his six-year tenure as leader of the Schuylkill Hibernians, there had been just one murder, and that far from his headquarters in Big Mine Run. It is true that he had Lawler removed as Shenandoah bodymaster for not avenging the Cosgrove killing, but that may have simply been a convenient excuse to get rid of an inconvenient rival. The New York Times noted, years later, that “during his term of office the county had a season of comparative immunity from the startling crimes which mark its history before and since.”47 Indeed, while Dolan was a union committeeman in Forestville during the Civil War, there were no murders there, either. To be sure, a company store was burned and a guard beaten, but the New York and Schuylkill mine bosses in Forestville escaped the fate of their counterparts in Branchdale and Heckscherville.
At least one contemporary Schuylkill County observer believed the violence that marked Kehoe’s reign was part of a strategy by the new county delegate to a establish a contrast with his predecessor. “Kehoe, acting on the assumption that Dolan had been cowardly and weak in his direction of the order, endeavored to contrast with such former policy his own boldness and daring,” Francis Dewees wrote in 1877, while Kehoe was still alive.48
McParlan made note of all the changes in the AOH, sending regular reports to Pinkerton, who forwarded summaries to Gowen. And the Ulsterman wasn’t the only Pinkerton spy in the anthracite region. There were several others—P. M. Cummings, William McCowan, and one identified only as R.J.L.—monitoring the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association. While the violence of the Mollies was at this point little more than barroom bluster, there was plenty of activity to report on the labor front.
In October 1873, as Pinkerton was dispatching spies into the anthracite field, Siney, the head of the anthracite mine workers’ union, was organizing a national convention of mine workers in Youngstown, Ohio. A nationwide miners’ union was born at the convention, with Siney as its president. He promptly resigned as leader of Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, in a move that helped spark acrimony between the new organization, the Miners’ National Association, and the WBA, which was often referred to as the state union. (Many of the old combatants were moving on—Benjamin Bannan sold the Miners’ Journal to his old acolyte, Robert H. Ramsey, that same year.)49
In April 1874, John Welsh of Forestville was elected president of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association. The Miners’ Journal praised his “clear, discerning judgment”—an astonishing turnaround from the days when Bannan had suggested that Cass Township needed to be cleansed of Irish Catholic union members.50 Welsh would need all the judgment he could muster. As 1874 drew to a close, a titanic battle loomed between coal operators insisting on a deep wage cut and a union determined to protect its gains. There was no bargaining this time—the companies, which had been stockpiling coal, simply announced a wage cut of 10 to 20 percent. The union’s position was weakened when the mine workers of the Northern Field accepted the pay cut. On January 5, his back to the wall, Welsh formally announced a strike. It was clear that if the WBA lost, it would be shattered.
All through the long, cold winter and into the spring, the union held firm in what came to be known as the Long Strike. Mockery was used to stiffen the spines of anyone considering a return to work—in late May, the Pinkerton operative R.J.L. reported that “two rough-looking men” had entered the bar at the Ashland Hotel: “They were said to be miners, distributing snide poetry and ballads, but their real purpose being to sound the men, and prevent them from going to work.”51 When mockery didn’t work, there were other means available. McParlan reported on May 10, 1875, that three Shenandoah-area Mollies had “proposed to call a meeting of a few of the Molly Maguires of No. 3 and Loss Creek, and to destroy those men who were to work at the W. Shenandoah Colliery, and also to destroy their homes.”
