Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)

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and drawing of iron for nail production. The ﬁrst recorded anthracite company,

Lehigh Coal Mining Company, was formed in 1820, and in little more than

20 years, the ﬁrst documented mine strike occurred in 1822.

The possibility for success in labor organization was limited. Employer’s

opposition, racial and ethnic divisions, and mismanagement or poor leadership

were just a few of the reasons for the difﬁculty in creating a cohesive labor organi-

zation. In addition, there were divisions among the miners and the laborers in the

mines, particularly in terms of compensation. For example, in 184 8, the average

wage among miners in the anthracite region was $1.25 per day as compared to a

laborer’s wage of $0.83 per day (Bimba 1932, 25). As the demand for labor grew

during the American Civil War, wages increased, albeit modestly; however,

laborers continued to work at the mercy of the company. They lived in company-

owned towns, bought supplies in a company-owned store, and even relied on the

company for the most basic necessities.

As many immigrant workers in the mining industry continued to live in pov-

erty and discomfort, opposition to the company grew. Because British mines had

traditionally attracted Irish laborers, many of the Irish who came to America had

not only some mining experience, but had also learned the basics of organizing

in the mills and mines of England. The ﬁrst anthracite labor union, the Working-

men’s Benevolent Association (WBA), was formed under the leadership of Irish-

man John Siney in 1868, and membership grew to include 30,000 miners.

Within one year of its conception, the WBA lobbied successfully for the ﬁrst

mine safety law, the Mine Safety Act of 1869, which became a model for mine

safety legislation for the next century (U.S. Department of Labor). Although the

union succeeded in this regard, the celebration was cut short when 110 workers

lost their lives on September 6, 1869, at the Avondale Mine disaster in

Plymouth, Pennsylvania.

The WBA and other labor organizations attempted to bring change to the indus-

try within a political framework. However, the membership of the various secret

societies that had formed, such as the Buckshots, Sleepers, and Ribbonmen, con-

sidered other ways to bring attention to the plight of the worker and the injustices

suffered at the hands of the company. One such group was the Molly Maguires.

Named after the 17th-century Irish p lotter, Connor Maguire, the true origins and

actions of this group have been traditionally surrounded by myth and rumor. The

extent to whi ch they were willing to use violence to further their cause, however,

was at the center of debate in September 1875, when several Molly Maguires from

the coal ﬁelds of Glen Carbon, Pennsylvania, wer e placed on trial for the murder

of a mining superintendent. Testimony offered at the trial suggested that the Mol-

lies had an extensive record of violence against mine owners, superintendents, and

law ofﬁcials—not to mention plots of sabotage involving bombs and other lethal

466 Molly Maguires (1870s)

weapons. The trials lasted for two years and, by 1877, 19 members of the Molly

Maguires had been sentenced to die by hanging—10 of whom were hanged simul-

taneously (U.S. Department of Labor). The validity of the evidence s et forth to

convict these men has posted lingering questions in history, as there are those

who suggest that the events of 1875 to 1877 were nothing more than an attempt

to further suppress the labor movement through guilt by association. Or perhaps,

due to the membership being overwhelmingly Irish, this was yet another example

of the class, racial, and ethnic divisions that came to characterize the labor struggle

in Am erica. Whatever the case may be, the Molly Maguires earned their rightful

place in history as men willing to take up arms and ﬁght oppression in the coal-

ﬁelds of northeastern Pennsylvania.

—Jacqueline M. Cavalier

Further Reading

Bimba, Anthony. The Molly Maguires. New York: International Publishers, 1932.

Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Blooming-

ton: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Coleman, J. Walter. The Molly Maguire Riots: Industrial Conﬂict in the Pennsylvania Coal

Region. New York: Arno & the New York Times, 1969.

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.

