The Poem by "Graybeard"

Part 2 of 2: The Darkening Future

The poem by “Graybeard,” written on lined paper in careful nineteenth century penmanship, remains one of the most enigmatic artifacts from Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” history. Its author remains unknown.

The poem’s contents suggest that John Kehoe’s wife Mary Ann penned this work.

Whatever its derivation, the poem by “Graybeard” told Mary Ann’s story.

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In 1877 s Philadelphia reporter called Mary Ann, the mother of five, “quite a young, comely woman.”

“She has proved herself a faithful wife, and has clung to her husband steadfastly through good and evil report,” a Pottsville newspaper said after Kehoe’s sentencing hearing. “In the darkening future she will be entitled to sympathy.”

Of Mary Ann’s strenuous efforts to secure a commutation of sentence for her husband, the same newspaper reported: “Mrs. Kehoe’s dream by night and the object of her labor by day, is to save her husband from being executed on the 18th prox. She will go to Harrisburg with by far the best prepared case of any presented by the long list of Mollies.”

The poem by “Graybeard” describes that struggle in part.

“For the last two years and over on hope I relied upon,” its second stanza reads. “But now my hope is over for my husband dear is gone.”

The poem continues, with its misspellings and grammatical errors:

Like a faithful woman I done my best and I could do no more
For him indeed I lost my rest and hardship Sore I bore
But it was my right to do for him for he was my husband dear
And I lost no chance either night nor day to let my husband clear
But it was all in vain allas for me for his enemies was not slow
For they hung my childrens Father and my husband dear my John Kehoe

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“His life [they] wanted and [they] have it now for the hirelings Swore untrue,” stanza three asserts. “By perjury they hung my John but anything would do.”

The remainder of stanza three speaks of Franklin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad; of James Frederic Wood, archbishop of Philadelphia; and of mine supervisor Frank Langdon, who died after a beating at Audenried in 1862:

To please the prince great Franklin B. the Liars done all [they] could
And left a widow now of me to satisfy Rev. Bishop Wood
Had he been guilty I would not care, no nor ask to set him free
But by the evidence any Sensible man would know it was downright perjury
For poor Langdons blood he never shed which his Jury ought to know
But [his] life [they] wanted and [they] have it now of my husband John Kehoe

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Stanza four describes Kehoe’s hanging:

Oh many a trip to Pottsville Jail for two years and one half I made
To comfort him in a dismal cell many a visit there I paid
But the eighteenth of December was the Sadest there to me
To See my husband dear upon the gallows tree
When he bid farewell forever to his children and his wife
The parting was heart rending and I thought I would lose my life
My heart was breaking to the core, for it was a dreadful blow
To part with him for ever my poor husband John Kehoe

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Coming November 15 – Justice Trembling in the Balance – Part 1 of 4: The Stacking of Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons

The Poem by "Graybeard"

Part 1 of 2: An Uneasy Heart

With the public hangings in Pennsylvania during the 1870s of 21 Irish Catholic alleged “Molly Maguires,” a pall settled over the surviving family members of the executed Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) men. Descendants of these men from various families speak of a closely held belief in their innocence—expressed over many decades in kitchens and living rooms—and of the belief that these men were railroaded to the gallows by a combination of interests.

The executions themselves, the murders that prompted them, the long imprisonment of scores of other AOH men, the pernicious and promiscuous use over the decades of the toxic “Molly Maguire” label, the withholding of much information surrounding these cases, and the reluctance of historians to investigate these events closely all led to a smothering of information regarding the true identities of the AOH defendants—and of their family members. The fact that the Pinkerton Detective Agency and the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad—not state government agencies—archived many of these records further complicates the investigation of this history.

The executions and the infiltration of Pennsylvania’s hard coal region by numerous Pinkerton operatives produced a lingering climate of suspicion and fear. A raid conducted in December 1875 at Wiggan’s Patch in Schuylkill County against John Kehoe’s in-laws—and the murder there of his brother-in-law and his pregnant sister-in-law—bolstered a climate of terror that kept area residents and their descendants from speaking or sharing information. Survivors suspected rightly that Pinkerton operatives had helped engineer the early morning raid. Its chilling effect was virtually complete.

