Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)
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Voting Rights
In the Confederate states of the South, African Americans did not have the right to
vote, and this included not only the slaves who made up the vast bulk of the Afri-
can Americ ans in the South, but also freed African Americans, many excluded
owing to property qualifications being enforced. During the Confederacy, these
rules remained in force. As a result, with the Union victories in the Civil War
and the proclamation of the abolition of slavery in the Confederacy in 1863,
and throughout the entire nation by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Cons titution in 1865 , radical Republicans felt that all African Americans should
be allowed to vote. Indeed, most of those African Americans who did vote tended
to vote Republican until the rise of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
However, the individual laws regarding the right to vote was addressed on a
state basis, and the populations in some states, determined to restrict civil rights
for African Americans, introduced the Black Codes. In the Fourteenth Amend-
ment to the U.S. Constitution, which cam e into effect in July 1868, citizenship
rights we re extended to Af rican Americans, and most people assumed that this
would en franchise them. It was not until the Fifteenth Amendment proclaimed
on March 30, 1870, which forbade any state to deny the right to vote to any person
because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Although it was thought by many legislators that the Fifteenth Amendment
would ensure that African Americans could vote, six states in the South introduced
educational tests and property qualifications that were applied to all people except
those who had voted prior to 1867, or who had ancestors who voted prior to 1867.
Because of this latter qualification, it became known as the “grandfather clause.”
The idea came from the S outh Carolina lawyer Edward McCrady Jr., who based
his legal views on the nativist move in Massachusetts in 1857, which introduced
a literary test for anybody who had not yet been registered to vote as a way of
excluding Irish immigrants. This was obviously discriminatory against African
Americans, but the rules remai ned in force until they were declared unconstitu-
tional by the U.S. Supreme Court, who found in the judgment Guinn v. United
States (1915) that these laws violated the Fifteenth Amendment. The Court’s deci-
sion was expected because the grandfather clauses had already lapsed in all the
states except Oklahoma.
—Justin Corfield
456 New Orlean s Riot (1866)
Further Reading
Lewinso n, Paul. Race, Class & Party: A History of Negro S uffrage and Wh ite Politics in
the South. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963.
Matthews, Donald R., and Prothro, James W. Negroes and the New Southern Politics.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966.
William son, Chilton. American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760–1960.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960.
New Orleans Riot (1866) 457
Molly Maguires (1870s)
The Molly Maguires were a shadowy and almost mystical organization of Irish
coal miner s that wa s active in the six northeastern counties of Pennsylvania’s
anthracite region between 1862 and 1876. In two distinct waves of violence,
the Molly Maguires were accused of industrial sabotage, armed robberies, physi-
cal assaults, and at least 16 murders. On Black Thursday, June 21, 1877, 10 con-
victed Molly Maguires were hung for murder, and over the next two years,
another 10 convicted Irish miners, including John Kehoe, who was considered
to be the “King of the Mollies,” were also hung. During the 1870s, the Molly
Maguire conspiracy was also blamed for outbreaks of violence in the Illinois
and Ohio coal fields.
The name and origin of the organization, like most secret societies, remains
obscure. I n his popular book, The Realities of Irish Life,W.SteuartTrench
noted that he had come across the society in County Monaghan, Ireland, during
the 1840s and 1850s. In the troubled history of Ireland, local peasant organiza-
tions dedicated to the cause of retributive justice against their landlords and their
agents were common. From the Whiteboy s of the 18th century, to the Ribbon-
menoftheearly19thcentury,theyhaveoftenbeenportrayedasheroesin
romantic, nationalistic histories of Ireland. In his book, Trench tended to link
all such societies together, as did James McParlan, the Pinkerton detective hired
to penetrate the Molly Maguries in October 1873. In his initial report, McParlan,
himself an Ulster Catholic from County Armagh, suggested that the tradition of
Ribbonmen violence was brought to the United States, via England, by the Irish
workers who committed their acts of violence behind the respectable fac¸ade of
such organizations as the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, an Irish fraternal
society founded in New York City in 1836. Unlike some earlier 18th-century
secret societies, the Mollies in the United States did not disguise themselves in
woman’s clothes, but their name is said to have represented a mythical Irish
woman who had begged for bread for her children during the Great Irish Famine
of the 1840s.