Excerpts from an Article Describing James McPartland’s

Inﬁltration of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s (1894)

The case of the Molly Maguires is a mysterious episode in American labor history. Nineteen men

were eventually hanged for involvement in a clandestine Irish American terrorist organization

responsible for murder and mayhem in coal mining regions of northeastern Pennsylvania in the

1870s. The actual existence of the Molly Maguires has never been definitively proven. T he

alleged Mollies were largely condemned on the testimony of Pinkerton agent James McParland,

who supposedly infiltrated the organization. Critics of the verdict claim that the organization was

a fiction invented by coal and railroad barons as an excuse for crushing the trade-union move-

men t, which threatened the mine owners’ con trol over their workers. They also point out that

McParland was later exposed as a liar in a 20th-century case involving the Western Federation

of Miners. The passage below, recounting McParland’s work as a Pinkerton, was written by

acclaimed journalist Cleveland Moffett for McClure’s Magazine in 1894.

Some twenty years ago ﬁve counties in eastern Pennsylvania were dominated, terrorized,

by a secret organization, thousands strong, whose special purpose was to rob, burn, pil-

lage, and kill. Find on the map that marvelous mineral country, as large as Delaware, which

lies between the Blue Mountains on the south and the arm of the Susquehanna on the

Molly Maguires (1870s) 467

north, and there you will see what was the home of these banded outlaws, the merciless

Molly Maguires. ...The origin and development of the Molly Maguires will always present

a hard problem to the social philosopher, who will, perhaps, ﬁnd some subtle relation

between crime and coal. One understands the act of an ordinary murderer who kills from

greed, or fear, or hatred; but the Molly Maguires killed men and women with whom they

had had no dealings, against whom the y had no personal grievances, and fro m whose

death they had nothing to g ain, except, perhaps, the price of a few rounds of whiskey.

They committed murders by the score, stupidly, brutally. ...The men who decreed these

monstrous cr imes did so for the most trivial reasons—a reduction in wages, a personal

dislike , some imagined grievance of a friend. These were sufﬁcient to call forth an order

to burn a house where women and children were sleeping, to shoot down in cold blood

an employer or fellow workman, to lie in wait for an ofﬁcer of the law and club him to

death. In ...trial of one of them, Mr. Franklin B. Gowen described the reign of these ready

murderers as a time “when men retired to their homes at eight or nine o’clock in the eve-

ning and no one ventured beyond the precincts of his own door; when every man engaged

in any enterprise of magnitude, or connected with industrial pursuits, left his home in the

morning with his hand u pon his pistol, unknowing whether he would again ret urn alive;

when the very foundations of society were being overturned.”

In vain the ofﬁcials of the Philadelphia and Reading and Lehigh Valley Railroads ...

offered thousands of do llars in reward s for the apprehension of the criminals. In vain

Archbishop Woo d, of Philadelphia fought the Molly Maguires with the whole power of

the Catholic Church. ...In v ain, reputable cit izens in almost ever y town, formed and

armed committees of vigilantes who were to take the law into their own hands, inasmuch

as the forces of the law were paralyzed. All was of no avail; public ofﬁces remained in the

hands of rufﬁans; the same ﬁerce crimes persisted; people were assaulted, robbed, and

murdered with increasing frequency. ...

In 1873, Mr. Fra nklin B. Gowen, then President of the Phil adelphia and Reading Rail-

roa d, to ok counsel with Allan Pinkerton in regard to the matter. “It was owing to Mr.

Gowen,” says Mr. Robert A. Pinkerton in a recent letter, “that the Molly Maguire organi-

zation was broken up. ...” [I]n order to protect its interests, and its employees, and the

managers and superintendents of the mines ... [Gowen] consulted Mr. Allan Pinkerton.

“I have the very man for you,” said Allan Pinkerton ...James McParland. A few weeks

after the interview between Mr. Gowen and Mr. Pinkerton, James McParland was

announced to have sailed for Europe on an important mission. Only two men in the

country knew tha t he had really set out for the terrorized region, with instructions to

run down these Molly Maguir e bandits. ...After some weeks of reconnoitering on foot

through the coal regions, the young detective arrived in Pottsville, where he established

himself in a boarding-house kept by a Mrs. O’Regan. There he met a man named Jennings,

who volunteered to show him the sights of the city that same night. P assing a noisy

drinking-place called the Sheridan Hous e, McKe nna, for that was McParland’s assumed

name, p roposed going in. Jennings warned him as he valued his life never to cross the

threshold of that place. “It’s kept by Pat Dormer,” he said, “the big body-master of the

Molly Maguires....”

