The Mahanoy City Miners and the Poor of the Cities

On March 11, 1871, officers from Pennsylvania’s Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), an Irish Catholic benevolent order, filed a revised charter with the state legislature. Some evidence suggests that AOH officers later charged as “Mollies” helped with this chartering. 

The new charter's introduction included this sentiment: “the Supreme Being has implanted in our natures tender sympathies and most humane feeling towards our fellow creatures in distress, and all the happiness that human nature is capable of enjoying must flow and terminate in the love of God and our fellow creatures.”

The same month that AOH officers filed the revised charter, miners in Mahanoy City, a heavily Irish town in the heart of the hard coal region, published a resolution. A report drafted by Pinkerton operative James McParlan, working undercover a few years later for railroad president Franklin Gowen, gives some clues to the miners’ motivation. In early 1875, McParlan gave Gowen a count of four hundred-fifty AOH men in Schuylkill County. Four hundred, he stated, were union men—members of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA). Mahanoy City housed Irish miners who held combined AOH lodge and WBA union membership.

Of AOH officers later charged as “Mollies,” one had strong family ties to Mahanoy City in 1871. Former coal miner John Kehoe, the father of three at the time, kept a hotel there. Kehoe’s two grown brothers, both mine laborers, lived in town with their parents. Kehoe’s father Joseph, a mineworker, served over the years both as township supervisor for Mahanoy City and as town constable. John would hold the post of high constable in subsequent years in Girardville.

The Mahanoy City miners’ resolution issued from WBA District Five. It addressed the ongoing mineworkers’ strike and the resulting hardship in securing coal. It declared:

“That we, the miners and laborers of this district, hearing that the poor of the Cities of Philadelphia and New York are suffering for the want of coal, will give one or two days’ labor in the mines, free gratis, for the purpose of supplying coal for their pressing need, provided that the operators will give the use of their collieries, and the railroad companies will transport the same free.”

In March 1871, Pennsylvania’s newly revised AOH charter spoke to “humane feeling towards our fellow creatures in distress.” That same month, miners in Mahanoy City, a heavily Irish town and home to future AOH county delegate John Kehoe, offered to work “free gratis”—without pay—to supply the urban poor with coal during wage disputes.

The miners’ offer to supply coal to the poor depended on the matching largesse of the railroads. That winter Franklin Gowen, president of the region’s largest carrier, doubled, and then tripled, his freight rates—an act so outrageous, Governor John Geary called for a legislative investigation into the rate increase. Gowen’s action helped derail the miners’ offer to the poor. The New York Herald declared Gowen's intervention in the legislative investigation “one of the most barefaced frauds that has [ever] characterized the Pennsylvania Legislature.” Four years later, Gowen broke the miners’ union.

The language of the AOH charter, its filing the same month that the miners offered their resolution, and future AOH delegate Kehoe's ties to Mahanoy City suggest that the AOH charter and the miners' resolution flowed from the same spring. In late winter 1871, Christian ideology informed industrial action in Pennsylvania’s hard coal region.

Two and a half years after the AOH filed its revised charter, Gowen brought McParlan into the coalfields. Nine murders followed within a two-year period. Those murders drove Gowen’s early “Molly Maguire” prosecutions.

A few weeks before McParlan entered the region, newspapers in Boston circulated a letter allegedly written from Mahanoy City. It described the town as one of the scenes of the “dark deeds of the Mollies,” subject to “a perfect reign of terror by the gang."

One Mahanoy City priest challenged the image of his town as a hotbed of terrorism. “I have resided and officiated in this town for four years, and have yet to discover the existence of such a society, much less a single member of such an organization as the ‘Molly Maguires,’” Father Charles McFadden told the New York Herald in late 1874. “On the contrary, the people are peaceable, intelligent and law-abiding. … I had charge of souls in Philadelphia and elsewhere, and I must, in justice, say that the people of Mahanoy City are as pious and good citizens as ever I met with.”

This post was revised on September 1, 2017.