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After the executions, descendants on all sides of the story who remained in the coal region split down the middle—along ethnic lines—in their belief in the guilt or innocence of the AOH men hanged as “Mollies.”

In this climate of suspicion, fear, disquiet and mistrust, personal records remained scant. But a few have appeared in scattered collections.

An unmarked folder held in an archive at the Ryan Library of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, holds one such relic. Titled simply “To the memory of John Kehoe,” this five-stanza poem carries only the mysterious attribution “By graybeard.”

Sometime during the 1980s a granddaughter of John Kehoe released this poem, along with other artifacts. It contains many of the grammatical and spelling lapses common to some nineteenth century writing.

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“My pencils good but my hand does shake and cannot compose my theme,” the poem begins. “For my mind is a Stray and I cannot think so good people don’t me blame.”

The unnamed author made a painstaking rendering on lined paper, drafting carefully formed letters with a fountain pen, with flourishes at the stanzas’ openings. Although nothing remains to show who authored this work, its contents suggest it may have been written by John Kehoe’s wife, Mary Ann.

Whoever authored the poem, it is heartfelt, naïve, and of a piercing intensity. Its sentiment brings a rare personal stamp to this history.

“And its no wonder for with grief I’m bound and my heart is uneasy now,” the writer mused. What remains legible of stanza one continues:

My spirits low Since that dreadful day with Sorrow on my brow
In Pottsville Jail they hung my John and caused him for to bleed
Which leaves me now his heart broken wife in Sorrow now indeed

The last two lines of the first stanza remain indecipherable, apart from the last two words. “John Kehoe,” the end of stanza one reads.

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Coming November 8 – The Poem by “Graybeard” – Part 2 of 2: The Darkening Future

Alex Campbell's Wake

Part 4 of 4: The Sun’s Editor Pleads for the “Molly Maguires”

The New York’s Sun’s June 1877 coverage of Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) treasurer Alex Campbell’s wake proved among the most outrageous in a decades-long campaign by newsmen to smear Pennsylvania’s AOH men as illiterate “Molly Maguires.”

Historian Kevin Kenny relied in part on the Sun’s account of Campbell’s wake to shape his views of the AOH men prosecuted as “Molly Maguires.”

But extensive research shows that John Swinton, chief of staff and editorial page writer for the Sun at the time of Campbell’s wake, strenuously disagreed with his own newspaper’s coverage. Swinton tried to rectify the tragic events that coverage helped set in motion.

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On Swinton’s death in 1901, The New York Times said of the newsman: “He … assisted workingmen’s movements of every kind with money as well as with his pen and voice.”

On July 1, 1877, ten days after Pennsylvania hanged 11 so-called “Molly Maguires,” the cases of many other AOH men sentenced to death—including those of Patrick Hester, John Kehoe and Peter McHugh—lay pending before Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons. Swinton wrote a private letter from New York on that date. He addressed it “To the Board of Pardons.”

“I beseech you to save my country, and your state, from the terrible wrong & appalling disgrace of these executions,” Swinton implored the Pennsylvania board. “I beseech you to exercise clemency, which in this case I believe to be justice, toward the so-called ‘Molly Maguires,’ now under condemnation.”

The Pennsylvania board ignored Swinton’s plea. It held fast to its decision to execute the remaining AOH defendants. For two and a half more years the “Molly Maguire” juggernaut rolled on throughout Pennsylvania.

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Six years after Swinton addressed his plea to Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons, he addressed a group of pressmen in New York. “There is no such thing … in America, as an independent press,” Swinton told fellow journalists. “The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread. … We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

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Thus New York editor and workingmen’s advocate John Swinton spoke in July 1877 of the “terrible wrong and appalling disgrace” of Pennsylvania’s ongoing “Molly Maguire” executions. Swinton drafted his private letter to Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons just days after his own newspaper indulged its descriptive orgy of Campbell’s wake for regional newsstands.

If Swinton, not Allan Pinkerton, had first written Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” history, this defining slice of Irish American experience may have received a just interpretation.

