Benjamin Bannon

There is little question that the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, fraught at the time with labor unrest and ethnic strife, were violent places. As early as the 1850s, Benjamin Bannon, writing in the Miner's Journal, a decidedly anti-labor periodical published in the anthracite region warned of the violent tendencies among the Irish workers, though historians have speculated that Bannon, a staunch Republican saw a greater threat in the fact that many of the miners were not just Irish, and not immigrants, but Democrats as well. By 1857, Bannon had declared in his paper that the violence was, at least in part, the work of Molly Maguires, a secret band of killers, ensconced within the secretive fraternal organization the AOH.

Few outside coal country paid much heed to Bannon, and fewer still bought his assertion that a mysterious gang of foreign bred cutthroats who took as their inspiration a band of 18th century Irish vigilantes, were abroad in America's industrial heartland. But there are some, among them Wayne, the great grandson of the alleged King of the Mollys, who contend that if the Molly Maguires ever did actually exist outside of the fetid imagination of Bannon and Franklin B.Gowen, then they existed only during the early to mid 1860's when the country was ripped apart by Civil War. As Black Jack Kehoe would later write from prison while awaiting execution as a Molly Maguire, by the 1870's there was no longer any need for them because "the war was over."

There is ample historical documentation that the fury over the draft during the Civil War helped fuel the simmering clash between the Irish miners and their bosses. As Valerie-Anne Lutz wrote in her tract "The Old Country in the New World," based largely on the papers of noted Pennsylvania historians Anthony F.C. Wallace and his son, Paul A.W. Wallace, "many Irish immigrants aligned with the copperhead Democratic resistance to the war and the draft."

There was, to be sure, an undercurrent of racism in the Irish resistance. Many of them were, as Lutz put it, "opposedto aiding blacks in any form."

But the Irish opposition went deeper still, Lutz wrote. To them, the war was a symbol of their own status as virtual slaves. "Many Irish immigrantsobjected to the war because as non-naturalized residents of the country they were expected to fight the war while they were yet unable to vote."

Even more galling to the Irish immigrants was the fact that, in their eyes, the fight to free the Southern slaves was a rich man's war being fought by the poor. Under the law at the time, any draftee with $300 to spare could buy his way out of uniform and out of danger.

Few if any Irish immigrants had $300 for food and shelter and clothing. To the average miner, that staggering sum represented six month's wages.

By 1863, the tension turned to bloodshed. Much has been written about the draft riots that shook New York that summer, a shameful episode in Irish American history that included among other excesses, the lynching of innocent African-Americans. But the riots were not confined to New York City alone. A riot also was reported in Cass Township in Schuylkill County, the heart of anthracite coal country. According to Lutz, agitators went from mine to mine enlisting men to block trains carrying draftees from the state capitol in Harrisburg, to Philadelphia. One can only imagine how that must have galled the local commissioner at the time. After all, the commissioner was none other than Benjamin Bannon.

Perhaps it was the tension over the war and the draft, perhaps it was the stress the miners were facing as they struggled to keep up with the increased production demands created by the war, or perhaps it was the white hot rage of men who were being used as fodder for the great industrial machine, but the years during and immediately after the Civil War were particularly bloody.

Between 1863 and 1867, there were 57 murders in Schuylkill County alone. Most of them, as Joseph Wayne put it, were little more than common street crimes, the kind of deplorable but not wholly unexpected events that grip any community when money is scarce and hope even more elusive.

A year earlier, in 1862, in Carbon County, a mine boss named Frank W.S. Langdon was assaulted by a group of miners during the lead-up to a Flag Day celebration. A decade and a half later, that killing was ascribed to the Molly Maguires. Based on questionable testimony, and despite accounts from eyewitnesses that should have exonerated him, Black Jack Kehoe was convicted and hanged for Langdon's killing.

Today, there are many who believe the Langdon killing, like the slaying of other mine bosses, may have been simply the random act of men who had their fill of desperately low wages, dangerous working conditions, and what seemed to be a concerted effort on the part of some bosses to rob them of their labor.

"Youhave the situation here where a guy went out and he worked his tail off and here's the docking boss" -- a man paid by the bosses to make sure that miners, who were paid by the ton, were paid as little as possible, Wayne said. The docking bosses would deduct for "rock, shale, water and dirt," causing the miner to be paid for only about half of his yield.

"So there was room for a question as to whether or not some of these instances of beatings, crimes of property and or murders that were allegedly committed were done by an individual in the heat of passion because of what the man had done to them, rather than an organized effort," Wayne said.

Even today, scholars remain divided over the causes of violence in the coal region. As one young writer, Michael Pollock, noted in his postgraduate thesis on the Molly Maguires, though violence was rife between 1863 and the founding of the Workman's Benevolent Association in 1868, it tapered off during the years of the union's ascendancy, only to erupt again when the union began to collapse. Perhaps, some historians speculate, much of the violence was spawned in response to the horrid conditions in the mines. Maybe, just maybe, the WBA, which held as one of its key tenets that the interests of the miners and the mine owners were one, helped, at least for a time, to reduce that tension, and might even have temporarily staunched the flow of blood.

That certainly was not the opinion of the powers that be at the time, however.

As Wayne put it, the overriding philosophy among the Pennsylvania elite of the late 19th century was that, if you were a union man, "if you're Irish Catholic, and you belong to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, then you belong to the Molly Maguires."

To men like Bannon, and those who followed him, particularly Franklin B. Gowen, railroad magnate and special prosecutor, there was no difference between the Hibernians, the unionists and the Mollys. Together these Irishmen were "the incarnate fiends who rule the County."

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