Molly Maguires

For the movie, see The Molly Maguires (film).

Location of the counties of the Molly Maguires, in northeastern Pennsylvania

Mollys in Ireland

The Molly Maguires originated in Ireland, where their semi-legendary vigilante organization fought Irish landlords for tenants' rights. The group named itself after a widow, Molly Maguire, who was possibly a mythical figure. According to legend, Molly was killed by her landlord Billy Kilgannon, who instructed her to get out of town, and when she refused to vacate the premises, he levelled the house she was in. Tales of that incident incited violent anti-landlord agitations in the 1840s. The organization was established officially in 1843.

In the 1880s, the Molly Maguires in Ireland slowly merged with a newly evolving society, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, becoming a secret society retaining the second front name of The Molly Maguires, or The Mollies. They spread under the cloak of the Hibernians and with the approval of the Irish Parliamentary Party, expanded into every Irish county. Their strongest opponents were the All-for-Ireland League. The Mollies radicalized the Irish political scene with sectarian violence and intimidation until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and were thought by some to have contributed to the ultimate partition of Ireland.

Mollys in USA

Many historians believe that Irish immigrants transplanted a form of the Molly Maguires organization into America in the nineteenth century, and that it continued its activities as a clandestine society. They were located in a section of the anthracite coal fields dubbed the Coal Region, which included the counties of Lackawanna, Luzerne, Columbia, Schuylkill, Carbon, and Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. It is believed that the Irish miners in this organization employed the tactics of intimidation and violence previously used against Irish landlords in a violent confrontation against the anthracite, or hard coal mining companies in the 19th century.

Historians disagree about the Mollies

The Irish coal-mining heritage of the Mollies may have contributed to the wave of violence, which continued well over ten years in the late 19th century in the United States. But historian Aleine Austin believes,

The facts show that there was much more terror waged against the Mollys than those illiterate Irishmen ever aroused.

Although a legitimate self-help organization for Irish immigrants existed in the form of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), most mainstream writers accept that the Molly Maguires existed as a secret organization in Pennsylvania, and that they used the AOH as a "front." Yet historians are not even in agreement on this last point. For example, Joseph Rayback's 1966 volume A History of American Labor states that the "identity of the Molly Maguires has never been proved."

Even authors who accept the existence of the Mollies as a violent and destructive group acknowledge a significant scholarship that questions the entire history. In The Pinkerton Story, authors James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett write sympathetically about the detective agency and its mission to bring the Mollies to justice. Yet they observe,

The difficulty of achieving strict and fair accuracy in relation to the Mollie Maguires is very great. Sensible men have held there never even was such an organization... We do believe, however, that members of a secret organization, bound to each other by oath, used the facilities and personnel of the organization to carry out personal vendettas...

Such disagreements over a period when "Labor was at war with capital, Democrat with Republican, Protestant with Catholic, and immigrant with native" are, perhaps, to be expected.

Media attention

While popular accounts of the Molly Maguires invariably focus on violence, the history unfolded primarily as a struggle between industrialists and a miners' union. Leaders of the American Miners' Association and others, "accused of being Mollies, were arrested and charged with crimes... [amid] lurid newspaper sensationalism."

In Labor's Untold Story, Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais put the responsibility for creating the Molly Maguires on industrialist Franklin B. Gowen, observing that,

A good number of historians now concede that there was never any organization in Pennsylvania known as the Molly Maguires—although any militant miner might have been called a Molly Maguire after the newspapers had spread Gowen's charge far and wide.

Gowen contributed to such perceptions when he declared,

The name of Molly Maguire being attached to a man's name is sufficient to hang him.

Although media reports sensationalized the accounts, not all media accepted the popular version. The New York publication The Irish World denied that any secret fraternity existed in Pennsylvania, and declared that such an organization was the creation of railroad leaders and the Pinkertons. The Labor Standard, a newspaper of the Workingmen's Party, believed that Pinkerton agent James McParlan, who infiltrated and testified against the Mollies, was an agent provocateur.