In 1932 Anthony Bimba determined: “Although at least nineteen men died on the gallows as Mollies, there was no organization by that name. … After the label itself had been made sufficiently fatal to send a man to the gallows, the mine owners proceeded to fasten this label upon all miners’ leaders they wished to get rid of.”

In 1947 labor historian Philip Foner concurred, stating: “It is now established that there was no society in America calling itself the Molly Maguires, that this name was tagged to the Ancient Order of Hibernians by the commercial press whose purpose it was to help the coal operators crush all organization in the mining industry; that the Philadelphia and Reading Company hired the Pinkerton spy agency not to save society from a band of terrorists but to spread terror …”

Howard Zinn, in his 1980 work “A People’s History of the United States,” supported Foner’s claim. Zinn described the alleged “Mollies” as “members of a society called the Ancient Order of Hibernians … accused of acts of violence, mostly on the testimony of a detective planted among the miners.” Zinn noted in particular Foner’s use of a quote from the Irish World in New York. It described the AOH defendants as “‘intelligent men whose direction gave strength to the resistance to the miners to the inhuman reduction of their wages.’”

A decade’s research proves the truth of these claims.

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By the mid-1870s, 700,000 Irish Catholic men had organized in the United States under the sheltering arm of AOH social, political, labor, financial and even religious reform. It took a widespread effort to cripple the order in Pennsylvania statewide—and to undermine it not just throughout the United States, but worldwide.

That effort needed not just Pennsylvania coal operators, their Pinkerton agents and their hired press. It needed Pennsylvania courts and Roman Catholic clergy to join in the effort. The collusion of all of these powerfully self-interested men stopped the AOH reform movement dead in its tracks.

If these organized Irishmen had been given free rein, our U.S. “Gilded Age” may have earned itself a new title. This age enriched a group of industrialists called “robber barons” at the expense of the workingmen they treated like serfs. If the reform efforts of well over a half million Irish American men had been allowed to take hold, our “gilded” age may have instead embodied the democratic principles that underlay this republic.

Those enlivening principles helped draw large numbers of passionate Irishmen to these shores. The brutal smashing of their AOH reform movement remains a great loss to history, to the Irish American identity—and to this republic.

This post was edited October 30, 2011 to include Howard Zinn's comments.

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Coming November 1 – The Poem by "Graybeard" - Part 1 of 2: An Uneasy Heart

Alex Campbell's Wake

Part 3 of 4: Campbell's Assertions of Innocence
After Pennsylvania hanged 11 so-called “Molly Maguires” on June 21, 1877, newspapers country-wide had a field day. The New York Sun kept readers well entertained with its dime-novel accounts of Alex Campbell’s Friday night wake.

In 1995 historian Kevin Kenny used the Sun’s account of Campbell’s wake to bolster this theory: that Pennsylvania’s so-called “Molly Maguires” remained outside the characteristic culture of Irish immigrants to the United States.

But research into coal region newspapers disputes Kenny’s characterization.
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Just three years before Campbell’s execution as a “Molly Maguire,” an 1874 newspaper squib announced a social event hosted by the Irishman from County Donegal. “A ball will be given on Tuesday next at the house of Mr. Alexander Campbell,” a Carbon County paper reported from Summit Hill. “A fine time is anticipated.”

An account from the mid-1870s showed that Campbell, known locally as a “well-to-do Irishman,” served with two of his fellow “Molly Maguires” as a delegate to a county Democratic convention. Campbell and two fellow AOH officers who assembled in Mauch Chunk to elect their local and state representatives did not belong to the “preliterate Gaelic culture” of Kenny’s alleged “Molly Maguires.”

After their arrests as "Mollies," at least two of Campbell’s fellow prisoners in Mauch Chunk Jail, if not Campbell himself, decorated the walls of their cells with the American flag.

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Campbell spoke English fluently. “‘You still assert your innocence?’” a newspaper reporter asked the AOH officer less than a month before his execution.

“‘Yes, I do,’” replied Campbell, “‘and I know that in the very bottom of my heart that the commonwealth knows the same thing. They cannot help know it as they were well aware of the perjured testimony that was given during my trial.’”

