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It is alleged that the Molly Maguires was an Irish people 19th-century secret society active in Ireland, Liverpool, and parts of the eastern United States, best known for their activism among Irish-American and Irish diaspora in Pennsylvania. After a series of often violent conflicts, twenty suspected members of the Molly Maguires were convicted of murder and other crimes and were executed by hanging in 1877 and 1878. This history remains part of local Pennsylvania lore and the actual facts are much debated among historians.Rayback, p. 133
Agrarian rebellion in Ireland can be traced to local concerns and grievances relating to land usage, particularly as traditional socioeconomic practices such as small-scale potato cultivation were supplanted by the fencing and pasturing of land (known as enclosure). Agrarian resistance often took the form of fence destruction, night-time ploughing of croplands that had been converted to pasture, and killing, mutilating, or driving off livestock. In areas where the land had long been dedicated to small-scale, growing-season leases of farmland, called conacre, opposition was conceived as "retributive justice" that was intended "to correct transgressions against traditional moral and social codes".Kenny (1998), pp. 18–21.Kenny (1995b), pp. 31–39.
The victims of agrarian violence were frequently Irish land agents, middlemen, and tenants. Merchants and millers were often threatened or attacked if their prices were high. Landlords' agents were threatened, beaten, and assassinated. New tenants on lands secured by evictions also became targets. Local leaders were reported to have sometimes dressed as women, i.e., as mothers begging for food for their children. The leader might approach a storekeeper and demand a donation of flour or groceries. If the storekeeper failed to provide, the Mollies would enter the store and take what they wanted, warning the owner of dire consequences if the incident was reported.Kenny (1995b), pp. 20–21.
While the Whiteboys were known to wear white linen frocks over their clothing, the Mollies blackened their faces with burnt cork. There are similarities—particularly in face-blackening and in the donning of women's garments—with the practice of Mummers Play, in which festive days were celebrated by mummers who travelled from door to door demanding food, money, or drink as payment for performing. The Threshers, the Peep o' Day Boys, the Lady Rocks (deriving from Captain Rock and the Rockite movement), and the Lady Clares also sometimes disguised themselves as women.Kenny (1995b), pp. 22–23. Similar imagery was used during the Rebecca Riots in Wales.
British and Irish newspapers reported about the Mollies in Ireland in the nineteenth century. Thomas Campbell Foster in The Times on 25 August 1845 traced the commencement of "Molly Maguireism" to Lord Lorton ejecting tenants in Ballinamuck, County Longford, in 1835. An "Address of 'Molly Maguire' to her children" containing twelve rules was published in Freeman's Journal on 7 July 1845. The person making the address claimed to be "Molly Maguire" of "Maguire's Grove, Parish of Cloone", in County Leitrim. The rules advised Mollies about how they should conduct themselves in land disputes and were an attempt to direct the movement's activities:
Later Liverpool newspaper articles from the same time period refer to assaults by Mollies against other Irish Liverpudlians. The "Molly Maguire club" or "Molly's Club" was described as a "mutual defence association" that had been "formed for the mutual assistance of the members when they got into 'trouble', each member subscribing to the funds". Patrick Flynn was the secretary of the Liverpool Molly Maguire Clubs in the 1850s and their headquarters was in an alehouse in Alexander Pope Street also known as Sawney Pope Street. The Liverpool branch of the Molly Maguires was known for its gangsterism rather than any genuine concern for the welfare of Irish people. Molly Maguires, politics.ie; accessed 25 August 2025.
The trusts seem to have focused almost exclusively upon the Molly Maguires for criminal prosecution. Information passed from the Pinkerton detective, intended only for the detective agency and their client—the most powerful industrialist of the region—was also provided to who ambushed and murdered miners suspected of being Molly Maguires, as well as their families. Molly Maguire history is sometimes presented as the prosecution of an underground movement that was motivated by personal vendettas, and sometimes as a struggle between organized labour and powerful industrial forces. Whether membership in the Mollies' society overlapped with union membership to any appreciable extent remains open to conjecture.Kenny (1998). pp. 3–5.
