Gowen was concerned that at trial a perjured alibi would free the guilty parties. Therefore, he wanted Pinkerton “to investigate this mysterious order, find out its interior workings, expose its evil transactions, and see if the just laws of the State cannot again be made effective in bringing criminals to justice.”
This initial conversation was strictly about the suppression of crime and the protection of industry and had nothing to do with union matters, according to Pinkerton. So, after some consideration, he agreed, replying, “I will enter upon the business, but it will require time, sharp work, and plenty of both!” But, realizing that his current operatives were not accomplishing what needed to be done for a successful conclusion, he decided he would have to bring an entirely new man into the operation, this time as a deep-cover operative.
It would not be easy, but eventually he would find just the man for the job—and that man would be James McParlan.
CHAPTER 2
THE MOLLY MAGUIRES
Franklin Gowen was not the first person to hope that the outrages attributed to the Molly Maguires could be suppressed by the full force of the law. He was, however, the most determined opponent a society branded with that name had yet faced. And there had been more than one group called that in the previous decades.
The name “Molly Maguires” first appeared in the 1840s in the countryside of northern Ireland, ascribed to a secret society engaged in agrarian violence—threats, beatings, burnings, property damage, and occasionally murder—against English landlords, their agents, and other Irish engaging in land practices considered by the Mollys to be unjust. It was not the first such underground organization in Ireland but was rather part of a lineage of secret societies that existed as far back as the 1760s.1 That decade saw the advent of a movement known as the Whiteboys, because of their practice of wearing white shirts or frocks over their clothes and white bands around their hats while making nighttime raids expressing their opposition to rack rents, evictions of tenant farmers, and tithe collections. The British government attempted to repress the Whiteboys by outlawing them and using military intervention, but the illegal behaviors only increased. Eventually, the expression “Whiteboyism” was applied not just to the original organization but as a generic term for rural violence.
The Whiteboys were succeeded by other kindred groups, such as the Defenders and the Threshers. Early in the nineteenth century the Society of Ribbonmen, a secret Catholic brotherhood named for the green ribbon worn by its members, was established in opposition to the Protestant Orange Order and as an ongoing protest against landlords, land agents, and tithes to the Protestant Church. As with Whiteboyism, the term “Ribbonism” became a catchall for different movements espousing agrarian aggression.
The Molly Maguires had appeared by the mid-1840s in north Leinster, north Connacht, and Ulster. The identity of the original Molly Maguire remains a topic of debate, and stories and legends abound about whence the organization’s name sprang, although they tend to be more folkloric than historical.2 One tale states that she was a destitute old widow evicted from her house by armed bailiffs; another that she was the owner of an illegal tavern in which the society’s members met; and a third that she was a woman of such phenomenal strength and charisma that she led nighttime raids herself. One theory places the origins of the movement in the Irish Rebellion of 1641, in honor of Connor Maguire, Second Baron of Enniskillen, who was executed for high treason after the failed attempt by Catholic gentry to seize power in Ireland.3 Thomas Foster, an English journalist and lawyer who produced newspaper articles and a book about his travels in Ireland in 1845–46, indicated that the movement had its beginnings in 1835 with the eviction of Catholics living on the Ballinamuck estate of Lord Lorton in County Longford. Another mid-nineteenth-century recorder of Irish life, land agent W. Steuart Trench, wrote that it developed on the Shirley estate at Carrickmacross in County Monaghan in 1843.4
What is certain is that some members of the society marauded while dressed in women’s clothing, which was seen either as honoring the concept of Molly Maguire or as representing the Irish mother begging bread for her children.5 As Trench wrote: “These ‘Molly Maguires’ were generally stout active young men, dressed up in women’s clothes, with faces blackened or otherwise disguised; sometimes they wore crape over their countenances, sometimes they smeared themselves in the most fantastic manner with burnt cork about their eyes, mouths, and cheeks. In this state they used suddenly to surprise the unfortunate grippers, keepers, or process-servers, and either duck them in bog-holes, or beat them in the most unmerciful manner.”6