Contemporary accounts of the Mollies were almost universally hostile, and the
notion that they were murderous sociopaths was continued in early 20th-century
histories as well as popular works of fiction such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s
459
Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Valley of Fear (1915). More recent popular cul-
ture, e specially in the Irish and Iri sh American communities, has transformed
them into heroic proletarian revolutionaries or innocent victims caught up in the
evil machinations of greedy mine owners. More recent historical research, how-
ever, has temp ered both these extreme views to the extent that it is now thought
that although there were clearly incidents of retributive violence occurring in
Pennsylvania, there was probably no Molly Maguire conspiracy. Irish coal work-
ers who fa ced harsh worki ng conditions and blatant discrimination undoubtedly
did react to local conditions in a violent manner, and it is now clear that of the
51 men either accused or convicted of Molly Maguire activities, a similar cultural
background was shared by them. The clear majority of the accused came from
either County Donegal or north central Ireland. Donegal was a remote and prelit-
erate Gaelic speaking area that, in the 1830s and 1840s, had witnessed an unusual
spate of rural violence. This had accompanied new forms of landholding and land
usage introduced by the powerful, and often absent, regional aristocracy. This pat-
tern of violence seemed to be replicated in Pennsylvania during two separate out-
breaks in June 1862 and September 1875. Mine superintendents, foremen, a
policeman named Benjamin Yost, and a justice of the peace, Thomas Gwyther,
were murdered by unknown assailants. Even in the United States, which witnessed
an increasing amount of industrial violence in the second half of the 19th century,
this record of violence in Pennsylvania was unusual.
The coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania were an important industri al center, but
following an early economic boom in the 1830s, the region suffered a series of eco-
nomic recessi ons after the fina ncial collap se of 1837. This cycle of economic
decline pro duced local labor unrest , sporadic vi olence, and the first strike by the
miners in July 1842. The first actual assassination, the murder of Frank W. Langdon
in June 1862, was followed by five other murders from 1863 to 1868. Although the
nativist editor of the Miners Journal, Benjamin Bannan, had initially blamed the
rising violence in the coalfields on the Catholic Irish immigrants in 1857, the early
murders were not blamed on the Molly Maguires until the later trials in the 1870s.
The ethic antipathy between the Irish coal workers and the Welsh miners
undoubtedly heightened unrest in the area, as did the later Irish opposition to the
American Civil War after 1862. If the coalfields themselves were never a safe place
to work, surprisingly the Avondale Mine disaster of September 1869 brought some
respite to the r ising violence. Following this disast er, whi ch claimed the lives of
over 110 mine rs, the coalfields witnessed the rapid rise of the Workingmen’s
Benevolent Association (WBA), a nonviolent union that had enrolled over
30,000 miner workers into its ranks by 1872. Union membership eased tensions
between the Irish and Welsh miners, but the onset of the 1873 depression, together
with the provocative actions of Franklin B. Gowen, the president of the
460 Molly Maguires (1870s)
Philadelphia and Reading Coal Company, rekindled the violence, w hich began to
reappear in 1874.
The son of an Irish immigrant, Gowen had risen rapidly as a lawyer in the rail-
road business, and by 1872, he had become one of the largest coalfield owners in
Pennsylvania. He had succeeded in driving many of the smaller owners out of
business, and when the price of coal began to fall in 1872, he persuaded the other
owners to join the Anthracite Board of Trade, a mine owner’s organization. With
unemployment and unrest increasing, Gowen engaged the Pinkerton agents James
McParlan and P. M. Cummings to infiltrate respectively the Ancient Order of the
Hibernians (AOH) and the WBA, hoping to establish links with the Molly
Maguires, the organization he thought was behind the recent unrest. Determined
to break the WBA to maximize profits, the Anthracite Board of Trade cut wages
by 20 percent in December 1874, which in turn produced a strike that lasted until
June 1875. The strike did break the union, but the Irish mine workers associated
with AOH refused to return to work and the level of violence sud denly rose. The
role of McParlan in the violence itself has been a matter of speculati on in that he
possibly acted as an agent provocateur, an accusation first suggested at the 1876
trials. Adopting the alias of James McKenna, he found work at Shenandoah in
Northumberland County, joined the WBA, and was inducted into the AOH in
April 1874. It was his evidence that the AOH was linked to the Molly Maguires
that convicted a number of the miners on the notion of guilt by association. How-
ever, he certainly knew that some of the attacks would happen before they did, and
he also supplied information about suspected Mollies to Gowen, which resulted in
vigilante attacks on the some miners and their families. The level of violence,
especially the six assassinations of mine officials beginning in July 1875 and end-
ing in September 1875, attracted national attention, and the idea of a Molly
Maguire conspiracy was largely generated by Gowen himself.