Some historians (such as Philip Rosen, former curator of the Holocaust Awareness Museum of the Delaware Valley) believe that Irish immigrants brought a form of the Molly Maguires organization into America in the 19th century, and continued its activities as a clandestine society. They were located in a section of the anthracite Coal mining dubbed the Coal Region, which included the Pennsylvania counties of Lackawanna, Luzerne, Columbia, Schuylkill, Carbon, and Northumberland. Irish in this organization employed the tactics of intimidation and violence used against Irish landlords during the "" yet again in violent confrontations against the anthracite, or hard coal, mining companies in the 19th century.
Authors who accept the existence of the Mollies as a violent and destructive group acknowledge a significant scholarship that questions the entire history. In The Pinkerton Story, authors James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett write sympathetically about the detective agency and its mission to bring the Mollies to justice. They observe:
The immigrant workers:
About 22,000 coal miners worked in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. 5,500 of these were children between the ages of seven and sixteen years, who earned between one and three dollars a week separating slate from coal. Injured miners, or those too old to work at the face, were assigned to picking slate at the "breakers" where the coal was crushed into a manageable size. Thus, many of the elderly miners finished their mining days as they had begun in their youth.Boyer and Morais, pp. 51–52. The miners lived a life of "bitter, terrible struggle".Horan and Swiggett, p. 125.
The miners faced a speedup system that was exhausting. In its November 1877 issue, Harper's New Monthly Magazine published an interviewer's comments: "A miner tells me that he often brought his food uneaten out of the mine from want of time; for he must have his car loaded when the driver comes for it, or lose one of the seven car-loads which form his daily work."Boyer and Morais, p. 47.
As the bodies of the miners were brought up from the Avondale Mine disaster, John Siney, head of the Workingmen's Benevolent Association (WBA), climbed onto a wagon to speak to the thousands of miners who had arrived from surrounding communities:Boyer and Morais, p. 45.
Siney asked the miners to join the union, and thousands did so that day. Some miners faced additional burdens of prejudice and persecution. In the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, some 20,000 Irish workers had arrived in Schuylkill County. It was a time of rampant beatings and murders in the mining district.Horan and Swiggett, pp. 126–129.
The union had grown powerful; thirty thousand members—eighty-five percent of Pennsylvania's anthracite miners—had joined. But Gowen had built a combination of his own, bringing all of the mine operators into an employers' association known as the Anthracite Board of Trade. In addition to the railroad, Gowen owned two-thirds of the coal mines in southeastern Pennsylvania. He was a risk-taker and an ambitious man.Boyer and Morais, p. 48. Gowen decided to force a strike and showdown.
While Kenny observes that the AOH was "a peaceful fraternal society", he does note that in the 1870s the Pinkerton Agency identified a correlation between the areas of AOH membership in Pennsylvania, and the corresponding areas in Ireland from which those particular Irish immigrants emigrated. The violence-prone areas of Ireland corresponded to areas of violence in the Pennsylvania coalfields.Kenny (1998), pp. 17–18, 25–26.
In his book Big Trouble, which traces McParland's history, writer J. Anthony Lukas has written: "The WBA was run by Lancashire men adamantly opposed to violence. But Gowen saw an opportunity to paint the union with the Molly brush, which he did in testimony before a state investigating committee ... 'I do not charge this Workingmen's Benevolent Association with it, but I say there is an association which votes in secret, at night, that men's lives shall be taken ... I do not blame this association, but I blame another association for doing it; and it happens that the only men who are shot are the men who dare disobey the mandates of the Workingmen's Benevolent Association.'"Lukas, p. 178.
Of the 450 AOH members that Pinkerton Agent McParland estimated were in Schuylkill County, about 400 belonged to the union. Molly Maguireism and full-fledged trade unionism represented fundamentally different modes of organization and protest.Kenny (1998), p. 111. Kenny noted that one contemporary organization, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Industrial Statistics, clearly distinguished between the union and the violence attributed to the Molly Maguires. Their reports indicate that violence could be traced to the time of the Civil War, but that in the five-year existence of the WBA, "the relations existing between employers and employees" had greatly improved. The Bureau concluded that the union had brought an end to the "carnival of crime". Kenny notes the leaders of the WBA were "always unequivocally opposed" to the Molly Maguires.Kenny (1998), p. 112.