The Extraordinary Career of District Attorney Siewers

Part 4 of 4: Embezzling Mother’s Bonds

District Attorney Edward R. Siewers proved as inept at hotel keeping as he had proved at maintaining ethical legal standards during Carbon County’s “Molly Maguire” trials.

Siewers’ Hotel Wahnetah was not marked for success. Its original name, Onoko Tavern, honored the Indian Princess Onoko. Legend promulgated by the Lehigh Valley Railroad's publicity department claimed that Princess Onoko leapt to her death from the spring-fed falls that cascade down Moore’s Ravine.

The princess allegedly made her leap for unrequited love.

The initial use of her tragic name for Siewers' Hotel Wahnetah proved equally ill-fated.

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Both the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the New Jersey Central had an interest in Hotel Wahnetah. Both ran lines to the resort.

Both railroads were part of Franklin Gowen’s Coal Combination, the cartel that controlled hard coal region interests and sent its special prosecutors to “Molly Maguire” trials to assist regional district attorneys. Asa Packer of the Lehigh Valley and Edward Clark of the Jersey Central were both named during an 1871 legislative investigation of price-fixing by that cartel.

Whether Siewers’ interest in Hotel Wahnetah represented a payoff for services rendered to those two railroads during the "Molly Maguire" trials has not been investigated to date.

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Whatever its backing, and despite even the attendance of U. S. President Grover Cleveland’s wife in 1888, Hotel Wahnetah failed. Its obscure location failed to draw the desired tourist trade.

And with that development, Siewers’ character asserted itself.

The hotel’s vacancy rate left Siewers “awash in debt and pursued by irate creditors,” Judge John P. Lavelle wrote in 1994. “In a desperate attempt to save the hotel, he borrowed heavily from his friends and when their funds dried up, he resorted to fraud, theft and embezzlement to raise money. His forgery of his mother’s name on ten Lehigh Valley Railroad bonds at the First National Bank of Mauch Chunk brought him to the brink of being arrested and charged with embezzlement in June of 1891.”

Siewers’ mother came to his rescue. She signed a release “exonerating the bank from all liability which might arise from her son’s forgery.”

His mother’s largess did not discourage the pack of creditors baying at Siewers’ heels. When charges of fraud were brought, Carbon County’s former district attorney fled the scene in dishonor.

A sheriff’s sale disposed of Siewers’ personal property. Proceeds from the sale totaled $1,000.

The Philadelphia Times, an old friend of Gowen’s, eventually took Siewers on as a financial editor. But in 1917, states Lavelle, Carbon County’s former DA Siewers “was found drowned in the Delaware River near the Market Street wharf, an apparent suicide.”

Hotel Wahnetah was razed the same year.

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The extraordinary career of District Attorney Edward R. Siewers spanned an arc from public drunkenness to prosecution of the most famous court cases in Pennsylvania history to fraud to embezzlement—from his own mother—to flight from legal charges to an apparent suicide.

Such was the career—and the character—of the district attorney from Carbon County who helped send seven Irish Catholic men to the gallows on tainted evidence as so-called “Molly Maguires.”

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The photo at the top of this post is of Hotel Wahnetah, opened in 1886 at Glen Onoko in Carbon County.

The material of Judge John P. Lavelle quoted in this four-part post is taken from "The Hard Coal Docket," published in 1994.

The Extraordinary Career of District Attorney Siewers

Part 3 of 4: The Canary Sings No More

By February 1877 the “confession” of former AOH bodymaster James Kerrigan had helped convict dozens of Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) defendants as “Molly Maguires” in Pennsylvania’s hard coal region.

Though initially charged with murder, Kerrigan himself remained unmolested by legal constraint. Within just a few months, local editors would declare Kerrigan a free man.

Edward R. Siewers, district attorney for Carbon County, helped smooth all of the legal pathways that made Kerrigan’s statement possible. Siewers’ maneuvering did not go unnoticed by area residents.