That many of the accused were involved in the crimes is undoubtedly true, but
the testimony of paid informants, together with that of McParlan, sealed the fated
of a number of the accused. The trails began in January 1876, with Gowen acting
as a special state prosecutor. Of the initial 10 convicted defendants, it now seems
probable that Thomas Duffy was innocent of the murder of Benjamin Yost, as
was the later-convicted James Roarity, but both were convicted on circumstantial
evidence. This is also true of John Kehoe, who was convicted of the 1862 murder
of Frank Langdon. In 1980, the then-governor of Pennsylvania, Milton Shapp, par-
doned Kehoe for the murder. Nonetheless, all 20 of the convicted Molly Maguires
were publicly hung in what the historian Kevin Kenny has described as powerful,
intimidatory rituals.
The executions ended the activities of the Molly Maguires, and in the industrial
unrest that accompanied the great railroad strike of 1877, the coalfields of eastern
Molly Maguires (1870s) 461
Pennsylvania remained quiet. The v iolence at the Pittsburgh railroad yard s led to
troops shooting upon the strikers, killing 20; and in Scranton, a citizen vigilante
group also opened fire on the strikers, resulting in the wounding of 54 and the deaths
of 6 others. When the Irish-born Terence Powderly was elected major of Scranton, he
was accused of being a Molly Maguire. In December 1889, Franklin Gowen com-
mitted suicide, but many thought he had been murdered by the Molly Maguires in
revenge. The memory of the Molly Maguires lives on in popular memory, for the
Dubliners, the Irish Rovers, and the Irish Balladeers have all recorded songs about
them. Later interest in them was also generated by The Molly Maguires, a 1970 film
in which Sean Connery played John Kehoe while James Harris gave a powerful, and
not altogether unsympathetic, performance as McParlan.
—Rory T. Cornish
See also all entries under Great Railroad Strikes (1877); Haymarket Riot (1886);
Homeste ad Strike (1892–1893); Pu llman Strike; Lattimer Massacre (1894); Bl a ck Patch
War; Ludlow Massacre (1914); Bosto n Police Strike (1919); Battle of Blair Mountain
(1921); Bonus Army (1932); Toledo Auto-Li te Strik e (1934); World Trade Organization
Protests (1999).
Further Reading
Bimba, Anthony. The Molly Maguires. New York: International Publishers, 1950.
Broehl, Wayne G., Jr. The Molly Maguires. Cam bridg e, MA: Harvard University Press,
1964.
Coleman, James W. Th e Molly Maguire Riots: Industrial Conflict in the Pennsylvania
Coal Region. Richmond, VA: Garrett and Massie, 1964.
Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press,
1998.
Kenny, Kevin. “The Molly Maguires in Popular Culture.” Journal of American Ethnic
History 14 (Summer 1995): 27–46.
462 Molly Maguires (1870s)
Irish Americans
One of the earliest accounts of the Irish in America is the legend of St. Brendan, a
monastic saint who, with a number of both pilgrims and nonbelievers, set out onto
the Atlantic Ocean from Ireland in the early sixth century in search of the Garden
of Eden. The result of Brendan’s seven-year voyage was the discovery of “The Isle
of the Blessed.” Whether or not this isle was, in fact, America is a matter of great
debate. Whatever the case may be, it is a fact that Irish immigration to America
reached unprecedented rates by the mid-19th century, due not only to the great
potato famine of 1845–1848, but as a r esult of intense economic displacement
and a sharp decline in the standard of living of many by the early 1800s.
There were obvious regional differences among the “new” European immi-
grants of the late 19th century to America. However, there appears to be a common
impetus for, and similar patterns of, emigration from their respective homelands
throughout Europe. America had the promise of political freedom and economic
opportunity that was lacking in many of the European countries, and these were
founda tions upon which many immigrants hoped to build as they and th eir fami-
lies made new lives f or themselves in the United States. Patterns of immigration
from Irelan d to America, however, differed from other Europeans in a variety of
ways. By the late 18th century, Ireland was populated more densely than any other
European country, and while it is true that there was limited socioeconomic mobil-
ity throughout Europe especially in regards to land ownership, the problem i n
Ireland was much more severe.
The Irish constituted approximately 10 percent of the population of the United
States in 1790 (Dolan 2008), and while the landless and impoverished constituted
a large portion of Irish immigrants to America prior to 1845, small Irish land-
owners were not able to survive the destructive repercussions of the potato famine.
So they, too, fled—not only to America, but to England f or those who could not
afford transport across the Atlantic. High rents, evictions, limited industrial oppor-
tunities, religious divisions, and a variety of other problems plagued the Irish even
after the famine, which resulted in continued emigration from Ireland in the sec-
ond half of the 19th century.
