Twenty coal miners, alleged to be leaders of the "Molly Maguire" a gang blamed for social conflict in the coal regions, were hanged by the "state" for the crime of attempting to organize workers.
"Historians feel the Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency [the Pinkertons]. A private police force [Coal and Iron Police] arrested the alleged defenders, & private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom & the gallows." — Carbon County Judge John P. Lavelle, "Hard Coal Dockets" (1994) The biggest mine-owner had himself appointed special prosecutor.
Members of the "Mollies" were accused of murder, arson, kidnapping and other crimes, in part based on allegations by Franklin B. Gowen and the testimony of a Pinkerton detective, James McParland. The Molly Maguires originated in Ireland, where secret societies with names such as Whiteboys and Peep o' Day Boys were common beginning in the 18th century and through most of the 19th century.
During the mid 19th century, coal mining came to dominate northeastern Pennsylvania. About 22,000 coal miners worked in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. 5,500 of these were children between the ages of seven and sixteen years. By the 1870s, powerful financial syndicates controlled the railroads and the coalfields. Wages were low, working conditions were atrocious, and deaths and serious injuries numbered in the hundreds each year. In the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, some 20,000 Irish workers had arrived in Schuylkill County. It was a time of rampant beatings and murders in the mining district. The union had grown powerful; thirty thousand members — eighty-five percent of Pennsylvania's anthracite miners — had joined.
The years of 1873 through 1879 were marked by one of the worst depressions in the nation's history, caused by economic over-expansion, a stock crash, and a decrease in the money supply. 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.
Franklin B. Gowen, the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company and "the wealthiest anthracite coal mine owner in the world". Gowen had built an employers combination, bringing all of the mine operators into an employers' association known as the Anthracite Board of Trade. In addition to the railroad, Gowen owned two-thirds of the coal mines in southeastern Pennsylvania. Gowen decided to force a strike and showdown with the miners union, the Workingmen's Benevolent Association (WBA). 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. The state militia and the Coal and Iron Police patrolled the district. Union leaders were defamed by the press and denounced from altar and pulpit. Strike organisers and union officials were arrested and two imprisoned. In Schuylkill County the striking 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."
After six months the strike was defeated and the miners returned to work, accepting the twenty percent cut in pay.
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.
When the miners’ union went down to defeat , the Molly Maguires stepped into the vacuum. Six of the 16 assassinations attributed to them took place that summer. The Mollies were up against the violence of the militias, the violence of the vigilantes and the violence of gang warfare. By killing mine-owners and superintendents by the dozen, by beating up hundreds of others, the Mollies unquestionably improved the working conditions not only for themselves but for all the miners in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania, and saved many workers' lives. There is no doubt, however, that many Molly Maguire killings were motivated by petty, personal grudges, often against other ethnic groups such as the Welsh Modocs gang.
The juries excluded Catholics. Their prosecutors wore full military regalia. Defense witnesses were evicted from their homes, cut off from the company store, blacklisted, or imprisoned. The chief witness against them was an informer. None of the hanged was apprehended in an act of violence. Informers, agents provocateurs, backroom deals for pardons for snitches and unmitigated capitalist cruelty was the order of the day.
On June 21, 1877, six men were hanged in the prison at Pottsville (James Carroll, James Roarity, Hugh McGehan, James Boyle, Thomas Munley, Thomas Duffy), and four at Mauch Chunk, Carbon County (Edward Kelly, Michael Doyle, Alexander Campbell, John Donahue). A scaffold had been erected in the Carbon County Jail. State militia with fixed bayonets surrounded the prisons and the scaffolds. 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. Ten more went to the gallows over the next three years.
Eugene V. Debs wrote:
“They all protested their innocence and all died game. Not one of them betrayed the slightest evidence of fear or weakening. Not one of them was a murderer at heart. All were ignorant, rough and uncouth, born of poverty and buffeted by the merciless tides of fate and chance… To resist the wrongs of which they and their fellow-workers were victims and to protect themselves against the brutality of their bosses, according to their own crude notions, was the prime object of the organization of the Molly Maguires… It is true that their methods were drastic, but it must be remembered that their lot was hard and brutalizing; that they were the neglected children of poverty, the product of a wretched environment… The men who perished upon the scaffold as felons were labor leaders, the first martyrs to the class struggle in the United States.”
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