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The editor of the Mauch Chunk Democrat joined in the clamor that charged AOH defendants as “MURDERERS” on the basis of Kerrigan’s statement. In early February 1877, that editor published a squib on his county’s by-now illustrious district attorney—and that DA’s famous canary.

“We had often admired it, and frequently listened for hours to its melodious strains, but the beautiful songster is no more, a wicked weasel having, on Wednesday night entered our friend Siewers’ office and the cage in which the bird was confined; and made a meal off of his canary,” this editor reported in his “personal” column. “When Mr. Siewers entered his office on Thursday morning, the weasel was still in the cage, but made its escape while he and others were preparing for its capture. Poor bird, and cruel weasel!”

The Mauch Chunk editor never resolved the mystery of who placed the weasel in the songbird’s cage.

Prosecution witness Kerrigan fared better than Siewers’ ill-fated canary. In late April the same editor ran an article headlined “Jim Kerrigan at Home.”

The commonwealth brought no further charges against Kerrigan.

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Siewers himself initially fared well after the “Molly Maguire” trials. In 1877, while trials remained ongoing, he again won the race for district attorney. When the trials ended, he continued to practice law in Mauch Chunk.

Siewers’ downfall began during the mid-1880s. He channeled large sums of cash—his own and borrowed—into a land development scheme called the “Wahnetah Land and Improvement Company.”

Along with a local investor and one from Philadelphia, Carbon County’s former district attorney oversaw the erection of a four-story luxury hotel in Carbon County’s Glen Onoko. The hotel came complete with a dance pavilion, tennis courts and an 84-foot long bar. Guests could disport themselves with carriage and horse rides. Scenic walks abounded for the athletically minded.

But guests, athletically minded or not, did not come in sufficient numbers.

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Coming Next – The Extraordinary Career of District Attorney Siewers – Part 4 of 4: Embezzling Mother’s Bonds

The photo at the top of this post is of Hotel Wahnetah, opened in 1886 at Glen Onoko in Carbon County.

The material of Judge John P. Lavelle quoted in this four-part post is taken from "The Hard Coal Docket," published in 1994.

The Extraordinary Career of District Attorney Siewers

Part 2 of 4: The Canary Sings

It would take a book to document the various legal manipulations, chicaneries and outright nullifications of existing law undertaken to procure the scores of "guilty" verdicts issued during Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” prosecutions.

Carbon County’s District Attorney Edward R. Siewers added to that list of offenses. In October 1875, in a region inflamed with prejudice and lust for convictions at any price, Siewers characterized Irish Catholic defendants’ requests for a change of trial venue into a county less tainted with bias as “false and unfounded.”

In this cynical legal climate, it came as no surprise that the “confession” of prosecution witness James Kerrigan eliminated all hope for fair trials for Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) defendants prosecuted as “Molly Maguires” in Pennsylvania.

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“The Mollies Exposed!!!” a Shenandoah newspaper crowed in February 1876. “One of the Prisoners at Mauch Chunk Makes a Confession. Closing in on The Game!”

The Irish American “game” swept into the legal net through Kerrigan’s statement included Carbon County’s AOH delegate Thomas Fisher, its treasurer Alex Campbell and three other prominent AOH men.

An avid public waited two months for Kerrigan’s “confession” to hit local newspapers. When published, it did not disappoint.

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Kerrigan’s statement was sensational. And it was lurid. It told a credulous public long susceptible to “Molly Maguire” tales that Irish Catholic men who had spent years—sometimes decades—working their way out of the mines and into ownership of hotels and taverns, who had married and were raising families, who had successfully entered the political arena, and who were the elected officers of an international, state-sanctioned, Irish Catholic benevolent order, had also orchestrated widespread schemes of conspiracy to murder various mine officials.

To many who knew the Irishmen charged, Kerrigan’s “confession” was flatly unbelievable.