Hibernians had been union enforcers since the Civil War, but with the advent of the WBA, they were acting without sanction. That is not to say a few rank-and-file union members did not appreciate their efforts. “Some miners who do not live up to the rules of the State Union are very much afraid of the Mollie Maguires,” a detective reported in May 1874, referring to the WBA. “Others who are favorable to the State Union also favor the Mollie Maguires, saying that many a man joins the State Union for fear of the Mollie Maguires.”52 Even Welsh, the WBA leader who helped redirect the West Branch from its bloody course, saw some value in the Mollies’ fearsome reputation. In a speech to Shenandoah strikers reported by McParlan, the union leader “referred to some of the newspapers branding all the miners as Molly Maguires . . . and said this was all the better, as it would keep black sheep away.”53
The union and leading Hibernians tried to apply political pressure, joining in an Anti-monopoly Convention in Harrisburg on March 4 that sought to unite independent coal operators and miners in opposition to Reading Coal and Iron. Among those attending were Lawler and Hugh Mohan of Minersville, who was named secretary of the proceedings.54 But it was all for naught. Snide songs could not fill the bellies of children weak with hunger, barroom plots did not budge the Reading, and political pressure failed to faze Gowen. He was starving the strikers into submission. “Hundreds of families rose in the morning to breakfast on a crust of bread and glass of water, who did not know where a bite of dinner was to come from,” one historian wrote. “Day after day, men, women and children went to the adjoining woods to dig roots and pick up herbs to keep body and soul together.”55
The union did not die quietly. When bands of strikers, headed by a drum corps with flags flying, descended on Mahanoy City on June 3 to free some imprisoned comrades and shut down mines, a spectacular burst of violence ensued. And the Mollies were in the vanguard. Philip Francis, a Welsh union member who took part in the march, described the scene in a memoir. “First, we marched to the jail to get some miners out who were in jail for being too rough in the city. The police and eighteen citizens were there all armed to defend it. It was then and there that I first saw Jack Kehoe, a leading Mollie, with his pistol in hand, arguing with the police at the jail door. At times they would place their pistols at each other’s breast.” According to Francis, a gun battle was avoided only after a magistrate agreed to bail for the union men.56
As the strikers left the jail with their freed comrades, they headed toward the Little Drift mine, intent on shutting it down. They were confronted by a deputy sheriff, who read them the riot act, backed up by the Mahanoy City police and a civilian posse. When an overexcited deputy whom Pinkerton identified as “Tim Jolley” fired into the crowd, mayhem ensued. Both sides began shooting, and those strikers who were not armed tossed rocks and manhandled any policemen and posse members they could get their hands on. Among the most prominent combatants on the union side were Kehoe’s brother-in-law, James “Friday” O’Donnell of Wiggans Patch, who “did some rapid shooting,” and Friday’s housemate James McAllister, whose brother was married to O’Donnell’s sister. McAllister “received a cut in the head” while throwing rocks at the officers, according to Pinkerton.57
Among the casualties on the law enforcement side were two members of a newly formed state militia unit, the Silliman Guard, which had close connections to the town’s law enforcement apparatus. William Enke, a magistrate, posse member, and private in the militia unit, was injured in the head by a rock, while Henry Leitenberger, a policeman and fellow guardsman, was gravely wounded by a gunshot, but not before he cut down several strikers.58 The Francis memoir tells how, after the crowd picked up a man he identified as Ellison and passed him over their heads, it next turned it attention to Leitenberger: “I could see LIGHTENBERGER’S eyes and his firm chin. He backed away about twenty feet, placed both elbows to his side and began shooting rapidly. There was no need to aim. We stood so close together. Every shot found its mark. After every shot we could hear cries of ‘Oh! Oh!’ ”
In addition to Enke and Leitenberger, several other men with close ties to the Silliman Guard appear to have played prominent roles on the law enforcement side that day. The man Francis identified as “Ellison” was most likely the Mahanoy City police chief, Elias Whetstone, who was the father of a Silliman Guardsman, John Whetstone. Henry Lochman, a policeman who was wounded in the leg, was the next-door neighbor of another Guardsman, Henry Zimmer. Finally, the trigger-happy “Tim Jolley” who Pinkerton said started the riot by firing into the crowd was almost certainly another member of the Silliman Guard, Jim Jolley. (No one named Tim Jolley appears in the 1870 or 1880 census for Mahanoy City.)59 When it was all over, the union men, acting much like a labor militia, “formed in line and marched defiantly through town, headed by music.”60
The bloody riot marked the death knell of the strike, but the Kehoe clan’s clash with members of the Silliman Guards would come back to haunt the anthracite region before the close of the year. Welsh announced a formal end to the strike on June 14, 1875, citing “the keen pangs of hunger.” Joe Patterson, the secretary of the union, recalled the bitterness of the defeat. “Famine drove the men into submission. It was a terrible thing to submit to a 20 per cent reduction,” he wrote. “Evil days had come. We went to work, but with iron in our souls.”61 Benjamin Bannan, who had always hated unions, lived to witness the demise of this latest one, but just barely. He died on July 29, 1875, at age sixty-eight, just as the last wave of Molly violence was getting under way.