Kenny notes there were frequent tensions between miners of English and Welsh descent, who held the majority of skilled positions, and the mass of unskilled Irish labourers. However, in spite of such differences, the WBA offered a solution, and for the most part "did a remarkable job" in overcoming such differences.Kenny (1998), pp. 116–117.
A Pinkerton agent, Robert J. Linden, was brought in to support McParland while serving with the Coal and Iron Police.Lukas, pp. 183–184. On 29 August 1875, Allan Pinkerton wrote a letter to George Bangs, Pinkerton's general superintendent, recommending vigilante actions against the Molly Maguires: "The M.M.'s are a species of Thugs... Let Linden get up a vigilance committee. It will not do to get many men, but let him get those who are prepared to take fearful revenge on the M.M.'s. I think it would open the eyes of all the people and then the M.M.'s would meet with their just deserts." On 10 December 1875, three men and two women were attacked in their home by masked men. Author Anthony Lukas wrote that the attack seemed "to reflect the strategy outlined in Pinkerton's memo".Lukas, p. 184
The victims had been secretly identified by McParland as Mollies. One of the men was killed in the house, and the other two supposed Mollies were wounded but able to escape. A woman, the wife of one of the reputed Mollies, was assassinated.
McParland was outraged that the information he had been providing had found its way into the hands of indiscriminate killers. When McParland heard details of the attack at the house, he protested in a letter to his Pinkerton supervisor. He did not object that Mollies might be assassinated as a result of his —they "got their just deserving". McParland resigned when it became apparent the vigilantes were willing to commit the "murder of women and children", whom he deemed innocent victims. His letter stated:
There appears to be an error in the detective's report, which also constituted his resignation letter, of the vigilante incident: he failed to convey the correct number of deaths. Two of the three men "were wounded but able to escape". In the note, McParland reported that these two had been killed by vigilantes. Such notes, possibly containing erroneous or as-yet-unverified information, were forwarded daily by Pinkerton operatives. The content was routinely made available to Pinkerton clients in typed reports. Pinkerton detective reports now in the manuscripts collection at the Lackawanna County Historical Society reveal that Pinkerton had been spying on miners for the mine owners in Scranton. Pinkerton operatives were required to send a report each day. The daily reports were typed by staff, and conveyed to the client for a ten-dollar fee. Such a process was relied upon to "warrant the continuance of the operative's services".Friedman, Morris (1907). The Pinkerton Labor Spy. New York: Wilshire Book Company. p. 14. . The Execution: Life and Times of Patrick ODonnell, .
McParland believed his daily reports had been made available to the anti-Molly vigilantes. Benjamin Franklin, McParland's Pinkerton supervisor, declared himself "anxious to satisfy McParland that the nothing to do with the" McParland was prevailed upon not to resign.Horan and Swiggett, pp. 152–153.Later, when McParland tried the same methods he used against miners in Pennsylvania against miners in Idaho, defence attorney Clarence Darrow exposed intimidation of the miners leading them into making false confessions. Linder, Douglas O. The Trial of William "Big Bill" Haywood Frank Wenrich, a first lieutenant with the Pennsylvania National Guard, was arrested as the leader of the vigilante attackers, but released on bail. Another miner, Hugh McGeehan, a 21-year-old who had been secretly identified as a killer by McParland, was fired upon and wounded by unknown assailants. Later, the McGeehan family's house was attacked by gunfire.Horan and Swiggett, pp. 153, 157. McGeehan lived with a Mrs. Boyle, a "young widow".