Kerrigan was charged as a defendant in Carbon County. District Attorney Siewers, in compliance with a writ of habeas corpus issued by Schuylkill County’s Judge Cyrus Pershing, allowed the former AOH bodymaster to be transported over the county line to Pottsville, where Pershing took Kerrigan’s statement in closed-door proceedings. Reporters attended, but not as guardians of civil liberties. Pershing instructed the newsmen to publish only when told to do so by prosecutors.

In April, with numerous trials pending, prosecutors lifted the gag. Local papers gave front page coverage to “KERRIGAN’S CONFESSION.”

“There ought to be more hangings than there is,” one juror said after reading the infamous document.

Buried deep in Kerrigan’s “confession” came the intelligence that would send a score of men to the gallows, imprison at least a score more, and cripple the entire AOH order statewide. Kerrigan told Judge Pershing: “The purposes of the ‘Mollie Maguires’ or A. O. H. is to kill people, beat them and burn down buildings. The notion is that it is to protect workingmen, but really they are all of the most hardened villains in the places where they reside.”

Kerrigan’s statement would be repeated, in various forms and with varying degrees of erudition, by numerous prosecution witnesses.

Editors published Kerrigan’s statement gleefully. They labeled Irish Catholic defendants “MURDERERS” before those defendants ever set foot in a courtroom.

Prosecutors’ reliance on Kerrigan’s statement—and judges’ wide support of that document—set aside all hope of equal protection for scores of AOH defendants. These Irishmen would not be tried individually, but as alleged members of a notorious criminal organization known as the "Molly Maguires." For membership in the AOH order, per James Kerrigan, equaled membership in that murderous society. Kerrigan’s charge started the legal juggernaut rolling.

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Coming February 1 – The Extraordinary Career of District Attorney Siewers – Part 3 of 4: The Canary Sings No More

The photo at the top of this post is of Hotel Wahnetah, opened in 1886 at Glen Onoko in Carbon County.

The material of Judge John P. Lavelle quoted in this four-part post is taken from "The Hard Coal Docket," published in 1994.

The Extraordinary Career of District Attorney Siewers

Part 1 of 4: A Little Bacchanalian Episode

During the late 1870s the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania prosecuted Irish Catholic defendants for so-called “Molly Maguire” crimes in five counties in its anthracite coal region: Carbon, Columbia, Luzerne, Northumberland and Schuylkill.

Elected district attorneys in all of these counties performed their duties with varying degrees of ineptitude. Most, if not all, of them happily ceded their authority to special prosecutors in the pay of railroad and coal and iron companies. These elected agents of the state allowed paid agents of the coal interests to control their “Molly Maguire” prosecutions.

It is not known what influence encouraged the legal guardians of so many Pennsylvania counties to so readily give up their elected authority. Bribery leaps to mind. So does coercion. Or perhaps simply an adherence to the pernicious “Know-Nothing” beliefs of the era. Those beliefs maintained that Irish Catholics should never hold elected office.

A deficiency of character no doubt contributed to the specific case of Carbon County’s District Attorney Edward R. Siewers.

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Siewers was admitted to Carbon County’s bar in 1873. He served from 1874 to 1880 as that county’s district attorney. His tenure spanned the entirety of the “Molly Maguire” prosecutions.

“No member of the Carbon Bar rose to prominence so early or so easily; no member fell from the pinnacle so quickly,” Judge John P. Lavelle wrote of Siewers in 1994.

Drama marked Siewers’ career from the start. One year before his admittance to Carbon County’s legal fraternity, a local editor reported “a little episode in his [Siewers’] bacchanalian career.” In fall 1872, three years before Pennsylvania charged its first “Molly Maguire,” newspaperman E. M. Boyle said of "Ed. R. Siewers," the man who would be district attorney:

“Edward was on a serious drunk a few weeks ago, and early in the morning he left his noisy companions, and attempted to go home. It was a fortunate thing that the night was warm, because if it had not been, Edward would have caught a very bad cold on somebody else’s door step, where he lay in a drunken snooze until awakened by the early watchman.”