At the reading of his death warrant a day later, Campbell said: “‘It’s hard to die innocently; but I shall not be the first to die thus. God knows that I am innocent of any crime; and the people know it, and the Commonwealth know it.’”

A week before his execution Campbell's wife brought their two children, one an infant and one four years of age, to his cell for a final leave-taking. A local newspaper reported: “It was a trying moment when Campbell was compelled to finally separate from his children—he kissed and kissed them time and time again. But he bore it manfully.”

A few months before his execution, five residents of County Donegal addressed Pennsylvania’s pardon board on Campbell’s behalf. They pleaded that the defendant had “so conducted himself, while at home, dutifully, steadily and honestly; and that his parents are honest, industrious and respectable.”

Campbell’s defense attorney, Daniel Kalbfus, wrote to the same board: “I was one of the Counsel who defended Alex Campbell in his trial for the Murder of John P. Jones. The character of the material witnesses against him, was so palpably infamous, and the game they played so certainly in the interest of their own forfeited necks, that I could not agree to a verdict that would take Campbell’s life—nor can I now.”

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Campbell, AOH divisional treasurer for Storm Hill, was no “archetypal ‘wild Irishman.’” Before his arrest as an alleged “Molly Maguire,” Campbell—along with his fellow AOH officers—had acculturated himself comfortably into Carbon County’s social and political scene.

Pennsylvania did not prosecute wild Irishmen as “Molly Maguires.” The commonwealth prosecuted, in some instances, prosperous members of its own middle class. Many were fathers of large families. At least one was a grandfather.

Many of Pennsylvania’s AOH officers prosecuted as “Molly Maguires” were not, in Kenny’s words, “noticeably and ominously different from the mass of Irish immigrants.” They were, in fact, political leaders—and area businessmen. They were embedded in the social life of the region.

Kenny’s 1995 description of “the closed, alien culture embodied by Molly Maguireism”—and his 1998 description of Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguires” as “archetypal ‘wild Irishmen’”—beg for revision.

Given the gaps in Kenny’s theory, the latest in the “Molly Maguire” accounting, given more than 130 years of severely flawed historical accounting, Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” story demands a new reckoning.

This post was revised on August 9, 2018.
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Coming October 22 – Alex Campbell’s Wake – Part 4 of 4: The Sun’s Editor Pleads for the “Molly Maguires”Th

Alex Campbell's Wake

Part 2 of 4: Conducted With the Greatest Decorum

In June 1877 the New York Sun reveled in wild scenes of alleged drinking, “keening” and chanting of curses during the Friday night wake of Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) treasurer Alex Campbell, executed as a “Molly Maguire.”

A Philadelphia Times reporter, drawn by rumors of the “expected wild time” to be had at Campbell’s Saturday night wake, attended that service. Campbell would be buried on Sunday. Reporters could hope to be kept well entertained by the mourning of wild Irishmen.

But events disappointed. The Philadelphia article described only “QUIET AND ORDERLY PROCEEDINGS.” “Plenty of Pipes and Whiskey,” its headline read, “but No Demonstrations or Threats of Violence.”

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Mourners to Campbell’s funeral on Sunday gathered from all the towns, villages and mining patches surrounding the AOH order in Schuylkill and Carbon counties. Most, if not all, believed strongly in Campbell’s innocence.

The mourners gathered during the time of greatest upheaval the coal regions had ever known. The mineworkers’ union had been smashed for good two years before. Then questionable—some said appalling—“evidence” had convicted numerous AOH men, and most of the region’s AOH officers, of capital crimes.

Irish mineworkers had pledged portions of their starvation wages to secure defense counsel for the AOH men. Some of those mineworkers now went to work with empty dinner kettles.

Campbell’s funeral drew these men and their families in droves. Its procession of mourners, the largest the coal regions had ever seen, wound all the way from Campbell’s tavern at the foot of the mountain to the little church at its top.

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The Philadelphia reporter called Campbell, a coal miner turned hotel keeper turned liquor distributor, “a well-to-do Irishman.” Campbell’s Saturday wake, he reported, “was conducted with the greatest decorum … notwithstanding the published rumors.”