The number of Irish immigrants to America peaked at 914,119 during the nine-
year period from 1851 to 1860. Thirty years later, however, from 1881 to 1890, the
655,482 Irish was the highest number among any group of immigrants to America—
from Europe or otherwise. (Lord and Lord 1972). Although the earliest wave of Irish
immigrants set tled thr oughout Appalachia in p arts of Kentucky, Tennessee, West
Virginia, and Pennsylvania, the second wave of immigrants tended to settle where
they arrived—through the ports of the American northeast in places such as Boston,
463
Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia. Irish immigrants were conscripted into
the American Civil War; they worked in the mines, in the mills, and the factories.
Pennsylvania, in particular, provided economic opportunities for the Irish, first in
the form of farming, and later in coal mining and industry.
—Jacqueline M. Cavalier
Further Reading
Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban Am erica.Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press , 1985.
Coffey, Michael, and Terry Golway, eds. The Irish in America. New York: Hyperion, 1997.
Dolan, Jay P. The Irish Americans. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
Lord, Clifford Lee, and Elizabeth H. Lord. Historical Atlas of the United States.
New York: Holt Publishers, 1972.
Pennsylvania
Situated between New York to the north, New Jersey to the east, and Maryland to
the south, Pennsylvania on the eve of colonization in the 17th century was home to
several Native American tribes including the Sh awnee, the Susquehannock, and
member tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. Although, initially, the Swedes and
the Dutch battled over trading rights in the region, by 1676, English laws and civil
government were introduced by the Duke of York and, in 1681, by charter granted
from the king of England to William Penn, the colony of Pennsylvania was estab-
lished. A number of groups, including English, Germans, Scotch-I rish, Africans,
and many others, came to settle the colony throughout the 18th century and, on
the eve of independence from England in 1776, the population of Pennsylvania
was approximately 275,000, including 11,000 slaves, which made it the third-
largest American colony at that time.
Traditionally, agriculture proved to beaprosperouseconomicfoundationfor
the settlers to Pennsylvania. However, an abundance of natural resources made it
conducive to the early development of industries such as textile production, saw-
mills and gist mills, as well as iron manufacture. The lay of the land made the sale
and transport of various goods, first by water and later by coach and railroad, rel-
atively easy. Access to waterways such as the Monongahela, Ohio, and Allegheny
rivers of the southwest and the Susquehanna and Lackawanna rivers of the north-
east allowed commercial activity to flourish throughout Pennsylvania, with Phila-
delphia becoming an important center of business and trade by 1776.
464 Molly Maguires (1870s)
After independence was won from the British and the Constitution of the
United States of America came into effect on March 4, 1789, Pe nnsylvania con-
tributed to the overall economic success of th e new nation in a numb er of ways,
due largely to the wealth of natural resources that were concentrat ed in the state.
Coal production, in particular, began in the mid-1700s as a means to support the
colonial iron industry, which was of vital importance to the goal of independence.
The coa l mines of Pennsylvania produce two specific types of coal; anthracite,
which is otherwise known as “hard” coal concentrated largely in the counties of
eastern Pennsylvania, and bituminous, or “soft” coal, concentrated primarily in
the counties of western Pennsylvania. Coal fueled the growth of numerous indus-
tries in the United States, and more specifically, i n Pennsylvania throughout the
19th century, especially as railroads expanded and the desire for steel rails
increased. As railroad, mining, and steel corporations grew, however, industrial
strife and labor struggle became a common theme among them. The state legisla-
ture of Pennsylvania, for example, did not attempt to pass regulations for the pro-
tection of miners until after t he American Civil War; therefore, in dividual
operators were permitted to conduct their own affairs as they saw fit. By the
mid-19th century, problems with labor organization, coupled with a rising tide of
nationalism among the Irish in America, gave rise to a number of secret societies
throughout the anthracite coal regions of eastern Pennsylvania, and the most infa-
mous among them were the Molly Maguires.
—Jacqueline M. Cavalier
Further Reading
Coleman, J. Walter. The Molly Maguire Riots: Industrial Conflict in the Pennsylvania Coal
Region. New York: Arno & the New York Times, 1969.
Lord, Clifford Lee, and Elizabeth H. Lord. Historical Atlas of the United States.New
York: Holt Publishers, 1972.
U.S. Department of Labor. “A Pictorial Walk through the 20th Century: The Irish in Min-
ing.” R eport from the U.S. Department of Labor, Mine Safety and Health
Administration, January 30, 2009.
Unionism
The anthracite region of Pennsylvania includes the counties of Schuylkill, Carbon,
Luzerne, and Lackawanna in the Wyoming Valley region. The mining of anthra-
cite coal began in 1775 near Pittston, Pennsylvania, in Luzerne County. One of
the first recorded industrial uses of anthracite coal was in 1788 for the heating
Molly Maguires (1870s) 465