With the union broken, many mine bosses retaliated against those who had been in the forefront of the labor struggle, which meant that many Irishmen found themselves blacklisted. The choices were simple and hideously familiar for those who had fled the Irish famine thirty years before—migrate, fight, or starve. John Welsh, for one, had to move to western Pennsylvania for a time to find work.62 There were plenty of others in the same situation, and for those who could not or would not move, fighting seemed a better option than starving. As a result, Molly violence returned with a vengeance.
In the seven years between the founding and destruction of the regional union, the Molly Maguires had been involved in four murders. In a two-month period after the Long Strike ended, Molly gunmen killed six individuals, most of them mine bosses or law enforcement officials. Benjamin Yost, a Tamaqua policemen, was gunned down on July 5. A month later, on August 4, the Mollies killed Thomas Gwyther, a Girardville justice of the peace, and finally closed accounts with Gomer James, the killer of Cosgrove. (The James killing would in short order decimate the leadership of the organization, for a dispute about who should get the blood money for the murder had to be decided by a panel of bodymasters, all of whom were later convicted as accessories after the fact.) On September 1, Thomas Sanger, a Cornish mine boss, and his friend, William Uren, a miner, were killed; and on September 3, it was the turn of John P. Jones, a Welsh mine superintendent, in Lansford, Carbon County.
McParlan had seen it all coming. “Now you can see yourself how this is, and what I predicted at the time of the suspension—‘that if the Union would fail there would be rough times,’ ” he wrote on September 2. Under the union, “each man got his turn,” he said. “But now the Irish are discharged or if not they are put to work at some place where they can make nothing . . . There was very little killing whilst the union stood, but now it is quite the reverse.”63
His report as an undercover detective for the corporation responsible for the situation was simply a more articulate version of the letter from a Mahanoy City Molly published in the Shenandoah Herald one month later. “I am aginst shooting as much as ye are,” the letter read. “But the Union is Broke up and we Have got nothing to defind ourselves with But our Revolvers and if we dount use them we shal have to work for 50 cints a Day . . . I have told ye the mind of the children of the Mistress Molly Maguire, all we want is a fare Days wages for a fare Days work, and thats what we cant get now By a Long shot.”64
The struggle was waged with ballots as well as bullets. Kehoe, the Schuylkill County AOH leader and the constable of Girardville, signaled his displeasure with the coal establishment that fall by working to undermine Cyrus Pershing, the Democratic candidate for governor who just happened to be the senior judge of Schuylkill County Court. Kehoe’s work on behalf of the Republican incumbent, John Hartranft, was only modestly effective—he delivered Girardville and West Mahanoy Township, and can hardly be credited with Pershing’s defeat.65
Kehoe’s embrace of the governor has been portrayed as a cynical attempt to curry favor with an official who had the power to pardon. (Some local officials associated with the Hibernians were facing embezzlement accusations, and three Mollies had recently been arrested in the Jones killing—the Tamaqua bodymaster, James “Powderkeg” Kerrigan; and two Mount Laffee men, Edward Kelly and Michael J. Doyle.)66 But if Kehoe was trying to curry favor with powerful officials on behalf of accused Mollies, snubbing the local Democrat who presided over the court that would try them seems an odd course. Rather, it may be that his work on behalf of Hartranft simply demonstrated the degree to which the political alignments of the Civil War era had become irrelevant. With a Democrat like Gowen running the Reading, and a Democrat like Pershing running the courts, the conflict was no longer one that pitted Irishmen, Catholics, Democrats, and union members against Anglo-Saxons, Protestants, Republicans, and mine owners. Now it was simply the coal companies and their allies versus the workers and theirs.