This reporter spent several hours at Campbell’s wake hoping for the “expected wild time.” He found no incident worth reporting but “the ordinary watching of the dead by a dozen women in an inner room, and at the most fifty or sixty men who sat in an outer room smoking their pipes and conversing in low tones.”

“The yard and front of the house had a few idlers standing about in groups,” he noted, “but not even the episode of a drunken man or a weeping woman broke the monotony of the wake.”

Some local newspapers, too, stuck to the facts. One gave a description of Campbell’s tombstone. “This stone is over seven feet in height, plain finish, with Gothic cross on the top and representation of the Crucifixion,” the report stated. “The inscription is on the stone, with simply the name ‘Campbell’ in heavy raised letters on the base. The stone complete weighs about a ton.”

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Of the New York Sun's reported “keening” from Campbell's Friday night wake, historian Kevin Kenny said in 1995: “Here, also, was a cultural pattern that would need careful monitoring if the ‘wilder’ Irish of west Ulster and Connacht were to be tamed.”

But the Sun’s reports of threats, of keening, of curses—of Kenny’s “archetypal ‘wild Irish’”—were a fiction concocted by a New York reporter to sell newspapers and keep ethnic hostility strongly on the boil. Such stories of supposed "Molly Maguire" activity had circulated for years, inside and outside of the coal region.

They made newspapermen a lot of money. They helped send 21 Irish Catholic men, guilty or innocent, to their deaths on the gallows.

And they have influenced historical accounts for more than a century.

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Coming October 15 — Alex Campbell’s Wake – Part 3 of 4: Campbell’s Assertions of Innocence

Alex Campbell's Wake

Part 1 of 4: Sensational Dispatches to City Papers
A 1998 review for the History Book Club called Kevin Kenny's “Making Sense of the Molly Maguires” the “best book on the subject.” “It is meticulously researched, carefully argued, and well written, and it brings all of the events to life,” said this review. “The controversy over the Molly Maguires will not end with Kenny’s book. … But no one will ever again be able to think or write seriously about the 1870s violence in the anthracite coal region without reading this stunning volume.”

Since the publication of Kenny’s work in 1998, no historian has stepped forward to challenge it.

But new research suggests that Kenny’s argument is in need of revision.

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“The Molly Maguires embodied a rare, transatlantic strand of a pattern of violent protest characteristic of different parts of the Irish countryside at different times between 1760 and 1850,” Kenny said in “Making Sense of the Molly Maguires.” “The type of violence in question has been aptly described as a form of ‘retributive justice.’”

Many convicted “Mollies” came from west Donegal, noted Kenny, from a “preliterate Gaelic culture.” “It was these Irish-speakers,” he said, “and not the Irish in general, who became ‘Molly Maguires’ in Pennsylvania.”

“Because of their language, culture, and customs, they were the archetypal ‘wild Irish,’ noticeably and ominously different from the mass of Irish immigrants,” Kenny determined.

In a 1995 article published in Labor History, Kenny used one example in particular— the wake of Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) divisional treasurer Alexander Campbell—to reinforce his theory of these “archetypal ‘wild Irish.’”

Campbell died on June 21, 1877, along with ten other AOH men executed on that day in Pottsville, Mauch Chunk and Wilkes-Barre. He was charged with the 1875 murder of mine superintendent John P. Jones.

Kenny relied on an account from the New York Sun to describe Campbell’s wake. But like much of the Sun’s reporting of the so-called “Molly Maguires,” this account was a masterpiece of hyperbole. A week after its publication, a private letter from the newspaper’s own editor to Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons challenged the truth of the Sun’s dime-novel reporting.

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“AFTER THE GALLOWS SCENE,” the Sun’s front-page headline ran. “TEARS AND CURSES, AND THREATS OF VENGEANCE GROWLED.”

The Sun, noted Kenny, described “a protracted boisterous wake” held for Campbell “of precisely the type frowned upon by the Catholic Church, conducted in the Irish language, and featuring the distinctly Gaelic practice of ‘keening.’”