468 Molly Maguires (1870s)

[McKenna slowly ingratiated himself with Dormer, then moved to Shenandoah ,

where he met “Muff” Lawler, the Molly Maguires’ body-master for that region, whose life

he saved in a barroom dispute.] ...[H]e made the acquaintance of most of the promi-

nent Mollys, including Ja ck Kehoe, of Girardville, and “Yellow Jack” Donahue, both of

whom were afterwards hanged on his testimony. Everywhere he found that his reputa-

tion had preceded him, and he was received by all the Mollys with the respect which ruf-

ﬁans never fail to pay men whom they regard as greater rufﬁans than themselves. At each

new stopping place he came into possession of new secrets touching crimes of the order

already committed, and others that were planning, all of which he reported day by day to

Allan Pinkerton. ...

He learned that the number of Molly Maguires in the ﬁve counties h ad been much

exaggerated in the popular mind, through fear, and that there were not really more than

three or four thousand active members of the organization, whereas it had been reported

through the State that there were ten times that many. McKenna saw, however, that it

was impossible to exaggerate the desperate character of these men. He found that each

county was governed by a “county delegate,” his territory being divided into districts,

or “patches,” each under a “body-master” or chief ofﬁce r, who gave out the signs and

pass-words to trusted members, and ordered the execution of crimes that had been

decided upon. In nearly every case the body-maste r was the keeper of a saloon near

one of the shafts, slopes, or drifts. ...If any superintendent dared to refus e the request

of a body-master to hire or discharge any man, with or without reason, that superinten-

dent’s life was as good as forfeited. “Bosses” were in the same way constrained to give

Mollys the best jobs—that is, the easiest—and in case of their failure to do so they were

promptly made an example of with clubs or revolvers. Before killing a superintendent or a

colliery “boss,” the body-master would usually serve him with a “cofﬁn notice,” a roughly

written warning, bearing crudely drawn knives and revolvers, and a large cofﬁn in the

center. Woe to the man who allowed such a notice to go unheeded! In nearly every in-

stance he was shot or clubbed to death within a few days by unknown assailants. ... Early

in July 1875, while McKenna was still in Sh enandoah, acting as a bodymaster, a sh ocking

murder was committed by Molly Maguires at the town of Tamaqua ...the east. The victim

was Franklin B. Yost, a policeman, and a man who had served honorably in the civil war, and

a most peaceful and wort hy citizen. Hurrying to th e s cene of the crime, McKenna

addressed himself to “Powder Keg” Carrigan, the body-master of that patch. ...

McKenna was not long in learning that “Powder Keg” himself was the man at whose

instigation the murder had been committed. Carrigan explained to him that they had

killed the wrong man, his grievance having been not against Yost, but against another

policeman, Bernard McCarron, who had arouse d “Powder Keg’s” enmity years before

by frequently arresting him for disorderly cond uct. Carrigan nursed the memory of this

treatment, and when he had became a body-master at once proceeded to arrange for

the killing of McCarron. Having applied to Alexander Campbell, the body-master of

Landsford, Carbon County ...for t wo m en to do a “clean job,” he brought the men to

a retired spot on McCarron’s beat. Later in the nigh t, when a poli ceman passed by, the

two men shot him, according to orders, and then st arted for their homes. But on that

Molly Maguires (1870s) 469

night McCarron had exchanged beats with Yost, who accordingly came to a violent

death, although neither the Mollys nor anyone else in the region had any but kind feelings

toward him. Carrigan showed McKenna the rev olver, a weapon of thirty-two caliber,

with which the policeman had been killed, and explained that it had been borrowed from

a Molly named Roarity by the two men, Hugh McGehan and James Doyle, who with

others had done the murder. McGehan was the man who ﬁred the fatal shot. McKenna

secured the names of every man concerned in the crime, and ultimately, on his evidence,

it was punished by the hanging, in Pottsville, of Hugh McGehan, Thomas Duffy, James

Roarity, James Carl, and James Doyle. ...