Kehoe soon had more immediate worries than the election results. On December 10, vigilantes invaded the home of his in-laws, the O’Donnells of Wiggans Patch, between Mahanoy City and Gilberton. Charles O’Donnell never stood a chance—he was dragged outside and shot fifteen times. His sister, Ellen McAllister, who was several months pregnant, died of a single bullet wound to the chest. Their mother, Margaret O’Donnell, escaped with a mere pistol-whipping. Luckier still were two other inhabitants of the house—James “Friday” O’Donnell and Ellen’s husband, James McAllister, who both got away.
It was the sort of attack that was common in Ulster from the 1790s right through to the 1990s: masked killers armed with pistols and inside information, gunning down victims in their home in the wee hours of the morning. The identity of the attackers was never determined for certain, but the home’s occupants had been included in a list of Molly Maguires that the Pinkertons had circulated in the area. And a note found on the scene the next day read, “You are the murderers of Uren and Sanger.” Perhaps as important, Friday O’Donnell and James McAllister had been active participants in the June 3 riot in Mahanoy City that injured several members of the Silliman Guard. The only man ever taken into custody in what became known as the Wiggans Patch Massacre was the militia unit’s second in command, Frank Wenrich, on the word of Margaret O’Donnell, Kehoe’s mother-in-law. But he was quickly released.
A Mahanoy City burgess and butcher, Wenrich displayed a curious sign on his Centre Street shop in the year of the vigilante killing. It featured a giant eye, flanked by the words “meat market.” It was an odd symbol for a butcher, but a near-perfect match for the logo of San Francisco’s famed vigilance committee—and that of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. William Enke, Wenrich’s fellow Guardsman who was wounded in the June 3 riot, was a professional sign and coach painter.67
Wenrich also had business dealings with Reading Coal and Iron. Just a couple of weeks after the butcher’s arrest in the Wiggans Patch killings, a coal company official who lived just two doors away from Wenrich’s commanding officer in Mahanoy City wrote a curious note to Reading Coal and Iron’s immensely powerful land agent, Frank Carter. Wenrich had “Mahanoy Township orders amounting to about one hundred and Seventy Five Dollars. Can you pay them or don’t you want to have anything to do with them?”68 The note from Thomas L. Hess may have been a simple accounting question, but it is worth noting that Wenrich’s business was in Mahanoy City, a separate municipality from Mahanoy Township, which included Wiggans Patch.
The note also opens a window on a web of interlocking business relationships involving officials of Reading Coal and Iron, the Silliman Guard, and members of Mahanoy City’s business elite and judiciary. In addition to Carter’s duties as land agent for the coal company, he was a close business associate of E. S. Silliman, the man who bankrolled the Silliman Guards. Carter was secretary of the Mahanoy City Water Company, of which Silliman was president. The two were also founding directors of the First National Bank, and part owners of the Mahanoy City Gazette. George Troutman, the lawyer who represented Wenrich in the Wiggans Patch case, was, like Silliman, a director and officer of the Mahanoy City Gas Company. Silliman was the treasurer of the Fidelity Building and Loan Association; the commander of the Silliman Guard, the architect and builder John Schoener, was a director.