The Sun’s account rivaled Shakespeare’s “Double, double toil and trouble.” It beat even Allan Pinkerton’s fiction for color. In its account, Irishmen swarmed Campbell’s premises, smoking clay pipes and drinking whiskey. Forty women dressed in hooded cloaks sat in the parlor adjacent to Campbell’s laid-out body and gave their grief “free rein.”

One crone among them, “the Keener,” exceeded all others with her “lamentations and curses upon the enemies of the dead man.” Of the judges, detectives and prosecution witnesses who sent AOH men to the gallows, she intoned: “May they and their children meet with fire and hunger, and disease, and early death … and may every true friend of Aleck, the kind, good soul, who died through perjury, revenge his awful death.”

“Such outcries were hushed when the presence of strangers in another room was discovered,” the Sun reported, “and afterward only Keeners who spoke Irish were permitted to lead the lamentations.”

“Here, once again,” Kenny observed, “was some fleeting evidence of the closed, alien culture embodied by Molly Maguireism, from which outsiders were rigidly excluded.”

“The few people there who are not Mollies are in bodily fear of the others,” the Sun concluded. It bolstered that claim with reports of numerous, murderous threats of wild vengeance. If true, this was a dire account of a dangerous people.

If true.

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In Pottsville, the Miners’ Journal protested the city dailies’ sensationalized accounts. No friend to the Irish, the Journal’s editor nonetheless flatly denied the claims of vengeance threatened at the Irishmen’s wakes.

“It is hardly necessary to state that the sensational dispatches to city papers have only a very little leaven of truth in them,” the Journal admonished readers. “Falsehoods, palpable to residents of the coal region, throw discredit even on what may be true in them.”

As to the disturbances reported at Campbell’s Friday night wake, the Journal openly contradicted the Sun’s account. “The reports that the crowd at Campbell’s wake were very disorderly on Friday night are false,” it said. “We have it on good authority that good order was maintained. … There was no demonstration of any kind.”

The photo at the top of this article is of Alex Campbell, AOH treasurer for Storm Hill, hanged on June 21, 1877, in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania.

This post was revised on August 9, 2018.
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Coming October 8 — Alex Campbell’s Wake – Part 2 of 4: Conducted With the Greatest Decorum

"The Stories Were All Lies"

Pinkerton, McParlan and Sherlock Holmes Tell a Tale of the "Molly Maguires"

In the telling of Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” history, fact and fiction collide brutally. A centuries-long trail of innuendo, half-truths, fiction and outright lies fogs the telling of this history.

Pivotal to this telling is the credibility of Pinkerton operative James McParlan. McParlan’s trial testimony helped execute 21 men—and sent scores more to prison. So much depended on the truth of McParlan’s statements.

Just how credible were those statements?

This post gives two versions of one significant issue.

The question at issue is this: How did McParlan first cultivate the Irish Catholic men he later helped execute as “Molly Maguires”? Did he seduce them with tales of murder, as he testified in court?

Or did he use another strategy?

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Both Allan Pinkerton and Arthur Conan Doyle spun McParlan’s trial testimony into lucrative fictional tales. McParlan first met Pennsylvania’s alleged “Molly Maguires” while working undercover as “James McKenna.” In reports from January 1874 filed with his supervisors, McParlan provided one version of his cultivation of numerous county officers of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH).

Less than three years later, during trial testimony, McParlan gave a second version of his cultivation of these men. McParlan’s May 1876 testimony, given under oath, left out telling information from reports made to his supervisors two and a half years before.

Allan Pinkerton’s fictional 1877 work described McParlan's exploits in detail. It further clouded the trail.

And in 1915, incredibly, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Valley of Fear” gave yet another fictionalized account of the “Molly Maguire” drama. In Sherlock Holmes’ case, McParlan appeared undercover as “Jack McMurdo,” aka “Birdy Edwards.” And AOH delegate John Kehoe, weighted down with diamonds and gold chains, was known both as “Councillor McGinty” and as “Black Jack McGinty,” the feared head of a “murder society.”*

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During the Yost murder trial in May 1876 McParlan testified in detail of his supposed cultivation of Schuylkill County’s alleged “Molly Maguires.”