Following closely upon the murder of Y ost, there came in August, 1875, a “Bloody

Saturday,” as it was called by the Mollys, when they ki lled on th at one day, Thomas

Guyther, a justice of the peace, at Gerardville, and, at Shenandoah, Gomer James, the

same whose life had been saved a few weeks before by McKenna’s intervention. James

was a desperado himself, having some time before, while drunk, shot down an Irishman

named Cosgrove, and this offense the Mollys had sworn to avenge. ...The Shenandoah

ﬁremen were giving a banquet in a public hall, and Gomer James was serving as bar-

tender. A lit tle before midnight, when the gaiety was at its height, Thomas Hurler left

his mother, wh o was sitting on a bench near the bar, and going up to James ordered a

glass of beer.

Jame s serve d him promptly, whereupon Hurley threw down a nickel, and lifting the

glass in his left hand, pretended to drain it. but he held a p istol, ready cocked, in the

right-hand pocket of his sack coat, and while the glass was at his lips, he pulled the trigger.

Then, quite unconcerned, he ﬁnished his beer, and affect ed to join in a search for the

murderer. ...

Toward the end of 1875, the st rain under which McParland had been working for

eighteen months began to tell upon him and he appealed to Allan Pinkerton to be

allowed to strike the ﬁnal blow. ...Allan Pinkerton and his ass istants ...concluded that

the evidence McParland had secured was sufﬁcient, and steps were forthwith taken to

close in on the murderers. McParland had still, however; many dangers to face; ﬁrst from

fellow members of the order who were beginning to believe he had played them false,

and then from outraged citizens, who regarded him as a monster of crime whose uncer-

emonious killing would be a service to the State. One night, in Tamaqua, bands of armed

men searched for him from house to house until morning, and would certainly have dis-

covered and lynched him, had he not, by pretending to fall into a drunken sleep, suc-

ceeded in remaining all night in the house of a respectable citizen who was not

suspected of harboring him. ...

Jack Kehoe, the county delegate whose inﬂuence in the order was very gr eat, was

now busily reporting his suspicion that “James McKenna” was a detective. To meet this

danger McParland boldly went straight to Kehoe, accused him of treachery and

demande d an immediate investigation. As county delegate, Kehoe instructed McKenna,

who was at that time county secretary, to write notice s to al l the body-masters in the

county to meet at Shenandoah at a given date, to conduct the investigation. He was

writing the notices in a room over Kehoe’s saloon, where Mrs. Kehoe was sewing, when

470 Molly Maguires (1870s)

Kehoe came in suddenly with a glass of soda for his wife, and a hot whiskey for McKenna.

Having placed the two glasses on the table, he left the room. ...As soon as he had gone,

Mrs. Kehoe, who was a good woman at heart, and devoted to McKenna, took up the hot

whiskey, threw it into the stove, and then burst into tears. ...It is certain that the whis-

key was poisoned. A second attempt to poison McKenna was made the day before his

trial at Shenandoah. He was lifting the drugged glass to his lips when an instinctive suspi-

cion moved him to set it down.

On the day of the trial Jack Kehoe did not appear. He was expecting that there would

be no trial; for he had engaged sixteen men to murder McKenna, and had even advanced

several of them twenty-ﬁve dollars each for the service. McKenna’s life was probably

saved by the personal devotion of a Molly Maguire named Frank McAndrew, who told

him of the plot to kill him, and swore to stand true to him. ...By McAndrew’s aid he

stole away and returned to Philadelphia, where he was warmly welcomed by Allan Pink-

erton and the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, Mr. Gowen. ...And

here the services of McParland (alias McKenna) as a detective in the Molly Maguire cases

ended; but he had still a most important service to render as a witness. ...