History

During the 1870s, powerful financial syndicates controlled the railroads and the coalfields. Coal companies had begun to recruit immigrants from overseas, luring them with "promises of fortune-making." Herded into freight trains by the hundreds, these workers often replaced English-speaking miners who, according to George Korson,

"...were compelled to give way in one coal field after another, either abandoning the industry altogether for other occupations or else retreating, like the vanishing American Indian, westward..."

Frequently unable to read safety instructions, the immigrant workers,

...faced constant hazards from violation of safety precautions, such as they were. Injuries and deaths in mine disasters, frequently reported in the newspapers, shocked the nation.

Twenty-two thousand coal miners worked in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Fifty-five hundred of the miners in the county were children between the ages of seven and sixteen years. The miners lived a life of "bitter, terrible struggle."

The daily routine of the miner was to crawl in the dim light of his lamp, in mud and trickling water, surrounded by coal dust and perhaps powder smoke... the struggle was a difficult one.

Wages were low, working conditions were atrocious, and deaths and serious injuries numbered in the hundreds each year. On September 6, 1869, at the Avondale Mine in Luzurne County, a fire took the lives of one hundred and seventy-nine coal miners. The families blamed the coal company for failing to finance a secondary exit for the mine. Death came not only from disasters; twenty-eight years later in Luzurne County, a sheriff's posse would kill nineteen unarmed immigrant miners and wound scores more.

The period from 1873 to 1879 was marked by one of the worst depressions in the nation's history, caused by reckless speculation and wholesale stock watering. By 1877 an estimated one-fifth of the nation's workingmen were completely unemployed, two-fifths worked no more than six or seven months a year, and only one-fifth had full-time jobs.

But not everyone had been suffering:

Labor angrily watched "railway directors (riding) about the country in luxurious private cars proclaiming their inability to pay living wages to hungry working men."

Some miners faced the additional burden of prejudice and persecution. The Molly Maguires were Irish and Catholic in a time and place where signs in employment windows often declared, "No Irish need apply." It was a time of rampant beatings and murders in the mining district, some of which were committed by the Mollies.

Franklin B. Gowen, the President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, a protestant and "the wealthiest anthracite coal mine owner in the world," hired Allen Pinkerton's services to deal with the Molly Maguires.

Pinkerton assigned James McParlan, who successfully infiltrated the organization, becoming a secretary for one of its local groups. McParlan's assignment was to collect evidence of murder plots and intrigue, passing this information along to his Pinkerton manager. He also began working secretly with a Pinkerton agent assigned to the Coal and Iron Police for the purpose of coordinating the eventual arrest and prosecution of members of the Molly Maguires.

Although there had been fifty "inexplicable murders" between 1863 and 1867 in Schuylkill County, progress in the investigation was slow. There was "a lull in the entire area, broken only by minor shootings."

McParlan wrote:

I am sick and tired of this thing. I seem to make no progress.

Gowen decided to force a strike and showdown.

F.P. Dewees, a contemporary and a confidant of Gowen, wrote that by 1873 "Mr. Gowen was fully impressed with the necessity of lessening the overgrown power of the 'Labor Union' and exterminating if possible the Molly Maguires." In December, 1874, Gowen led the other coal operators to announce a twenty percent pay cut. The miners decided to strike on January 1, 1875.

From the first it was war, Gowen trying for the absolute extermination upon which Dewees wrote he was determined. Led by the president of the Philadelphia and Reading, the operators unleased a reign of terror, hiring an armed band of vigilantes who took the name of the "Modocs" and who joined the corporation-owned Coal and Iron Police in waylaying, ambushing, and killing militant miners.

Edward Coyle, a leader of the union and of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, was murdered in March. Another member of the AOH was shot and killed by the Modocs led by one Bradley, a mine superintendant. Patrick Vary, a mine boss, fired into a group of miners and, according to the later boast by Gowen, as the miners "fled they left a long trail of blood behind them." At Tuscarora a meeting of miners was attacked by vigilantes who shot and killed one miner and wounded several others.

On December 10, 1876, three men and two women were attacked in their house by masked men. The men had been secretly identified by McParlan as Mollies. One of the men was killed in the house, and the other two men were wounded but able to escape. A woman, the wife of one of the Mollies, was taken outside of the house and shot dead.