At the time of this “little episode in his bacchanalian career,” Siewers was almost thirty years old.
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It seems unlikely that Siewers was brought up to bacchanalian ways. His father, Joseph, was born in the West Indies to Moravian missionaries. Joseph Siewers graduated from Nazareth Hall, a Moravian theological seminary. He served as principal of Mauch Chunk’s high school, as superintendent of Carbon County’s schools, and as prothonotary, an elected position.

Joseph Siewers dabbled in newspaper work. Then he turned to the study of law. After passing the bar, he opened a law office opposite the Mauch Chunk courthouse. When his hearing failed, making trial work no longer possible, Joseph opened an insurance business.

Joseph Siewers' career contributed to an auspicious lineage for his son, Edward, Carbon County district attorney for that county’s so-called “Molly Maguire” trials.

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“The son of … a prominent, well-regarded lawyer, politician and former superintendent of schools … Siewers rode the fame bestowed by his last name when he made his first run for public office,” Lavelle wrote of Edward 120 years later. “His father’s political clout and money did not hurt either …”

Edward’s first run for the office of district attorney came less than a year after his reported “bacchanalian” episode left him drunk and asleep in an unnamed resident’s doorway.

That episode would become less jarring to those who followed Edward’s career over the years.

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Coming January 15 – The Extraordinary Career of District Attorney Siewers – Part 2 of 4: The Canary Sings

The photo at the top of this post is of Hotel Wahnetah, opened in 1886 at Glen Onoko in Carbon County.

The material of Judge John P. Lavelle quoted in this four-part post is taken from "The Hard Coal Docket," published in 1994.

A Message for December

Love Guides the Whole Design

In March 1871, Pennsylvania officers for the Irish Catholic benevolent order known as the “Ancient Order of Hibernians” (AOH) filed their order's corporate charter—complete with constitution and by-laws—with the state legislature in Harrisburg.

Like so much of this tantalizing history, the origins of the 1871 Pennsylvania AOH charter—including the question of who authored its beautiful language—remain unknown. No information regarding the drafting of this document has yet been published.

But all of the dozens of AOH men arrested for alleged “Molly Maguire” crimes—and all 21 men executed on gallows in five counties over a period of two and a half years—belonged to the AOH benevolent order. All of these Irish Catholic men received copies of the AOH constitution and by-laws on their initiation into the order.

John Kehoe, AOH delegate for Schuylkill County during the mid-1870s, oversaw the printing of these documents at the Herald newspaper office in Shenandoah. Kehoe also likely oversaw the distribution of these documents to AOH divisions throughout Pennsylvania’s hard coal region.

Most, if not all, of the men prosecuted as Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguires” had in their possession at some time a booklet that included the language given here.

Below is the preamble from the AOH constitution, chartered on March 10, 1871, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

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Constitution and By-Laws of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

Instituted, March 10, 1871.
Chartered, March 10, 1871.
Adopted, March 11, 1871.

Preamble. The members of this Order do declare that the intent and purpose of the Order is to promote Friendship, Unity, and True Christian Charity among its members, by raising or supporting a stock or fund of money for maintaining the aged, sick, blind, and infirm members, and for no other purpose whatever.

These laws though human,
Spring from Love Divine,
Love laid the scheme—
Love guides the whole design.

Vile is the man
Who will evade these laws,
Or taste the sweets
Without sufficient cause.

Introduction. The Motto of this Order is “Friendship, Unity, and True Christian Charity.”

Unity, in unity together for mutual support in sickness and distress.
Friendship, in assisting each other to the best of our power.
True Christian Charity, by doing to each other, and all the world, as we would wish they should do unto us.

Brethren: It is beyond all doubt that the Supreme Being has placed man in a state of dependence and need of mutual support from his fellow man. Neither can the greatest monarch on earth exist without friendship and society. Therefore, the Supreme Being has implanted in our natures tender sympathies and most humane feeling towards our fellow creatures in distress, and all the happiness that human nature is capable of enjoying must flow and terminate in the love of God and our fellow creatures. So we, the members of this Order, do agree to assist each other, and conform to the following rules …

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Thanks to all readers of the John Kehoe blog over the past year, and warm wishes for the coming year.