Andrew Roy in his book A History of the Coal Miners of the United StatesRoy, Andrew (1907). A History of the Coal Miners of the United States (3rd ed., rev. and enlarged). Columbus, Ohio: I. L. Trauger Printing Company. . noted:
After six months, the strike was defeated and the miners returned to work, accepting the 20 percent cut in pay. But miners belonging to the Ancient Order of Hibernians continued the fight. McParland acknowledged increasing support for the Mollies in his reports: Men, who last winter would not notice a Molly Maguire, are now glad to take them by the hand and make much of them. If the bosses exercise tyranny over the men they appear to look to the association for help.Lukas, p. 182. Lukas observes that the defeat was humiliating, and traces the roots of violence by the Mollies in the aftermath of the failed strike: Judges, lawyers, and policemen were overwhelmingly Welsh, German, or English ... When the coalfield Irish sought to remedy their grievances through the courts, they often met delays, obfuscation, or doors slammed in their faces. No longer looking to these institutions for justice, they turned instead to the Mollies.... Before the summer was over, six men—all Welsh or German—paid with their lives.Lukas, p. 183.
Authors Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais argue that the killings were not one-sided:
A plan to destroy a railroad bridge was abandoned due to the presence of outsiders. The Irish miners had been forbidden to set foot in the public square in Mahanoy City, and a plan to occupy it by force of arms was considered and then abandoned. In the meantime, a messenger reported that W.M. Thomas, the would-be killer of one of the Mollies, had been killed in the stable where he worked. McParland himself had been asked to supply the hidden killers with food and whiskey, according to the detective. According to Horan and Swiggett:
Another plan was in the works, this one against two night watchmen, Pat McCarron and Benjamin Franklin Yost, a Tamaqua Borough Patrolman. Patrolman Benjamin K. Yost profile, odmp.org; accessed 8 September 2015. Jimmy Kerrigan and Thomas Duffy were said to despise Yost, who had arrested them on numerous occasions. Yost was shot as he put out a street light, which at that time necessitated climbing the lamp pole. Before he died, he reported that his killers were Irish, but were not Kerrigan or Duffy. McParland recorded that a Mollie named William Love had killed a Justice of the Peace, surnamed Gwyther, in Girardville. Unknown Mollies were accused of wounding a man outside his saloon in Shenandoah. Gomer James was killed while tending bar. Then, McParland recorded, a group of Mollies reported to him that they had killed a mine boss named Sanger, and another man who was with him. Forewarned of the attempt, McParland had sought to arrange protection for the mine boss, but was unsuccessful.Horan, pp. 143–149.
The first trials were for the killing of John P. Jones. The three defendants, Michael J. Doyle, Jimmy Kerrigan and Edward Kelly, had elected to receive separate trials. Doyle went first, with his trial beginning 18 January 1876, and a conviction for first-degree murder being returned on 1 February. Before the trial was completed, Kerrigan had decided to become a state's witness and gave details about the murders of Jones and Yost. Kelly's trial began on 27 March, and ended in conviction on 6 April 1876.
The first trial of defendants McGeehan, Carroll, Duffy, James Boyle, and James Roarity for the killing of Yost commenced in May 1876. Yost had not recognized the men who attacked him. Although Kerrigan has since been described, along with Duffy, as hating the night watchman enough to plot his murder,Horan and Swiggett, p. 144. Kerrigan became a state's witness and testified against the union leaders and other miners.
However, Kerrigan's wife testified in the courtroom that her husband had committed the murder. She testified that she refused to provide her husband with clothing while he was in prison, because he had "picked innocent men to suffer for his crime". She stated that she was speaking out voluntarily, and was only interested in telling the truth about the murder. Gowen cross-examined her, but could not shake her testimony. Others supported her testimony amid speculation that Kerrigan was receiving special treatment due to the fact that McParland was engaged to his sister-in-law, Mary Ann Higgins.Boyer and Morais, pp. 54–55.