Actually, men of a much wider range of professions were attacked: landlords’ agents, peasant farmers who settled on land from which previous tenants had been evicted, and shopkeepers and merchants who charged rates that were considered too high. Crops and fences were damaged, grazing animals driven off or killed, and small plots and buildings burned. It was widely accepted in the past that such actions had nationalist or religious undertones, but a more recent assessment suggests that these attacks were attempts to resist changes to traditional patterns of land use due to agrarian modernization. The violence, therefore, could be interpreted as a means “to correct transgressions against traditional moral and social codes.”7
But how did that translate to the New World—who were the American Molly Maguires and how were they related to their Irish counterparts? For decades it was accepted that both were parts of a single, well organized, conspiratorial society driven by ethnic and religious issues, suggesting that the Molly Maguires transferred either directly from Ireland to Pennsylvania, or with a stop in Britain en route.8 But it appears more likely that the pattern of outrages in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal area was a result of the demographics of immigration; that is, the high number of immigrants who settled there from northwest and north-central Ireland—particularly Donegal—brought with them that region’s distinctive mode of direct, violent action in pursuit of what they deemed justice.9 And because “Molly Maguires” was an accepted term in the north of Ireland, it is likely that those in Pennsylvania took the same name due to familiarity with it.10
• • •
To the average citizen of Schuylkill County, unaware of this historic background, the name Molly Maguires first appeared in October 1857, introduced by Benjamin Bannan, the intensely anti-Irish editor of The Miners’ Journal and Pottsville General Advertiser, the region’s leading Republican newspaper. Bannan—who tended to be supportive of mine owners and operators, unsympathetic to workers, and vitriolic toward Roman Catholicism and Irish immigrants11—reported that fifty-five fraud indictments had been passed down by a Philadelphia grand jury against inspectors for the 1856 presidential election. “Every one of these inspectors were Irishmen,” he wrote, “belonging no doubt to the order of ‘Molly Maguires,’ a secret Roman Catholic association which the Democracy is using for political purposes.”12
Throughout his forty-four-year tenure as editor (1829–73), Bannan, a devout Presbyterian with an extreme nativist agenda, regularly castigated Irish immigrants for the standard stereotypes—drunkenness, laziness, turpitude, ignorance, and criminality. After that initial article, the Molly Maguires and the Buckshots—a name sometimes applied as an alternative to Molly Maguires and at other points to an entirely different organization—began taking a regular battering in his columns. So did the Irish fraternal organization the Ancient Order of Hibernians and its series of lodges scattered across northeast Pennsylvania. As in that initial article, Bannan’s early charges against such organizations concentrated on political corruption rather than violence.13 However, that changed during the Civil War, when the anthracite coalfields—already among the most important economic regions in the Union—also became some of the most troublesome.
The special significance of the region was that it contained approximately 95 percent of the western hemisphere’s known supply—estimated at sixteen billion tons—of one of
nature’s most prized gifts: anthracite, also called “hard coal” or “black coal.” Anthracite is purer, harder, and of a higher carbon content than other grades of coal, and it therefore burns longer, slower, and cleaner. In 1808, Jesse Fell developed an L-shaped, open-air grate that allowed it to be kept in a state of continuous combustion with a steady flow of air. Then, in the 1820s and 1830s, new types of stoves made it possible to use anthracite for “luxury heating” in hearths, kitchens, and public buildings much more cheaply than wood, and it was soon being used for steam engines and became the coal of choice for powering blast furnaces for smelting iron ores.14
The anthracite region, covering approximately 485 square miles and parts of seven counties, was a wild area split asunder by a series of rugged mountains interspaced with valleys.15 Although there was some arable land, the steep, heavily wooded hills and rocky outcrops made widespread agriculture difficult. Instead, the region’s economic mainstay was based around its four vast coal beds. Two of these—the Northern Field, running through the district of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton and the Lehigh or Eastern Middle Field centering around Hazelton—were located in what was called the northern or upper anthracite region.