Anne Flaherty

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Coming January 2 – The Extraordinary Career of District Attorney Siewers—Part 1 of 4: A Little Bacchanalian Episode

"Before I Die I Will Relate These Facts":

Patrick Hester's Dying Statement

Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) officer Patrick Hester died in March 1878 on a gallows at Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. He died alongside AOH members Peter McHugh and Patrick Tully. All three Irishmen were convicted for the 1868 murder of Alexander Rea. All three protested their innocence. McHugh and Tully gave their statements at sentencing hearings.

By the time the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania executed these three Irish Catholic men, its hard coal region had convulsed in a carnival of ethnic hostility. Public executions in three counties on June 21, 1877, had dangerously charged the atmosphere and changed civic life forever. Many more executions were promised.

But with Hester’s effort in March 1878 to issue a dying statement, events took an especially degraded turn.

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Hester, a hotelkeeper, had served not just as AOH delegate for Northumberland County. Over the past decade or more, area voters had elected the Irishman as township supervisor, tax collector, school director and overseer of the poor. All four of his daughters had been schoolteachers. An area newspaper, with biting rhetoric, had crowned Hester “the great mogul of the Democratic party.”*

“[T]hey are after my life these good many years,” Hester told McHugh and Tully by letter just days before their executions in Bloomsburg. Rea’s murder, the charge against them, had taken place near Centralia ten years earlier. Rea was ambushed while watering his horse at a trough. A superintendent of the Locust Mountain Coal and Iron Company, Rea left behind a widow and six children.

The commonwealth initially prosecuted John Duffy, Thomas Donahoe and Michael Prior for Rea’s death. The first attempt to officially conflate the rising power of the AOH order with supposed “Molly Maguire” violence took place during the Rea trial in 1869. Hester served at that time as Northumberland County's AOH delegate. Defense witness Patrick McKenna brought forward the AOH constitution and bylaws to place in evidence during that trial. “These are the obligation constitution and by laws [sic] of the Ancient order of Hibernians,” McKenna told the court. “This is the order they accuse to be the ‘Molly M’Guires.’”

The 1869 trials of Donahoe, Duffy and Prior ended in acquittals. The commonwealth charged Hester, but released him without trial on an order of nolle prosequi. In other words, the commonwealth decided to proceed no farther in its case against Patrick Hester.

But eight years later, the trials of Donahoe, Duffy and Prior had long since faded from public memory. Prosecutors brought forward a brand new witness nicknamed “Kelly the Bum” to testify against Hester, McHugh and Tully.

“He is all he confessed to be in court—a notorious highway robber and scoundrel,” Hester told a Boston reporter of Kelly’s testimony against him. “I cannot say why he went against me unless … he was bribed.”

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“My Dear Friends,” Hester wrote to McHugh and Tully two days before the Bloomsburg executions. “I suppose [this] is about my last writing on this earth, as I believe our time in this world is short, and may God prepare us for the next and better world.”

Hester told of court proceedings against him in Bloomsburg in February 1877 during the second Rea murder trial. He described the testimony of three prosecution witnesses against him, concluding “every … one that swore against me at the February Court swore false.”

“The reason I write this,” Hester told his codefendants, “is to let you know that before I die I will relate these facts and the false perjury that has been sworn against me. I do declare and will declare that I am not guilty of the murder of A. W. Rea, that I never got up that job or plot that has been sworn against me and that both of you know.”

Hester had been a respected leader within the Irish Catholic community. This grandfather had credibility. If he issued a dying statement from the gallows, many would believe him.

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As Hester prepared his declaration, John Kehoe, alleged “King of the Molly Maguires,” was gathering momentum to stay the signing of his death warrant. With Hester’s published letter of innocence, Franklin Gowen risked losing even more support for his ongoing prosecutions.