McParlan was outraged that the information he had been providing had found its way into the hands of indiscriminant killers. When the attack at the house occurred, McParlan protested in a letter to his Pinkerton supervisor. He did not object that Mollies might be assassinated as a result of his labor spying — he considered their deaths justifiable, they "got their just deserving." But McParlan resigned when it became apparent the vigilantes were willing to commit the "murder of women and children," whom he deemed innocent victims. His letter stated:

Friday: This morning at 8 A.M. I heard that a crowd of masked men had entered Mrs. O'Donnell's house... and had killed James O'Donnell alias Friday, Charles O'Donnell and James McAllister, also Mrs. McAllister whom they took out of the house and shot (Charles McAllister's wife). Now as for the O'Donnells I am satisfied they got their just deserving. I reported what those men were. I give all information about them so clear that the courts could have taken hold of their case at any time but the witnesses were too cowardly to do it. I have also in the interests of God and humanity notified you months before some of those outrages were committed still the authorities took no hold of the matter. Now I wake up this morning to find that I am the murderer of Mrs. McAlister. What had a woman to do with the case—did the [Molly Maguires] in their worst time shoot down women. If I was not here the Vigilante Committee would not know who was guilty and when I find them shooting women in their thirst for blood I hereby tender my resignation to take effect as soon as this message is received. It is not cowardice that makes me resign but just let them have it now I will no longer interfere as I see that one is the same as the other and I am not going to be an accessory to the murder of women and children. I am sure the [Molly Maguires] will not spare the women so long as the Vigilante has shown an example.

McParlan was prevailed upon not to resign. A man named Frank Winrich, a first lieutenant with the Pennsylvania National Guard, was arrested as the leader of the attackers, but was released on bail. Then another miner, Hugh McGehan, a twenty-one year old who had been secretly identified as a killer by McParlan, was fired upon and wounded by unknown assailants. Later, the McGehan house was attacked by gunfire.

The state militia and the Coal and Iron Police patrolled the district. Union leaders were "excoriated by the press," and were "denounced from altar and pulpit." On May 12, John Siney, a union leader who favored arbitration and had opposed the strike, was arrested at a mass meeting called to protest the importation of strike breakers. An organizer for the miners' national association by the name of Xeno Parkes was also arrested, along with twenty-six other union officials, all on a charge of conspiracy. Judge John Holden Owes instructed the jury that,

...any agreement, combination or confederation to increase or depress the price of any vendible commodity, whether labor, merchandise, or anything else, is indictable as a conspiracy under the laws of Pennsylvania.

When he sentenced two of the union officials, Judge Owes addressed them,

I find you, Joyce, to be president of the Union, and you, Maloney, to be secretary, and therefore I sentence you to one year's imprisonment.

The union was nearly broken by the imprisonment of its leadership and by attacks conducted by vigilantes against the strikers. Gowen "deluged the newspapers with stories of murder and arson" committed by the Molly Maguires. The press produced stories of strikes in Illinois, in Jersey City, and in the Ohio mine fields, all inspired by the Mollies. The stories were widely believed.

In Schuylkill County the miners and their families were starving to death. A striker wrote to a friend,

Since I last saw you, I have buried my youngest child, and on the day before its death there was not one bit of victuals in the house with six children."

In his history of the American coal miner, Andrew Roy recorded,

Hundreds of families rose in the morning to breakfast on a crust of bread and a glass of water, who did not know where a bite of dinner was to come from. 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...

After six months the strike was defeated and the miners returned to work, accepting the twenty percent cut in pay. But miners belonging to the Ancient Order of Hibernians continued the fight. Boyer and Morais argue that the killing wasn't all one-sided:

Militant miners often disappeared, their bodies sometimes being found later in deserted mine shafts.

The Mollies infiltrated

James McParlan

James McParlan, a native of County Armagh, was selected by Allan Pinkerton to go undercover against the Mollies. Using the alias of James McKenna, he became a trusted member of the organization. After months of little progress, McParlan reported some plans by the "inner circle."