The other two fields—in the lower or southern region—were the centers for the Molly Maguire saga. The Southern Field was some fifty miles long by up to eight miles wide and extended from Lebanon and Dauphin counties across central Schuylkill County and into Carbon County, the seat of which was Mauch Chunk (since renamed Jim Thorpe). North of this—nestled between Broad Mountain and Mahanoy Mountain—was the Western Middle, or Mahanoy, Field, about thirty-six miles long and including Girardville, Shenandoah, and Mahanoy City, the districts where James McParlan would become known as Jim McKenna.
Although Pottsville, the Schuylkill County seat, was only about ten miles from Shenandoah in a straight line, they were in isolated valleys separated by untamed intervening mountain ridges. Travel in the region was extremely difficult, as the train lines tended to run along individual valleys and only crossed between them at occasional gaps. Therefore it was much easier to travel within a valley than between them, which led the Pottsville residents to refer to Shenandoah, in what they thought of as the distant northern part of the county, as “over the mountain.” Even Mahanoy City was separated from Shenandoah by the five-hundred-foot-high Bear Ridge. This isolation of towns, and their even more remote satellite hamlets, or “patches,” could be so complete that individuals who lived only five miles from a settlement might be total strangers there, a fact that played a key role in the way the Molly Maguires functioned.
More than hills and forests separated the northern and southern anthracite regions, however. The entire economic structure of the two areas was a series of contrasts. In the north, the fields were largely controlled by major transportation companies—such as the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad—that had expanded into the coal industry and shipped the anthracite to New York City.16 The southerly fields, on the other hand, had numerous small, independent operators. In 1853, no fewer than 86 different mining operations were located in Schuylkill County, running 115 collieries.17 Due to the links by river, canal, and railroad, it was natural for these companies to send coal south to Philadelphia. Thus, in the southern anthracite region, rather than large companies managing every aspect of extraction, transportation, and sales, such tasks were controlled by separate operators. As a result, the southern fields were considerably less economically secure than their northern counterparts. In the southern region, for example, miners’ pay was often only 80 percent that of their northern colleagues, and many southern companies collapsed after only a few years.
Following a brief economic downturn at the beginning of the Civil War—due to the enlistment of thousands of miners—the demands for anthracite by suppliers of war materials caused a boom that drove up companies’ profits and miners’ wages. Seeing the possibilities of financial windfalls, the Reading Railroad began to buy out smaller transport companies to consolidate its position as Schuylkill County’s primary coal carrier.
However, the anthracite region—and particularly Schuylkill County—proved highly unstable. Great numbers of laborers throughout the country were against the Civil War, seeing it as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Nowhere was this feeling stronger than in the coalfields, where Irish immigrants replaced many of those who had enlisted and filled the new jobs created by the increase in demand. Among these workers, who tended to occupy the lower-grade positions, there was a great deal of sympathy for the South, as well as anxiety about freed slaves replacing them in the mines.18 Therefore, much of the violence that initially brought widespread attention to the region was related not just to labor issues but to political protest—specifically, draft resistance.
In mid-June 1862, in Audenried, Carbon County, the first murder occurred that would later be legally attributed to the Molly Maguires. At a meeting of some two hundred people preparing for Fourth of July celebrations, mine foreman Frank W. Langdon denounced a group of unruly Irish miners who had displayed antiwar sentiments. Among that group was John Kehoe, who reputedly wrapped an American flag around his hand and struck Langdon in the face, following which he spit upon another flag hanging on a porch. Shortly thereafter, having left the meeting, Langdon was given such a severe beating with large stones that he died three days later. Langdon had worked as a “ticket boss” in the mines, which entailed checking cars of coal to assess how much of it was waste, for which the miners would not be paid.19 Such a position was naturally unpopular, and revenge was a likely motive for the murder. In fact, Kehoe had allegedly threatened Langdon only three weeks previously, saying: “You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you before long,” and had been part of the group of men that Langdon denounced and from which the comment was thereupon heard: “If we had the son of a bitch down here, we would kill him.”20 But although arrests quickly followed, the grand jury failed to bring charges, and the crime officially remained unsolved for more than fourteen years.