“I … told them different tales,” McParlan testified. “Sometimes I told them I shot a man; sometimes I told them I counterfeited money … the stories were all lies.”

Pinkerton’s 1877 fiction reinforced McParlan’s claim. Titled “The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives,” it appeared less than a year after McParlan’s sworn testimony in the Yost trial.

Franklin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and head of the regional “Coal Combination,” likely commissioned this fictional work. Robert Linden, Pinkerton superintendent of Gowen’s private police force, distributed Pinkerton's new book to regional editors.

Published while “Molly Maguire” trials remained ongoing, it skewed justice for cases that lay pending before Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court and its Board of Pardons. Pinkerton’s book painted the alleged “Molly Maguires” as violent thugs. Its descriptions of drunken Irish depravity reinforced the vicious “Molly Maguire” label. It helped secure fast verdicts of “guilty” in ongoing trials. And it dovetailed closely with McParlan’s trial testimony.

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“The Detective Sings, Fights, and Dances Himself Into Popularity,” Pinkerton titled Chapter 8 of his “Molly Maguire” story. Studded with puerile Irish American dialect, it described McParlan’s introduction in late January 1874 to a Pottsville hotel called the Sheridan House, run by a former AOH man named Dormer.

“Dormer had given a hint … that the stranger [McParlan] was a hard case generally, and engaged in concealing himself from certain officials in Western New York, who were in search of him for having killed a man in Buffalo a year or so before,” Pinkerton’s narrative related breathlessly. “It was more than probable that [McParlan’s] reputation as a dealer in counterfeit money had also been discussed by the same worthies.”

Singing. Fighting. Jigging. Tales of counterfeiting, and of a murder committed in Buffalo. And, of course, drinking. According to Pinkerton, this was McParlan’s supposed tale of introduction—in January 1874—to the AOH men he hoped to cultivate.

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In 1915 Arthur Conan Doyle went Pinkerton's work one better. While the coal region struggled to recover from the historic trauma of 21 public executions and the killings that generated them, area residents reviewed the latest in a long line of works that painted McParlan as heroic.

Conan Doyle’s work clanged with negative stereotyping. Kehoe’s character “McGinty” was a “black-maned giant, bearded to the cheek-bones, and with a shock of raven hair which fell to his collar.” His eyes were “of a strange dead black,” his complexion “as swarthy as an Italian.” He had an “enormous hand, which was hairy as a gorilla's.”

In Sherlock Holmes’ Pennsylvania case, the Irishmen under “McGinty’s” command committed murder at his will. They swaggered and drank and fought. They beat an elderly newspaperman until his “white hair was dabbled with patches of blood.” And they swapped murders—and rewarded young men with a few dollars for committing their murders for them. In other words, Conan Doyle trotted out McParlan’s trial testimony almost verbatim.

These Irishmen invited McParlan’s character “McMurdo” to join them in their murderous society. They burned his arm with their society’s brand. And, as in Pinkerton’s work, “McMurdo” confided his criminal past to these savage Irishmen.

In Conan Doyle’s version “McMurdo” tells “McGinty” he has killed a man in Chicago, a man who helped him “shove the queer” [pass counterfeit bills]. “I just killed him and lighted out for the coal country,” McParlan’s character tells Kehoe’s character. Forty years after Schuylkill County’s first “Molly Maguire” arrests, the character of Schuylkill’s AOH men was again under direct assault—this time in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fiction.

But McParlan's lurid statements of murder and counterfeiting—given in person during trial testimony and glamorized by writers of fiction—had helped send 21 Irish Catholic men to the gallows. Those statements inflamed the ethnic hostility that allowed scores of “Molly Maguire” prosecutions to move forward.

Was McParlan’s trial testimony the truth, or was it fiction?

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Per Pinkerton’s fictional account, McParlan seduced Schuylkill County’s AOH men in January 1874 with sordid tales of counterfeiting and murder. Decades later, after meeting Pinkerton’s son William on a cross-Atlantic voyage, Conan Doyle seasoned Pinkerton’s tale even more highly—this time for international consumption, in a Sherlock Holmes tale.