Pinkerton Detective Agency detective James McParlan, seen here some time in the 1880s

Gomer James, a Welshman, had shot and wounded one of the Mollies, and plans were formulated for a revenge killing. But the wheels of revenge were grinding slowly. And there was other violence:

November was a bloody month what with the miners on strike... In the three days around November 18, a Mollie was found dead in the streets of Carbondale, north of Scranton, a man had his throat cut, an unidentified man was crucified in the woods, a mining boss mauled, a man murdered in Scranton, and three men of [another Molly Maguires group] were guilty of a horror against an old woman, and an attempt to assassinate a Mollie, Dougherty, followed and [Dougherty] at once demanded the murder of W.M. Thomas, whom he blamed for the attempt.

On the last day of the month, with Gowen's strikebreakers pouring in, the Summit telegraph office was burned, a train derailed, and McParlan advised [his Pinkerton supervisor] to send in uniformed police to preserve order.

A plan to destroy a railroad bridge was abandoned due to the presence of outsiders. The Irish had been forbidden by the English and Welsh to set foot in a public square in Mahanoy City, and a plan for the Irish to occupy it by force of arms was considered then abandoned.

In the meantime a messenger reported that Thomas, the would-be killer of one of the Mollies, had been killed in the stable where he worked. McParlan reported that he'd been asked to supply the hidden killers with food and whiskey. Horan and Swiggett write,

The probability is that as a man, Bully Bill Thomas, a Welshman, was no better than his enemies, but he was remarkable in other ways. His killers, leaving him for dead in the stable door, were not aware until two days later that he had survived.

Another plan was in the works, this one against two night watchmen, Pat McCarron and Benjamin Yost. Accused Mollies Jimmy Kerrigan and Thomas Duffy were said to despise Yost, who had arrested them numerous times. Yost was shot as he put out a street light, which at that time necessitated climbing the lamp pole. Before he died, he reported that his killers were Irish, but were not Kerrigan or Duffy.

McParlan recorded that a Molly by the name of William Love killed a justice of the peace by the name of Gwyther in Girardville. Unknown Mollies were accused of wounding a man in Shenandoah outside his saloon. Gomer James was killed while he tended bar. Then, McParlan reported, a group of Mollies reported to him that they had killed a mine boss named Sanger, and another man with him. Forewarned of the attempt, McParlan had sought to arrange protection for the mine boss, but was unsuccessful.

While there was concern whether enough evidence was collected on reprisal killings and assassinations that sufficient arrests of the Mollies could be made, McParlan's identity had been discovered.

On February 10 1875, Captain R.J. Linden, a fellow Pinkerton operative with McParlan, captured Thomas Munley at his home in Gilberton. Charles McAllister was apprehended at the same time. McAllister demanded a separate trial and George Kaercher, Esq., the District Attorney, elected to try Munley first.

McParlan testified in numerous Molly cases, and his evidence helped to send ten men to the gallows. The defense attorneys repeatedly sought to portray McParlan as an agent-provocateur who was responsible for not warning people of their imminent deaths. (Kenny 232-33) McParlan testified that the AOH and the Mollys were one and the same, but most historians disagree. (Kenny 234-5)

The mainstream view of the Mollies

Many accounts of the Molly Maguires that were written during, or shortly after, the period offer no admission that there was widespread violence in the area, that vigilantism existed, nor even that violence was carried out against the miners.

In 1910, industrialist and historian James Ford Rhodes published a major scholarly analysis in the leading professional history journal:

Many of the Mollies were miners and the mode of working the mines lent itself to their peculiar policy. Miners were paid by the cubic yard, by the mine car, or by the ton, and (in the driving of entries) by the lineal yard. In the assignment of places, which was made by the mining boss, there were "soft" jobs and hard. If a Molly applied for a soft job and was refused, his anger was aroused and not infrequently in due time the offending boss was murdered. If he got employment, there was a constant chance of disagreement in measuring-up the work and in estimating the quality of the coal mined, for it was the custom to dock the miners' wages for bad coal with too much slate and dirt, and a serious disagreement was apt to be followed by violence. Little wonder was it that, as the source of the outrages was well understood, mining bosses refused to employ Irishmen, but this did not ensure their safety, as they might then be murdered for their refusal. A good Superintendent of any colliery would, in his quality of superior officer, support an efficient mining boss and would thus fall under the ban himself. John T. Morse, Jr., who made a contemporaneous study of the Molly Maguires, wrote in his vivid account of their operations: "The superintendents and 'bosses' in the collieries could all rest assured that their days would not be long in the land. Everywhere and at all times they were attacked, beaten, and shot down, by day and by night; month after month and year after year, on the public highways and in their own homes, in solitary places and in the neighborhood of crowds, these doomed men continued to fall in frightful succession beneath the hands of assassins."