Another set of ties involves the Citizens Fire Company, No 2. Like the militia unit, it was founded by Silliman, and at the time of the Wiggans Patch killings its foreman was Schoener. Schoener rose to that position after the killing of the fire company’s previous foreman, George Major, the chief burgess of Mahanoy City, who was gunned down during a Halloween night riot with a rival, largely Irish American fire company, Humane. The killing was blamed on the Molly Maguires, and the Silliman Guard was founded a few months after Major’s death.69
If the June 3 riot gave members of the Silliman Guard a direct, personal motive for the attack on the O’Donnell home six months later, the web of ties among the town’s business elite, civic leaders, and law enforcement officials may help explain why no one was ever brought to justice in the case. The Wiggans Patch murders on December 12, 1875, were the very last in a long line that stretched all the way back to the killing of James Bergen in his Coal Castle home nearly thirteen years earlier, close to a winter holiday. Though this time, of course, the Mollies were the target.
In a sense, Wiggans Patch marked not just a closing, but also a convergence. It was as if the two polar opposites of the parade tradition, the rowdy mummers and the disciplined militiamen, had developed violent, extralegal adjuncts—Mollies and vigilantes—who met in the middle, and there did battle in a naked class war. In a weird sort of inversion, the Molly leader Jack Kehoe had marched in Mahanoy City on June 3 at the head of something akin to a labor militia; six months later, a leader of a Mahanoy City militia unit stood accused of acting like a Molly assassin at the home of Kehoe’s in-laws in Wiggans Patch. The folk justice of the Mollies, it appears, had been matched tit for tat by the vigilantism of the militiamen, flip sides of the same extralegal coin.
In January the Mollies suffered another blow. Archbishop Wood of Philadelphia, the leader of the county’s Roman Catholics, reissued his pastoral letter of 1864 that had condemned the Molly Maguires. This time, however, he added the words “otherwise the Ancient Order of Hibernians” after “Molly Maguires,” and excommunicated the lot. But the most alarming development for the Hibernians also came in January, when Doyle went on trial for the Jones killing, and Kerrigan turned informer. He implicated Alexander Campbell, the AOH treasurer in Storm Hill, in the Jones case, and a host of other Hibernians in the Yost, Sanger, and Uren killings. There was another round of arrests, and rumors began to circulate that an informer had penetrated the order. Suspicion fell on McParlan, and he tried to bluff his way through. But he soon discovered that he was being stalked by a number of Mollies, including Philip Nash, who may well have been the Civil War labor committeeman in Cass Township. On March 7, 1876, McParlan came in from the cold, ending one of the most dramatic undercover assignments in American history.
With McParlan safe, the arrests picked up. In Cass Township, where it had all begun fourteen years before, the Forestville bodymaster went on the run. Frank Keenan, a Queen’s County native, had been one of several bodymasters indicted for conspiracy for taking part in the discussions about who should get the reward for the Gomer James killing. A Pinkerton report said that Thomas Mohan, Luke’s son, had taken over as bodymaster in Forestville, with James O’Leary as secretary.70
Lawler, embittered by his expulsion for dawdling on avenging Edward Cosgrove, turned informer in the Sanger–Uren case, saving his neck and inspiring a derisive ballad, “Muff the Squealer”:
“Now I’ll commence,” he says, “me whole story to tell
When I go back to Shenandoah, I’ll be shot sure as hell.”
“We’ll send you to a country where you’re not known so well.”
“Bejabers, that’s good,” says Muff Lawler.71
The society was crumbling. In April, at a convention in New York, the national AOH expelled all its chapters in Schuylkill, Carbon, Columbia, and Northumberland Counties. When Kehoe, the Schuylkill County leader, was rounded up on May 6 with ten others, the organization was effectively dead.
Now came the matter of burials.
Officials in Schuylkill and Carbon Counties turned over much of the task of prosecuting the Molly Maguires to the Reading Railroad and other major coal companies. Gowen himself served as one of the lead prosecutors. In the first big trial, for the Jones slaying, the state’s evidence was presented by none other than that old Civil War scourge of the Buckshots and Mollies, Charles Albright, who was now a lawyer for the Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal Company, Jones’s employer. He appeared in court in his army uniform and with his sword. Francis Hughes, the Schuylkill County Democratic leader during the war, like Gowen had become a lawyer for the Reading Company, and he, too, served on the prosecution. Judge Pershing, the Democratic candidate for governor in 1875 whom Kehoe had worked so hard against, presided over several trials, including Kehoe’s.