But McParlan himself had given his Pinkerton supervisors another version of how he contrived to influence many of the AOH officers from Pennsylvania’s hard coal region. This did not take place in saloons. It did not take place on trains, or at the bottom of mine shafts. And it did not take place while “shoving the queer.”

According to McParlan’s own reports from January 1874, he gained the trust of many of the region’s AOH men in a week-long church mission in Pottsville.

And it was Schuylkill County AOH treasurer Christopher Donnelly, imprisoned later for alleged “Molly Maguire” crimes, who invited McParlan to attend these church services.

“In the evening,” McParlan’s report told supervisors, “the operative attended the mission at the church – being a sort of revival – attended by all from Pottsville & all parts from the County [of Schuylkill] and Cumberland & Luzerne Co. The operative intends attending this mission closely as he will meet with all the M.M.’s and the fact of his attendance will gain for him more friends and confidence than all else.” The mission, said McParlan, “will last until the middle of next week.”

McParlan returned to church services on Wednesday, and again on Thursday. On Friday he attended the mission “in all devoutness morning & evening & made some new acquaintances.” On Saturday, and on Sunday, despite stormy weather, McParlan “attended church faithfully.”

In McParlan’s own words, “the fact of his attendance” at these church services—not jigging, brawling, drinking, counterfeiting or murdering—would “gain for him more friends and confidence than all else.”

On his entry into the hard coal region as an undercover Pinkerton operative, McParlan attended church services for one week “in all devoutness morning & evening” to gain the confidence of Pennsylvania’s AOH hierarchy.

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No authoritative history of the “Molly Maguires,” no fictional account, no semi-fictional account, has ever described McParlan's use of his church attendance to cultivate regional AOH men. McParlan’s attendance at church services to secure the trust of these Irishmen accords with their membership in an Irish Catholic benevolent society that chose for its motto “Friendship, Unity and True Christian Charity.”

Two years later McParlan testified in court that he gained the confidence of regional AOH men with tales of murder and counterfeiting, in “stories that were all lies.”

Which version of McParlan’s story is the true version?

An unnamed correspondent to the Boston Pilot in 1876 stated matters succinctly. “Paid swearers will swear for pay, especially perjured ones, such as McParlan,” this writer said. “I would not hang a fly on his oath.”

In his defense of AOH treasurer Alex Campbell, attorney Daniel Kalbfus said to the jury of McParlan: “His testimony all writers admit, is of the most dangerous character. … If they would not accuse me on the other side of being a blackguard I would call him a liar. Coward! He abetted, he planned, he connived the killing of John P. Jones, and you know it.”

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Pinkerton’s 1877 “Molly Maguire” dime novel was one in a series he published during this time. It fit in with earlier works titled “The Detective and the Somnambulist” and “The Murderer and the Fortune Teller.” Like these tales, Pinkerton’s “Molly Maguire” story reads as lurid fiction. But so did McParlan’s trial testimony.

Eighty-seven years after Pinkerton’s book appeared, Wayne G. Broehl Jr. published his scholarly work titled “The Molly Maguires.” Broehl relied, in part, on Pinkerton’s fictional account for his telling of this history. This defining slice of the Irish American historical experience can trace its scholarly treatment to an 1877 dime novel version of events published by Allan Pinkerton, the head of a private detective agency with a commercial interest in the caseload—and in procuring verdicts of “guilty” in ongoing "Molly Maguire" trials.

If McParlan’s “Molly Maguire” trial testimony, like his sensationalized tales, was simply “stories that were all lies,” then the history that flowed from that testimony is fatally compromised.

What is the truth of McParlan’s trial testimony—of his character, his credibility?

What is the truth of Pennsylvania’s AOH men fingered by McParlan as “Molly Maguires?”

*Note: Materials offered in this blog are documented in the full-length work "Waking the Dead: The Myth of the "'Molly Maguires,'" pending publication.

This article has been revised.

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Coming August 15: “Hireling Spies and Paid Informers”: Pinkerton’s Baltimore Plot Against Lincoln (Part 1)