The murders were not committed in the heat of sudden passion for some fancied wrong: they were the result of a deliberate system. The wronged individual laid his case before a quasijudicial tribunal demanding the death, say, of a mining boss and urging his reasons. If they were satisfactory, as they usually were, the murder was decreed; but the task was not assigned to the aggrieved person or to any one in his and the victim's neighborhood: perhaps directly-aggrieved parties might be tempted to use more force or more cruelty than necessary. Two or more relatively disinterested Mollies from a different part of the county or even from the adjoining county were selected to do the killing because, being unknown, they could the more easily escape detection. Refusal to carry out the dictate of the conclave was dangerous and seldom happened, although an arrangement of substitution, if properly supported, was permitted. The meeting generally took place in an upper room of a hotel or saloon and, after the serious business, came the social reunion with deep libations of whiskey.

In attempting to give precise figures, some writers have undoubtedly exaggerated the number of murders by this order from 1865 to 1875; but no one can go through the evidence without being convinced that a great many men were killed to satisfy the vengeful spirit of the Molly Maguires. Some of the victims were men so useful, so conspicuous, and so beloved in their communities that their assassinations caused a profound and enduring impression. In some cases, so Dewees (who has written a very useful story) asserts, robbery was added to murder: superintendents, who were carrying the money for the monthly pay of the miners and laborers, were waylaid as they drove along some lonely road in the desolate country. While the murders were numerous, still more numerous were the threats of murder and warnings to leave the country written on a sheet of paper with a rude picture of a coffin or a pistol and sometimes both. One notice read: "Mr. John Taylor — We will give you one week to go, but if you are alive on next Saturday you will die." Another, to three bosses, charged with "cheating thy men" had a picture of three pistols and a coffin and on the coffin was written, "This is your home." In other mining districts and in manufacturing localities, during strikes and times of turbulence similar warnings have been common and have been laughed at by mining bosses, superintendents, and proprietors; but, in the anthracite region between 1865 and 1876 the bravest of men could not forget how many of his fellows had been shot and suppress a feeling of uneasiness when he found such a missive on his doorstep or posted up on the door of his office at the mine. Many a superintendent and mining boss left his house in the morning with his hand on his revolver, wondering if he would ever see wife and children again.

The young men of the order were selected for the commission of murder; above them were older heads holding high office and, in a variety of ways, displaying executive ability. They were quick to see what a weapon to their hand was universal suffrage, and, with the aptitude for politics which the Irish have shown in our country, they developed their order into a political power to be reckoned with. Numbering in Schuylkill county only 500 or 600 out of 5,000 Irishmen in a total population of 116,000, the Molly Maguires controlled the common schools and the local government of the townships in the mining sections of the county. They elected at different times three county commissioners and came near electing one of their number, who had acquired twenty thousand dollars worth of property, Associate Judge of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. In one borough a Molly was Chief of Police; another in Mahanoy township, Jack Kehoe, was High Constable. In the elections were fraudulent voting, stuffing of the ballot-boxes and false returns; in the administration of the offices, fraud and robbery. In Mahanoy township, $60,000 were drawn for the schools and eleven-twelfths of it stolen. Exorbitant road taxes were a fruitful means by which township officials robbed the taxpayers and put the money in their own pockets. In August 1875 an ex-county commissioner, a Molly, and two commissioners then in office, not actually belonging to the order but in sympathy with it, had been convicted of stealing the county funds and each had been sentenced by a full bench [September 6] to two years' imprisonment. At the fall election for governor in this year [1875] the Molly Maguires, who were naturally Democrats, foresaw Republican success and sold their vote in Schuylkill and Luzerne counties to the Republicans for a certain amount of money in hand and an implied agreement that these convicted commissioners and other criminals who were called by a leading Molly "our men" should be pardoned. It is hardly to be supposed that the Republican politicians who made this bargain were aware of the thoroughly criminal nature of the Molly Maguires, for they had astutely covered themselves with a virtuous cloak, securing from the Legislature in 1871 a charter for the Ancient Order of Hibernians whose motto was "Friendship, Unity and Christian Charity." On October 10, 1875, in a letter to the Shenandoah Herald Jack Kehoe denied with indignation that the Molly Maguires were synonymous with the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which latter was "composed of men who are law abiding and seek the elevation of their members." Kehoe was crafty enough to see the advantage of throwing dust in the eyes of the public and, when the outside world was bargained with, the A.O.H. was put forward; but, as matter of fact, it was the old story of ravening wolves in sheep's clothing.