In fact, the great Molly Maguire trials of the 1870s allowed the coal establishment to finally lay to rest the bitter partisan feuds that had riven it during the Civil War era, giving rise to secret society violence. In effect, the leaders of the two parties buried the hatchet deep in the flesh of the Molly Maguires. Doyle, Kelly, and Campbell were convicted and sentenced to death in the Jones murder, as was Thomas Munley, a Gilberton Hibernian, in the Sanger–Uren killings. The coal establishment, smelling blood, pressed on with a frenzy of arrests and trials. When the railroads wrapped up the cases stemming from the poststrike wave of violence, they moved on to older cases from the Civil War era—sometimes because new evidence had emerged, and sometimes because the cases offered a convenient excuse to hang an inconvenient Irishman.
The murder trial of Jack Kehoe fell into the latter category. Kehoe had already been convicted and sentenced to fourteen years in prison in assault and conspiracy trials.* But Gowen was not satisfied, so he dredged up the 1862 death of Frank Langdon, the Audenried mine foreman. The crime was fifteen years old and probably did not rise to the level of first-degree murder—Langdon had been beaten with sticks and stones on a booze-soaked summer Saturday, which hardly suggested malice aforethought, and his inept doctor may have been as responsible as anyone for his death. There was also considerable doubt that Kehoe was even at the scene of the beating. But the prosecutors, who included Gowen and Albright, saw the trial as a way to eliminate Kehoe once and for all, and to link the Molly Maguires to the labor movement. Albright asked James Shoveland, a defense witness, if the miners union for which he was secretary in 1862 was known as the Buckshots, a synonym for the Mollies. “The coal operators put that name on the union then,” he replied. Then Albright asked him if Kehoe had been in the union. “He must have been; he was a miner,” said Shoveland.72
Kehoe was found guilty in January 1877 and Judge Pershing sentenced him to hang. On the same page that the Miners’ Journal reported the verdict, it carried a one-paragraph item that another Mollie convicted of murder, “Yellow Jack” Donahue, had confessed to killing Langdon. Donahue reported that “for a long while he was haunted by the murdered man, and had to go to New York to get the spell removed.”73 It’s hard to say what is more chilling about the tale—its echoes of the Molly Maguire ballad, in which the murdered Bell comes back to haunt his killer, or the fact that the Miners’ Journal gave just three sentences to the news that someone other than Kehoe had confessed to killing Langdon.
The ramifications of the Molly trials quickly spread far beyond the anthracite region. The week of Kehoe’s conviction, workers in New York denounced the press in Pennsylvania as the hirelings of the mine owners and condemned the prosecution of the Irish miners. The Miners’ Journal headline read “New York Workingmen Making Asses of Themselves.” In February, a mass meeting of workingmen in Philadelphia to protest the prosecution of the Mollies struck an ominous note, with one warning that “the people were fast drifting into a condition where revolution would be necessary” to defend their rights against monopoly.74 That same month, Pat Hester, Peter McHugh, and Patrick Tully were convicted in the 1867 murder of Alexander Rea, the mine boss killed in an aborted highway robbery on the road to Centralia.