If Hester gave a statement from the gallows, newspapermen would record it for publication. A wider populace might then give credence to what the regional Irish Catholic population already believed: that many, if not all, of the AOH men hanged as “Molly Maguires” were innocent of the crimes charged against them. Gowen’s “Molly Maguire” juggernaut might be halted.

A large crowd gathered for the Bloomsburg executions. Those who came to gawk at death by strangulation were fairly assured that event would take place not once, but three times. But even those spectators were likely unaware of the plan concocted to thwart Hester’s effort to issue his final statement.

A Philadelphia daily reported the scene from the gallows: “The priests recited the offertory rapidly, while from the window of the cell that McHugh had just left a party of young girls, admitted by a Coal and Iron policeman, laughed and chattered.”

“We do not know who they were nor do we wish to,” a Bloomsburg newspaper said of the women. “They were probably among those who are a disgrace to their sex.”

Whatever the occupation of the women admitted to McHugh's cell in Bloomsburg Prison by one of Gowen's private policemen, they made themselves useful as Hester spoke his last words. “The girls from the cell window chattered louder,” the Philadelphia paper reported. Whatever Hester tried to impart, no one in the crowd heard his words clearly. The commotion the women created succeeded. No newspaper could give a clear account of Hester’s dying statement.

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“[M]ay God direct every one to do what is right, and may God forgive them that is [sic] the cause of my being here,” Hester had written two days before to McHugh and Tully. “What I feel most sorry about is my poor family to be left desolate, poor and forlorn … And as for death, I am not afraid, for I am almost tired of this sinful world, for they are after my life these good many years. All that troubles me about dying is to die of what I am not guilty of, and that both of you know, and may God in His mercy do what is just and right to all.”

Of Hester’s last words, the Chicago Tribune recorded only this statement: “As God is my witness I am innocent.”

It is doubtful, given what Pennsylvania’s Irish Catholics had endured by this time, that even the use of the "chatter" of prostitutes to obscure Hester’s dying declaration would have surprised him.

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Coming July 15, 2011 — "The Stories Were All Lies": Pinkerton, McParlan and Sherlock Holmes Tell a Tale of the "Molly Maguires"

Franklin Gowen Argues:

"Men Were Not Created Equal"

Both the Miners’ Journal in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and the Reading Eagle reported in full Franklin Gowen’s stirring words to an assembly at Pottsville in 1878: “The Declaration of Independence affirmed that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”*

But Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, begged to differ with our country’s founders. “Men were not created equal,” this Irish Episcopalian said flatly. Only one distinction, he insisted, separated men: “the distinction between mind and matter, between the men who labored with their heads and those who labored with their hands.”

“There [are] two great classes of people in this world,” Gowen thundered, “men of genius, or intellectual men, and those who [are] not so, the men of labor."

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It was early April 1878 in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Pottsville’s town fathers—its self-proclaimed “white men”—were in the mood for a spring celebration.

The previous year had seen the execution of 11 Irish Catholic men, all officers or members of the “Ancient Order of Hibernians” (AOH), on the gallows in three counties for so-called “Molly Maguire” crimes.

Just the previous week had seen the hangings of four more AOH men, including three powerful county officers of the benevolent order. All four AOH men protested their innocence of the crimes charged against them.

Peter McHugh and Patrick Tully asserted their innocence at sentencing hearings. Patrick Hester declared his on the gallows, before God and man. Thomas Fisher, “as guiltless as an unborn child” of the crime charged against him, did the same.

The efforts of these AOH men had been aborted. The efforts of Gowen’s “Coal Combination,” the cartel of regional railroad and coal interests, against all populist organization—union, political and social—had succeeded brilliantly.

The commonwealth’s “Molly Maguire” prosecutions, based on evidence supplied by Pinkerton operatives in Gowen’s employ, had spread even to the western part of the state. Those prosecutions now disrupted the bituminous coal counties of Allegheny and Westmoreland.