— James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from Hayes to McKinley 1877 - 1896 Volume 8 of the series History of the United States of America, From the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896 published October, 1919, The Macmillian Company, New York. Chapter II, pp 52 - 58

The trials

In May, 1876, the first trial of defendants McGeehan, Carroll, Duffy, James Boyle, and James Roarity commenced for the killing of Benjamin Yost. Gowen had himself appointed as special prosecuter in this and the other trials, such that he was able to ask the state to execute the union men that had struck his coal mines, in courtrooms that were watched over by militia with bayonets fixed.

Benjamin Yost had not recognized the men who killed him. Although Kerrigan had been described, along with Duffy, as hating the night watchman enough to plot his murder, Kerrigan won his own freedom by testifying against the union leaders. However, Kerrigan's wife testified in the courtroom that her husband had committed the murder. She testified that she refused to provide him with clothing while he was in prison, because he had "picked innocent men to suffer for his crime." She testifed that her speaking out was voluntary, and that she was interested only in telling the truth about the murder. Gowen cross-examined her, but could not shake her testimony. Others supported her testimony amid speculation that Kerrigan had received special treatment due to the fact that James McParlan was engaged to his sister-in-law, Mary Ann Higgins. The five defendants were sentenced to death.

Another four miners were put on trial and were found guilty on a charge of murder for which they had previously been found innocent. The testimony against them came from only two sources: James McParlan, and "Kelly the Bum." McParlan had no direct evidence, but had recorded that the four admitted their guilt to him. Kelly the Bum was being held in a cell for murder, and he had been quoted, "I would squeal on Jesus Christ to get out of here." In return for his testimony, the murder charge against him was dismissed.

Many years later in a different trial, James McParlan would tell another witness, a confessed mass murderer by the name of Harry Orchard, that Kelly the Bum not only had won his freedom for testifying against union leaders, he had been given one thousand dollars to "subsidize a new life abroad." McParlan was attempting to convince Orchard to accuse the leadership of an entirely different union, the Western Federation of Miners, of conspiracy to commit another murder.

The trial of Tom Munley for the murder of mine foreman Thomas Sanger and his friend, William Uren, relied entirely upon the testimony of James McParlan, and the eyewitness account of a witness. The witness stated under oath that he had seen the murderer clearly, and that Munley was not the murderer. Yet the jury accepted McParlan's testimony that Munley had privately confessed to the murder. Munley was sentenced to death.

The executions

On June 21, 1877, ten men were hanged in the prison at Pottsville, in Schuylkill County, and four were hanged at Mauch Chunk, in Carbon County. A scaffold had been erected in each prison. State militia with fixed bayonets surrounded the prisons and the scaffolds inside. Miners arrived with their wives and children from the surrounding areas, walking through the night to honor the accused, and by nine o'clock "the crowd in Pottsville stretched as far as one could see." The families were silent, which was "the people's way of paying tribute" to those about to die. Tom Munley's aged father had walked more than ten miles from Gilberton to assure his son that he knew of his innocence. Munley's wife had arrived a few minutes after they closed the gate, and they refused to open it even for close relatives to say their final good-byes. She screamed at the gate with grief, throwing herself against it until she collapsed, but she was not allowed to pass.