A little over a year later, in the spring of 1878, James McDonnell and Charles Sharpe were convicted in the November 1863 killing of mine operator George K. Smith. Charles Mulhearn, a Tamaqua Hibernian who had turned state’s evidence, testified that Smith’s killers were all Mollie Maguires or Buckshots. “It had three names,” he said of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. “It was called the Mollie Maguires and Buckshots.”75
The hangings, meanwhile, had begun in spectacular fashion. Ten men went to the gallows on June 21, 1877, a date close enough to the summer solstice to suggest some kind of pagan sacrifice. On Black Thursday or “the day of the rope,” as it came to be called, Campbell, Doyle, Kelly, and “Yellow Jack” Donahue were hanged in Mauch Chunk; and Munley, James Roarity, Hugh McGehan, Thomas Duffy, James Carroll, and James Boyle in Pottsville. It was the largest mass hanging in the history of the Commonwealth, but it did nothing to stem the tide of industrial strife. In fact, it only contributed, as Reading Coal and Iron officials acknowledged. “There is general uneasiness at all the collieries where there are Irish workmen,” Henry Pleasants reported the day before the hangings. “There will be little or no work tomorrow.” A week later he wrote of “a universal feeling of restlessness” among the miners. “The Irish are very poor and having given their last dollar toward the defense and burial of the Mollies are left without enough to eat,” he wrote. “They blame our company for the hanging of innocent men and their hatred for our company is very great at present.” Their hatred, in fact, was so great that it trumped their hunger—in an eight-day period from June 20 to June 27, strikes had crippled the Elmwood, Ellengowen, Knickerbocker, Mahanoy City, North Mahanoy, and Shenandoah collieries.76
The trouble soon widened. In the weeks after the hangings, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 erupted, and the miners of Summit Hill, Campbell’s hometown, joined in, carrying bread on polls. It was a bit of symbolic protest that had boded ill for landlords during the agony of the famine years in the Ulster borderlands, and it proved a reliable barometer of the depth of feelings in the newest crisis.77 Amid gunfire and flames, the railroad strike spread from Baltimore to Scranton, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and San Francisco in the bloodiest class conflict the nation had ever known. In an echo of the Wiggans Patch killings, a vigilance committee in Scranton killed two Irishman when it opened fire on a crowd of strikers on August 2, trying to quell what a New York Times headline labeled “The Working Men’s War.” Efforts to arrest the killers were blocked by a National Guard unit—and then the vigilantes became a National Guard unit. Newspapers and state officials justified the killings by claiming the victims were “filled with the spirit of Molly Maguire” or by suggesting that they may have actually been Mollies.
A group of men and boys who marched into Mahanoy City to quite literally drum up a strike were promptly dispersed by a posse, and their leaders were arrested. The forces of law and order were determined to avoid a repeat of the drubbing they’d received just two years earlier at hands of Kehoe and his followers.78 When the authorities finished breaking what came to be known as the Great Strike, the railroads and the Commonwealth returned to the task at hand—hanging Irish miners.
Hester, McHugh, and Tully went to the gallows in Bloomsburg on March 25, 1878, for the Rea murder. Tully had already admitted his guilt and implicated Hester. The Associated Press reported that McHugh expressed remorse on the scaffold, saying that he wouldn’t have ended up there if he had taken good advice. Tully read a confession, too. The condemned were among the few people present to conduct themselves with dignity. The sheriff was staggering drunk, an intoxicated onlooker fell to his death from the roof of a nearby hotel, and a thirteen-year-old girl was crushed when the shed she was standing on collapsed.79
Kehoe worked frantically, and in vain, to escape the fate Gowen had ordained for him. To prevent Gov. Hartranft from pardoning Kehoe, the railroad president introduced testimony that he would do just that, forcing a denial from the governor. In a jailhouse interview, Kehoe delivered a bitter condemnation of Gowen as man whose “whole course as president of the Reading road has shown him to be a man of restless, arbitrary ambition, with such grasping tendencies that no obstacle, however sacred, was ever allowed to interpose between him and his end.” He accused Gowen of destroying the prosperity of the region by striving for a monopoly financed by British gold, subverting the legislature, buying out or bullying the independent coal operators, and destroying the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association.