This trial was declared a mistrial due to the death of one of the jurors. A new trial was granted two months later. During that trial, Fanny Kerrigan did not testify. The five defendants were sentenced to death. Kerrigan was allowed to go free. The trial of Tom Munley for the murders of Thomas Sanger, a mine foreman, and William Uren, relied entirely on the testimony of McParland, and the eyewitness account of a witness. The witness stated under oath that he had seen the murderer clearly, and that Munley was not the murderer. Yet the jury accepted McParland's testimony that Munley had privately confessed to the murder. Munley was sentenced to death.Boyer and Morais, pp. 55–56.
Another four miners were put on trial and were found guilty on a charge of murder. McParland had no direct evidence, but had recorded that the four admitted their guilt to him. Kelly was being held in a cell for murder, and he was reputedly quoted as saying: "I would squeal on Jesus Christ to get out of here." In return for his testimony, the murder charge against him was dismissed.Boyer and Morais, p. 55.
In November, McAllister was convicted. McParland's testimony in the Molly Maguires trials helped send ten men to the gallows. The defence attorneys repeatedly sought to portray McParland as an agent provocateur who was responsible for not warning people of their imminent deaths.Kenny (1998), pp. 232–233. For his part, McParland testified that the AOH and the Mollies were one and the same, and the defendants were guilty of the murders.Kenny (1998), pp. 234–235.
In 1905, during the Colorado Labor Wars, in preparation for a trial, McParland told another witness, Harry Orchard, that "Kelly the Bum" not only had won his freedom for testifying against union leaders, he had been given $1,000 (~$ in ) to "subsidize a new life abroad". McParland had been attempting to convince Orchard to accuse Bill Haywood, leader of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), of conspiracy to commit another murder.Carlson, Peter (1983). Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood. p. 91. Unlike the Mollies, the WFM's union leadership was acquitted. Orchard alone was convicted, and spent the rest of his life in prison.
Thomas Munley's aged father had walked more than from Gilberton to assure his son that he believed in his innocence. Munley's wife arrived a few minutes after they closed the gate, and they refused to open it even for close relatives to say their final goodbyes. She screamed at the gate with grief, throwing herself against it until she collapsed, but she was not allowed to pass. Four men (Alexander Campbell, John "Yellow Jack" Donahue, Michael J. Doyle and Edward J. Kelly) were hanged on 21 June 1877, at a Carbon County prison in Mauch Chunk (renamed Jim Thorpe in 1953), for the murders of John P. Jones and Morgan Powell, both mine bosses, following a trial later described by a Carbon County judge, John P. Lavelle, as follows:
Campbell, just before his execution, allegedly slapped a muddy handprint on his cell wall stating "There is proof of my words. That mark of mine will never be wiped out. It will remain forever to shame the county for hanging an innocent man." Doyle and Hugh McGeehan were led to the scaffold. They were followed by Thomas Munley, James Carroll, James Roarity, James Boyle, Thomas Duffy, Kelly, Campbell, and "Yellow Jack" Donahue. Judge DreherPer Jensen (2025). 9781845935368, Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International. ISBN 9781845935368 presided over the trials.
Ten more condemned, Thomas Fisher, John "Black Jack" Kehoe, Patrick Hester, Peter McHugh, Patrick Tully, Peter McManus, Dennis Donnelly, Martin Bergan, James McDonnell and Charles Sharpe, were hanged at Mauch Chunk, Pottsville, Bloomsburg and Sunbury over the next two years. Peter McManus was the last Molly Maguire to be tried and convicted for murder at the Northumberland County Courthouse in 1878. Note: This includes
In 1979, Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp granted a posthumous pardon to John "Black Jack" Kehoe after an investigation by the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons. The request for a pardon was made by one of Kehoe's descendants. John Kehoe had proclaimed his innocence until his death. The Board recommended the pardon after investigating Kehoe's trial and the circumstances surrounding it. Shapp praised Kehoe, saying the men called "Molly Maguires" were "martyrs to labour" and heroes in the struggle to establish a union and fair treatment for workers. And "... It is impossible for us to imagine the plight of the 19th Century miners in Pennsylvania's anthracite region" and that it was Kehoe's popularity among the miners that led Gowen "'to fear, despise and ultimately destroy him'".Kenny (1998), p. 284.
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