Molly Maguire Executions: Labor, Ethnicity, and the Gallows

On June twenty-first, eighteen seventy-seven, six men were hanged here in Pottsville on charges tied to the Molly Maguires, an alleged secret society of Irish coal miners accused of organizing violent resistance against mine operators in the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania.

The convictions rested heavily on testimony from Pinkerton detective James McParlan, who had infiltrated the miners' networks undercover. Four more men were hanged the same day at the county jail in Mauch Chunk, and ten additional executions followed across Pennsylvania through eighteen seventy-nine. Historians have long debated the fairness of the trials. The question of whether the Molly Maguires truly existed as an organized group, or whether the prosecutions were a tool to suppress Irish immigrant labor organizing, remains contested. What is not disputed is that twenty men died, and that the labor conflicts of the Pennsylvania coal fields were among the bitterest of the Gilded Age.