“I believe he started out with the intention of breaking up our organization as soon as he bought the mines,” Kehoe said. “He broke the Labor Union first . . . Of course he was aware of this Hibernian Society, and he was afraid that they would kill him, because he deserved to be killed.”80 To the end, Kehoe maintained his innocence in the Langdon case. Standing on the scaffold in Pottsville on a snowy December 18, 1878, he reasserted it one last time. “I am not guilty of the murder of Langdon,” he said in a clear, loud voice. “I never saw the crime committed; I knew nothing of it.” Then the trap was sprung, but the fall did not break his neck—Kehoe, once the high constable of Girardville, died slowly of strangulation, the rope gashing his face in his death throes.81
Of all the botched, ugly execution spectacles, none were quite as bad as the two that followed Kehoe’s. James McDonnell and Charles Sharpe had been convicted in the Civil War–era slaying of mine superintendent George K. Smith. It was the Molly murder with the strongest overtones of Old World mummery—committed within days of Halloween, by men who invaded the Smith home in costume or disguise. They had been scheduled to die on the same day as the Schuylkill County delegate, but their lawyers had won a reprieve until January 14, 1879. They sought a second reprieve in Harrisburg the day before the executions, to allow a review of the case by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. The governor promised a decision the next morning.
The execution was scheduled to take place between 11:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. At 10:25 A.M., the sheriff knocked on the doors of the condemned men’s cells to let them know it was time. At 10:30, the governor decided to grant the reprieves, and at 10:37, the news was received at the Mauch Chunk telegraph office. A telegraph messenger dashed off to the prison, where Sharpe and McDonnell were by now making their last statements, both proclaiming their innocence in the death of Smith (though McDonnell acknowledged his guilt in another killing). The two kissed crucifixes as priests whispered words of consolation. White caps were drawn over their heads.
At the door to the prison, where McDonnell’s wife and children were weeping loudly, the telegraph messenger rang for admittance, only to be ignored, probably on the assumption that he was a distraught relative. Thirty seconds later, McDonnell and Sharp dropped into eternity. The former died instantly, but the latter struggled violently. In the hush that accompanied his death throes, the ringing of a bell was heard, and the breathless messenger was let in with his news—half a minute too late.
Bedlam ensued. McDonnell’s brother, standing at the foot of the gallows where his brother still twisted, shouted, “This is murder. There hang two innocent men and their murderers are in this crowd.” The sheriff, instead of cutting down the wrongly hanged, took the time to inform the crowd of the contents of the telegraph. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “this is a dispatch reprieving the two men till Monday, the 20th. It is marked received at the post office at 10:37.” By the time he was done, Sharp had stopped struggling. The sheriff turned toward the swaying bodies and said, “I am as sorry as anyone. It is too late to be helped. Where is the undertaker?”
In response came more loud allegations of murder from relatives of the dead men, who accused the sheriff of hastening the executions because he knew a reprieve was at hand. The sheriff tried to shift blame for the timing of the execution to the priests. “I did not name the hour,” he said. “To Fr. Bunce I said that when he was ready the execution should go on. He could have stayed with the men, praying with them till two o’clock, had he chosen to do so.”
That nearly prompted a riot amid the agitated observers, but Fr. Bunce acted quickly to defuse the situation. “It was I who told him the men were ready,” he told the crowd. “Stand back, I say, and be silent.” The crowd obeyed. The New York Times headline said it all: “Thirty Seconds Too Late.”82
There were two more executions—one in Pottsville two days later, on January 16, and another in Sunbury on October 9. With twenty Molly Maguires now in the grave, the Reading’s triumph seemed complete. It had gained a monopoly on the production of coal in the lower anthracite region, crushed the miners’ union, and exterminated the leadership of the local Hibernian societies.
But like the New York and Schuylkill’s earlier triumph on the West Branch, the Reading’s victory was a Pyrrhic one. Gowen could not pay off the debt from his extensive purchases of coal land. The Reading went into receivership in 1880, and Gowen was forced out as president the following year. His repeated efforts at a comeback failed, and Gowen finally gave up on December 13, 1889. He secluded himself in a Washington hotel room, pulled out a gun and, in morbid imitation of his old enemies, killed a mine official—himself. It was twenty-seven years to the day since strikers had invaded Phoenix Park, shouting a name to rival Nemesis as the goddess of retribution: Molly Maguire.