The Molly Maguires and the Shadow War in the Coal Fields
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
In the eighteen sixties and seventies, a cloud of violence hung over the anthracite coal region, and at its center was a name that still divides historians: the Molly Maguires.
The Mollies, as they were called, were Irish immigrant miners, concentrated in the coal counties of Lackawanna, Luzerne, Schuylkill, and Carbon. The coal barons who employed them set wages unilaterally, enforced near-feudal conditions in company towns, and used private police to suppress any resistance. In this environment, someone began to fight back, violently. Mining supervisors were beaten. Company men were murdered. Acts of sabotage disrupted mine operations. In Scranton and surrounding Lackawanna County, handwritten death threats, known as coffin notices, were mailed to mine bosses and supervisors throughout this period.
The coal operators hired the Pinkerton detective agency to infiltrate what they believed was a secret organization directing the violence. An agent named James McParlan spent nearly three years undercover in the region, and his testimony formed the backbone of prosecutions that resulted in twenty men being hanged between eighteen seventy-seven and eighteen seventy-eight.
Whether the Molly Maguires were a genuine organized conspiracy or a label invented by the operators to criminalize Irish labor resistance is still debated by historians. No founding document, no membership roll, no primary source proving the organization existed as a coordinated body has ever been produced. What is not disputed is that twenty men were executed, largely on the testimony of a single Pinkerton informant, without significant corroborating physical evidence.
In nineteen seventy-nine, Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp granted a posthumous pardon to one of the executed men, John Kehoe, who had been the leader of the local chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The pardon did not resolve the historical argument. It acknowledged that the trial had been, at minimum, deeply unjust.
The coal operators won their war against labor in eighteen seventy-seven. It took another twenty-five years before labor won anything back.
