June 21, 1877: Ten members of the pro-labor "Molly Maguires" are executed for a group of murders in northeastern Pennsylvania's coal-mining country. It is a setback for both the American labor movement and justice in general.
The Molly Maguires originated in Ireland, where secret societies were common beginning in the 18th century and through most of the 19th century. Agrarian rebellion 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.
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. The Mollies blackened their faces with burnt cork. At a time when there were few people of African descent in the British Isles, there was no reason to consider this to be racist.
The Irish potato famine of the 1840s led to large-scale immigration, not just immediately but for the remainder of the 19th Century, to England, Scotland, and to the New World, including America and Canada. In 2022, there are about 32 million Americans of Irish descent, while there are only about 7.2 million people in Ireland (the Republic and Northern Ireland combined).
Many of the immigrants when to major cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston; but many were from rural parts of Ireland, and went to rural parts of America, where there was work, including mining, where their Anglo-Saxon bosses treated them no better than they had been treated back home.
Some Mollies came with them, and they are believed to have been present in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania since at least the Panic of 1873, making themselves welcome in the accompanying labor unions.
Members of the Mollies were accused of murder, arson, kidnapping, and other crimes, in part based on allegations by Franklin B. Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, whose business depended largely on the transportation of coal from around the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to the big cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
They also relied on the testimony of an agent of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, James McParland, a native of County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland, and a very anti-Catholic Protestant. Gowen acted as a prosecutor in some of the trials, which wipes out any notion of fairness right off the bat.
The first trials were for the killing of John P. Jones. The 3 defendants, Michael J. Doyle, Jimmy Kerrigan and Edward Kelly, had elected to receive separate trials. Doyle went first, with a conviction for first-degree murder being returned on February 1, 1876. Before the trial was completed, Kerrigan had decided to become a state's witness, and gave details about the murders of Jones and Benjamin Yost. Kelly was convicted on April 6.
On June 21, 1877, at the State Prison in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, 6 men -- Doyle, Kelly, Alexander Campbell, Hugh McGeehan, They were followed by Thomas Munley, James Roarity and "Yellow Jack" Donahue, all still proclaiming their innocence -- were hanged.
On the same day, at the State Prison in Mauch Chunk (a small city that would later rename itself Jim Thorpe, for the right to host the great Native American athlete's tomb), 5 others were hanged for a different murder: Hugh McGeehan, James Carroll, Thomas Duffy, James Boyle and James Roarity.
The Mollies declined, and American mining and railroad management grew more confident in their power. It would take until the 1890s for them to be seriously challenged again.
In 1889, Benjamin Gowen committed suicide. His family, not satisfied with the coroner's determination, hired the Pinkertons to find a killer. Certainly motivated by their past relationship with Gowen, the Agency was more than willing to blame the Mollies. But they could find no connection, and honesty won out: They determined, based on the word of members of the Gowen family, that he had been acting strangely lately, and that there was a history of insanity in the family. No one was ever charged in connection with his death.
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June 21, 1877 was a Thursday. There were 2 games were played in the National League. The Hartford Dark Blues beat the Chicago White Stockings, 6-0 at the Union Grounds in Brooklyn, where, in spite of their Hartford name, the Dark Blues were playing their home games that season. And the St. Louis Brown Stockings beat the Boston Red Stockings, 13-11 at the South End Grounds in Boston.
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