Trouble erupted numerous times in Schuylkill and Carbon counties in the next year and a half, showing significant differences from that of the prewar period. The Buckshots had traditionally chosen not to kill their victims, “but to discipline them by bodily punishment that ceased just short of murder,” including the use of a weapon known as “Donolan’s cat.”21 But as the Civil War progressed, not only did more weapons—particularly revolvers—become readily available, but life seemed cheaper in the face of the massive slaughter; consequently, attacks in the anthracite region became progressively more deadly.
The violence escalated to such an extent that when lists of conscripts were announced in October 1862 in response to the Militia Act—which required states to supply men for the Union army—military force was required to suppress the resistance in the heavily Irish and Democratic community of Cass Township in central Schuylkill County.22 It appeared there would be no way to meet the required numbers without sustained trouble, because, according to the officer in charge of the quota: “In several of the mining districts there were positive indications of revolutionary disloyalty, and it was especially manifested in Schuylkill, where the Molly Maguires were in the zenith of their power.”23
Hoping to avoid riots and the resultant military intervention that might damage the conscription program, President Lincoln essentially agreed to turn a blind eye to exempting Schuylkill County from the draft as long as the pretense of carrying it out had been fulfilled. Benjamin Bannan, the county’s draft commissioner, presented a series of fictitious affidavits showing that the quota of Cass Township had been filled by volunteers, and the authorities released the area from having to supply conscripts, temporarily steering clear of trouble.24
Not for long, however. Serious confrontations threatened to erupt again when the Enrollment Act of March 1863 established a federal draft due to a shortfall in state-run conscription. Antagonism toward the ac
t was fostered by a provision under which a payment of three hundred dollars allowed an individual to evade military service. Although this was more than a year’s wages for most working in the mines, it was easily affordable for the wealthy, such as Franklin Gowen, who paid the fee and avoided serving.25 In response to the Enrollment Act, between three thousand and ten thousand draft resisters reportedly organized in Schuylkill County, creating the threat of armed rebellion. Troops were again sent in, with the understanding that “if the miners resist the law forcibly, I hope you will make a severe example among them.”26
The resulting military crackdown kept the area relatively quiet through the end of the draft. However, the underlying hostility remained, as was apparent to Charles Albright, a lawyer who had practiced in Mauch Chunk before joining the Union army, in which he rose to brigadier general. In a letter to President Lincoln, Albright noted that a powerful group had been terrorizing the anthracite region. “They dictate the prices for their work, and if their employers don’t accede they destroy and burn coal breakers, houses, and prevent those disposed from working. . . . The life of no Union man is secure among them, and the murder of such a citizen is almost a nightly occurrence. . . . These men are mostly Irish and call themselves Buckshots.”27
It was not until after the war that the name Buckshots was consistently replaced in the press by Molly Maguires. Meanwhile, killings continued to bring the organizations into the spotlight. On January 2, 1863—the day after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation—James Bergen, a mine manager from Coal Castle, a patch five miles from Pottsville, was murdered by five strangers who knocked on his door. Gowen, then district attorney, found himself without the evidence for a prosecution. On November 5 that same year, a similar murder occurred, this time near Audenried, when mine owner George K. Smith was brutally murdered at home in full view of his family by a party of about twenty-five men with blackened faces. The New-York Times described the killers as a “riotous crowd of Irishmen, who, under the names of Buckshots and Molly Maguires, have disciplined themselves into an organization, in but few instances dissimilar to the Indian Thug.”28
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