Michael J. Doyle and Hugh McGeehan were the first to be led to the scaffold. A moment before the trap was sprung, they joined hands and Doyle said to McGeehan, "Hughie, let's die like men." They were followed by Thomas Munley, James Carroll, James Roarity, James Boyle, Thomas Duffy, Edward J. Kelly, Alexander Campbell, John Donahue, Thomas P. Fisher, John Kehoe, Patrick Hester, Peter McHugh, Patrick Tully, Peter McManus, and Andrew Lanahan.

Two more of the nineteen condemned men, James McDonald and Charles Sharpe, were hanged at Mauch Chunk. They had known that a pardon from the governor was expected, but their execution was not delayed. Minutes after their bodies were cut from the ropes, the governor's reprieve arrived, too late to spare their lives.

The question of justice

Some writers declare unequivocally that justice was done. Others have argued that,

...punishment had gone too far, and that the guilt of some of the condemned was that of association more than participation and but half established by other condemned men seeking clemency for themselves.

Boyer and Morais wrote,

McParlan agreed to testify, and did testify, that all those whom Gowan wanted removed had freely and voluntarily confessed to him that they had committed various murders. His word was to be corroborated by various prisoners at various of the county's jails, freedom the reward for corroboration. Among those who buttressed McParlan's testimony at the ensuing trials was a prisoner known as Kelly the Bum, who admitted that he had committed every crime in the calendar. Another prisoner was one Jimmy Kerrigan whose wife testified that he himself had committed the murder with which he was charging the miners of the AOH..

Joseph G. Rayback, author of A History of American Labor, has observed:

The charge has been made that the Molly Maguires episode was deliberately manufactured by the coal operators with the express purpose of destroying all vestiges of unionism in the area... There is some evidence to support the charge... the "crime wave" that appeared in the anthracite fields came after the appearance of the Pinkertons, and... many of the victims of the crimes were union leaders and ordinary miners. The evidence brought against [the defendants], supplied by James McParlan, a Pinkerton, and corroborated by men who were granted immunity for their own crimes, was tortuous and contradictory, but the net effect was damning... The trial temporarily destroyed the last vestiges of labor unionism in the anthracite area. More important, it gave the public the impression... that miners were by nature criminal in character...

The aftermath

The Mollys were forced to disband in 1877 after being in existence for about thirty years because, in an effort commissioned by Reading Railroad president Franklin B. Gowen (who was also at the time the most influential mine owner in the area), Pinkerton National Detective Agency agents infiltrated the organization and informed on the activities of the members.

Although they are viewed unfavorably by traditional history, there are those who contend that the Molly Maguires, manifesting in the United States as a direct response to wage disputes with the coal industry, are more accurately described as a labor organization than a group of vigilantes, and that the allegations of their more violent crimes were baseless and without evidence. Howard Zinn mentions the Molly Maguires in Chapter 10 of his A People's History of the United States, citing them as an example of labor organization in response to the frequent, gross exploitation of workers by industry in the Depression-ridden days after the Civil War. Zinn mentions Philip Foner as someone who, after careful study of the evidence available, concludes the 19 members executed were done so for the simple reason that they coordinated strikes whenever wages were reduced. Foner points to the coal mine owners' own words in the Miners' Journal essentially admitting to this as their chief motive in using the law to pursue the Maguires.

When organized labor helped to elect Terence V. Powderly mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania two years after the Molly Maguire trials, the opposition vilified his team as the "Molly Maguire Ticket."

Franklin B. Gowen

District Attorney for Schuylkill County

The address of Mr. Gowen, and those of General Charles Albright, Hon. F.W. Hughes, and Guy E. Farquhar, Esq., added just the argument which the jury required to find a just verdict of "guilty of murder in the first degree".

Franklin B. Gowen (1836-1889), District Attorney for Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad

In November McAllister was convicted. Munley was hanged in the Pottsville jail on August 16 1876; and McAllister was hanged later.

About twenty members of the group were hanged after being convicted of complicity in the murders of about twenty-four mine managers.

From 1865 to 1875, post-war recession combined with a crime wave in the Coal Region to create a decade marred by murder, assault, and arson.