Gowen’s prosecutions, engineered by private detectives and enabled by private police, had made a mockery of the constitutionally protected rights of Irish Catholic defendants. But not one attorney had successfully challenged Gowen’s autocratic abuse of the courts.

By April 1878 Gowen, generator of Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” juggernaut, had cleared the field to make any assertion he wanted. To pursue his vendetta against the AOH men, the industrialist had set aside the U.S. Constitution.

He had already upended one protective icon of American liberties. He had no problem now shattering even the bedrock document of U.S. identity—its Declaration of Independence.

To Franklin Gowen, prosecutor of Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguires,” the laws of the United States simply did not apply.

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Judge David Green introduced Gowen to the “large and brilliant audience” assembled that April evening for the Atheneum Anniversary at Pottsville’s Academy of Music. From the audience, Judge Cyrus Pershing applauded warmly. These two judges, along with Gowen, had helped send Schuylkill’s AOH men to the gallows.

Pottsville’s Atheneum, its gentlemen’s literary society, had been founded just one year before, amidst wholesale signings of death warrants for Irish Catholics convicted as “Molly Maguires.” Judges and prosecutors who secured those convictions joined now to celebrate their literary society’s first anniversary. They did so with Gowen’s speech. The Eagle subtitled it “ALLEGED EVILS OF TRADES UNIONS.”

Gowen gave this speech just four days after Thomas Fisher declared himself “guiltless as an unborn child” on the gallows. The night of the speech, Gowen strutted with self-importance, as he had as prosecutor in so many “Molly Maguire” trials. He confided to those assembled: “in the many conflicts he had had with Mollie Maguires, secret societies and investigating committees he had formed a very low opinion of his opponents, who had played the part of labor reformers.”

Exactly one week before, the executions of three powerful AOH men had convulsed the region. These Irishmen could no longer plague the Coal Combination with their challenges of collective bargaining, union solidarity, legislative investigations or benevolent associations.

The railroad president felt in the mood to crow. And crow he did, setting aside even the might of the icon of U.S. independence.

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Years before, Gowen had made clear his belief in the “five great races of men.” In Gowen’s personal—and peculiar—ideology, “the Celts” comprised a distinct and separate race. The role of Irish Catholics—to this aristocrat—was not to lead, but to serve.

And the “true happiness of every man,” Gowen puffed now to society members, “and especially of the laboring man, was to be accomplished only by individual effort, not by striving collectively.” Trade unions destroyed confidence between employer and employee by "making both subject to the domination of an irresponsible society led by inferior men.”

In a region where Irish Catholics comprised much of the “laboring class,” Gowen’s speech was a marvel of arrogance, drenched in thinly veiled bigotry. But 15 Irishmen were already dead on the gallows. Few would rise to challenge him now.

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The glittering assembly that heard Gowen’s speech held both members of the Atheneum society and stockholders of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. Many enjoyed wealth due in part to the efforts of seven-year-old slate pickers.

St. Clair’s Hickory Colliery, just a few miles from Pottsville’s Academy of Music, employed some of these boys. They worked in conditions of unimaginable deprivation. By the time Gowen gave his Pottsville speech, no trade union remained to protect them. Gowen’s efforts, and those of the Coal Combination, had destroyed unionism in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region.

The gentlemen in Pottsville gave Gowen’s effort on the “ALLEGED EVILS OF TRADE UNIONS” a thunderous applause. They applauded too, Gowen’s subversion of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. That document lay in tatters under their feet. Their applause helped scatter its contents.

A few miles away, the desperate lives of the slate pickers continued, unchallenged by “labor reformers.”

And the next year and a half would see the death of six more AOH men on the gallows.

For in Pennsylvania’s coal fields, as Gowen assured Pottsville’s finest citizens, “Men were not created equal.”

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Coming July 1, 2011 — “Before I Die I Will Relate These Facts": Patrick Hester's Dying Statement