[O]n May 6, 1876 a number of arrests were made, [and] the trials that followed were

highly dramatic. Held as they were at the very center of the lawless district, there was

more or less dange r that persons e ngaged in them would themselves suffer the frater-

nity’s vengeance. The result of the trials—which is to say the result of McParland’s dan-

gerous investig ations a nd su bsequ ent test imony—was the complete extermination of

the order of Molly Maguires. A score or more of the desperadoes were condemned to

longer or shorter terms in the penitentiary.

Nineteen were hanged. Among the latter was Jack Kehoe, who had been among the

ﬁrst to suspect McParl and of being a detective, and had expended all his power and

ingenuity to get him killed and well out of the way.

Source: Cleveland Moffett, “The Overthrow of the Molly Maguires,” McClure’s Magazine,

1894.

Molly Maguires (1870s) 471

Women’s Movement (1870s)

The 19th-century women’s movement emerged from Americans’ efforts to deﬁne

the social and political roles of women in the new rep ublic. Early reformers con-

centrated on improving women’s education and heightening women’s public inﬂu-

ence through organized benevolence. The movement gathered steam after the

Seneca Falls Convention in 1848; mid-century reformers sought to expand wom-

en’s employment opportunities and reform divorce, child custody, and property

laws. After the Civil War, the women’s movement increasingly focused on secur-

ing the right to vote. The battle for suffrage unfolded state by state, beginning in

the West; it was more than half a cen tury fr om the enfranchisement of Wyoming

women in 1869 to the ratiﬁcation of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S.

Constitution in 1920.

During the American Revolution, the rhetoric of equality and the process of

designing a new government brought the question of women’s position to the fore.

In a letter dated March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams admonished her husband,

“Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your

ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.

Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention

is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold

ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

Women’s suffrage was not unknown in Adams’s day; some colonies permitted

propertied women to vote, and New Jersey retained this practice until 1807.

Adams’s chief concerns, however, were social equality and expanded legal protec-

tions for women. In this, she anticipated the interests of the ﬁrst generation of

women reformers.

In the wake of the Revolution, Americans embraced “republican woman-

hood”—the idea that virtuous, well-educated women could strengthen the republic

by rearing virtuous, well-educated children and gently counseling their husbands

toward responsible citizenship. One of the consequences, especially for middle-

class women, was a sharp improvement in educational opportunities. From

northern New Engla nd to the Deep South, entrepreneurs opened academies that

promised to groom young women for republican citizenship by teaching them his-

tory, philosophy, foreign languages, mathematics, and science, as well as conven-

tional accomplishments such as music. The most rigorous academies offered what

473

was essentially a college curriculum, shorn of its classical emphasis. Oberlin, the

nation’s ﬁrst coeducational college, opened in 1833, and Mount Holyoke, the

nation’s ﬁrst women’s college, opened in 1837.

The new academies did not explicitly promote women’s rights—Emma Willard,

founder o f Troy Female Seminary, opposed women’s suffrage, while Cat harine

Beecher, founder of Hartford Female Seminary, was indifferent—but they incu-

bated the women’s movement by training young women in composition and public

speaking an d encouragi ng them to engage social issues. In their commencement

orations, young women frequently advocated social equality and expanded public

roles for women. In keeping with these values, alumni of women’s seminaries were

prominent in organized be nevolenc e, embracing causes as varied as r eforming

prostitutes, managing charity schools and orphanages, and ending slavery.

To a large extent, the women’s movement emerged within the antislavery move-

ment. When the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) was founded in 1833, its

leaders permitted women to attend and speak at the convention but not to join the

society. Female abolitionists responded by organizing the Philadelphia Female

Anti-Slavery Society and then, in 1837, the National Female Anti-Slavery Society.