Four members of the Molly Maguires, Alexander Campbell, John "Yellow Jack" Donohue, Michael Doyle and Edward Kelly, were hanged on June 21 1877 at a Carbon County, Pennsylvania prison in Mauch Chunk (renamed Jim Thorpe in 1953), for the murder of mine bosses John P. Jones and Morgan Powell, following a trial that was later described by a Carbon County judge, John P. Lavelle, as follows:

The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows.

A " coffin notice", allegedly posted by Molly Maguires in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. It was presented by Franklin B. Gowen, along with other similar coffin notices, as evidence in an 1876 murder trial.

In popular culture

• A movie based on these events called The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris, was released in 1970.
• The Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear is partly based on the Molly Maguires.
• George Korson, a folklorist and journalist whom became fascinated with the livelihood of Pennsylvania's miners, wrote several songs and other writings regarding the topic -- best showcased in his composition "Minstrels of the Mine Patch", which has a section specifically on the Molly Maguires: "Coal Dust on the Fiddle".
• Irish folk band The Dubliners refer to the Molly Maguires in one of their songs, "Molly Maguires".
• Irish-American Folk Band "The Irish Balladeers" wrote and recorded "The Sons of Molly" based on this history. This song was later covered by the Irish-Canadian band "The Peelers".
• The Irish folk music/ska band Molly from Sweden was originally called "Molly Maguire".
• A popular Irish/Bluegrass/Cajun band in Liverpool, UK 1990 were named after The Molly Maguires.
• A musical was performed near Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania that told the story of the Molly Maguires. It was very popular in the area.

Further reading

Scholarly secondary sources

• Adams, Sean Patrick. "The US Coal Industry in the Nineteenth Century." EH.Net Encyclopedia, August 15 2001 scholarly overview
• Broehl, Jr., Wayne G. The Molly Maguires. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964; excellent scholarly study
• Gudelunas, Jr., William Anthony, and William G. Shade. Before the Molly Maguires: The Emergence of the Ethnoreligious Factor in the Politics of the Lower Anthracite Region: 1844-1972. New York: Arno Press, 1976. on local politics and ethnic conflicts
• Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998)
• Kenny, Kevin, "The Molly Maguires in Popular Culture," Journal of American Ethnic History (1995) 14(4): 27-46. Looks at 8 novels and a film to show how popular depictions have moved from negative to positive.
• Kenny, Kevin. "The Molly Maguires and the Catholic Church," Labor History 1995 36(3): 345-376. Reports the bishops vigorously attacked the Mollies and the AOF (Hibernians) to expel violence from the Irish community and make it law-abiding.
• Morn, Frank. The Eye that Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency ;;(1982)
• James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States of America, From the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896: Vol 8: 1877-1896 (NY: Macmillan, 1919) Chapter 2. online version
• Bimba, Anthony, "The Molly Maguires. New York: International Publishers, 1970
• Foner, Phillip, "A History of the Labor Movement in the United States." 4 vols. New York: International Publishers, 1947-1964.

Popular books

• Samuel P. Orth, The Armies of Labor (1920)-Chapter 4 has a good overview of late 19th century labor history.
• Zinn, Howard, "A People's History of the United States (1492-Present)" (1980; 2003)

Primary sources

• Dewees, Francis P. The Molly Maguires: The Origin, Growth, and Character of the Organization (1877; 1964)

External links

• History and scholarly resources
• Brief history of the Molly Maguires
• Coal mining, mine fires and the Molly Maguires
• Mining History of NY,NJ,PA,CT
• History and Ritual of Irish Fraternal Organizations: Ancient Order of Hibernians, Molly Maguires, Orangemen, and Royal Black Knights of the Camp of Israel
• Trial in Pottsville
• Eckley Miners' Village
• Website with detailed information on Eckley Miners' Village
• Ohio State University historical article on the Pinkerton infiltration
• Mollies and Black Diamonds
• Notes on Molly Maguires (film from Paramount Pictures)
• Source: Allan Pinkerton, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877)—American Social History Project.
• The "Eerie Handprint" of Molly Maguire Alexander Campbell in the Old Jim Thorpe Jail proclaiming eternal innocence. The handprint never goes away, June 21,1877