Yet female abolitionists continued to struggle with social constraints. Women’s

activism ran contrary to the cult of true womanhood, which linked women’s moral

purity to their separation from the public sphere. Women’s public speaking was

highly controversial. Sar ah and Ange lina Grimke

, whose antislavery lectures

included allusions to sexual violence against female slaves, were pelted with fruit,

threatened with brickbats, and censured by the Congregationalist Church for

addressing mixed audiences. The climax was reached in 1838, when an angry

mob t orched a meeting hall in which Angelina had just lectured. In 1840, the

American Anti-Slavery Society split over the question of whether women should

be allowed to represent the society at antislavery conventions. When Lucretia

Mott, an AASS delegate to the 1840 World A nti-Slavery Convention in London,

was relegated to an observation gallery, she and fellow attendee Elizabeth Cady

Stanton resolved to organize a convention on women’s rights.

The Seneca Falls Convention transformed reformers’ wide-ranging discussion

of women’s condition into a coherent movement. Three hundred men and women

gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19–20, 1848, and produced the

Seneca Falls Declaration, a substantial manifesto modeled on th e Declaration of

Independence. The Seneca Falls Declaration outlined the agenda of the women’s

movement: the expansion of educational and employment opportunities; e qual

pay for equal work; reform of divorce and property laws; and the right to address

public meetings. The convention’s participants were divided on whether to call

for women’s suffrage, a demand some considered too radical, but a suffrage plank

ultimately made its way into the document.

474 Women’s Movement (1870s)

Though modest in size, the Seneca Falls Convention was well publicized. In

subsequent years, reformers organized similar meetings in several states, and Lucy

Stone convened the ﬁrst National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Mas-

sachu setts, in 1850. Women’s rights activists drew inspiration from the tactics of

the antislavery and temperance movements. They circulated petitions in favor of

married women’s property rights and women’s suffrage. They even launched femi-

nist newspapers—Amelia Bloomer’s Lily (1849–1856) and Pauline Wrig ht

Davis’s Una (1853–1854)—modeled on abolitionist newspapers such as The

Liberator. Yet the antebellum women’s movement retained a weak organizational

structure. Its ﬂuid, makeshift character spared the antebellum movement the

organizational inﬁghting that bedeviled the women’s suffrage campaign in the last

third of the 19th century.

The lea ders of the women’s movement tha t emerged in t he 1840s and 1850s

shared several characteristics. Most, though not all, hailed from New England.

Most came from middling-to-afﬂuent backgrounds; it was the middle-class tone

of the movement that provoked Sojourner Truth’s 1851 query (possibly

apocryphal) “ar’n’t I a woman?” Many women’s leaders belonged to liberal Prot-

estant denominations such as the Unitarians, Congregationalists, and Quakers; all

of these denominations were sympathetic to social reform, and the Quakers had a

long tradition of female preaching and leadership. Many had been educated at the

new academies; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, studied at Troy Female

Seminary, while Lucy Stone w as an al umna of Mount Holyoke and Oberlin.

Others had received similarly rigorous educations at home. Virtually all began

their activism in other reform movements, usually antislavery or temperance, and

their efforts to expand women’s rights were part of a larger crit ique of American

society. Several prominent male abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and

William Lloyd Garrison, also supported women’s rights.

The antebellum women’s movement melded 18th-century natural rights phi-

losophy, 19th-century liberalism, and prevailing ideas about gender difference.

The Seneca Falls Declaration emphasized that women as well as men derived cer-

tain rights from nature; natural rights philosophy led many reformers to see close

parallels between the emancipation of African American slaves and the emancipa-

tion of women. The middle-class liberals who led the antebellum women’s move-

ment focused on securing freedoms for individual women rather than fostering a

comprehensive women’s po litical agenda. This was not because they believed

women’s priorities to be indist inguishable from men’s; most believed in essential

gender differences. Elizabeth C ady Stanton, one of the movement’s most proliﬁc

and eloquent theorists, argued that society ﬂourished when governments reﬂected

the contrasting but complementary views of women and m en. She also noted,

more mundanely, that women’s suffrage was essential because women’s interests

Women’s Movement (1870s) 475