Pennsylvania's Hibernians and the Clergy

Roman Catholic clergy figured prominently in Pennsylvania’s

“Molly Maguire” prosecutions. During the 1870s, Archbishop James Frederick Wood of Philadelphia, Bishop Jeremiah Shanahan of Harrisburg, Bishop Tobias Mullen of Erie, Father Daniel McDermott of New Philadelphia, Father Joseph Koch of Shamokin, Father Daniel O’Connor of Mahanoy Plane, Father Joseph Bridgeman of Girardville, and many more, massed together to declare Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) men and alleged “Molly Maguire” terrorists one and the same. Archbishop John Williams of Boston, Cardinal John McCloskey of New York, and Archbishop Patrick Ryan of St. Louis joined with Pennsylvania’s clergy in condemning the AOH men.

The clerics published their views in diocesan newspapers from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Erie. Press coverage in the eastern cities echoed the clerics’ views and prepared the ground for the trials to come.

John Kehoe, AOH delegate for Schuylkill County executed in 1878 and posthumously pardoned in 1979, tried to cut through the resulting clamor. In fall 1875, from his seat as Girardville's high constable, Kehoe wrote to a local editor to protest the press’s conflation of the AOH with the “Molly Maguire” label.

Kehoe said: “… the Ancient Order of Hibernians … is a chartered organization, recognized by the commonwealth, and composed of men who are law-abiding and seek the elevation of their members. … Now, nothing can be more unjust than to charge the order with any acts of lawlessness, and nothing can be more inconsistent with the wishes of the people than the agitation of this matter by the leading papers of this country. The articles which have appeared on this matter have done an incalculable amount of harm, and, as a friend to law and order, I would advise their cessation.”

A few hardy clerics supported the AOH and the mineworkers’ cause. Just months before Kehoe wrote his letter from Girardville, Father James Brehony of St. Joseph’s Church in Summit Hill joined forces on behalf of the mineworkers with Thomas Fisher, AOH Carbon County delegate subsequently hanged as a “Molly.” The priest and the AOH delegate sat down together with Charles Parrish, director of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, to negotiate the wage issue.

Their meeting proved unsuccessful. The following year, Fisher sat in Mauch Chunk Jail, charged with an alleged “Molly Maguire” crime. 

By January 1877 numerous AOH leaders, including Fisher and Kehoe, had been imprisoned, tried, and convicted. Within months, they would be sentenced to death. 

By February 1877, mineworkers’ wages had fallen to such a point fathers were unable to feed their families. Father Brehony organized a “Catholic colony” movement, in his words, “to enable Catholics who wish to leave the coal regions, to form a colony and thus avoid the disadvantages of separate removal to a distant part of the county.”

A reporter for Archbishop Wood’s diocesan newspaper described the mineworkers’ plight: “Removal or starvation are the alternatives that now stare thousands of the coal region broadly in the face. The expectation of bettering their condition there, of even obtaining a decent livelihood for themselves and their families is plainly hopeless.” The wages now being paid the men “simply place them in a condition of slow starvation …”

At the height of the “Molly” trials, an unnamed priest from Ohio addressed a group of Hibernians in Philadelphia. This priest shared Father Brehony’s passion and his willingness to confront those in authority. The unnamed priest gave a scathing assessment of Archbishop Wood’s actions against the AOH. Newspapers in Philadelphia and Shenandoah refused to give this priest’s name, his parish, or the name of his bishop. They identified him only as “connected with a prominent church in Ohio.”

The unidentified priest “denounced the action of Archbishop Wood in anathematizing the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and held that the members are the most fervent supporters of the Catholic faith.” Of Archbishop Wood's order of excommunication against AOH men in the Philadelphia diocese, the Ohio priest told Hibernians assembled in Philadelphia: “My bishop, through the official organ of his diocese, pronounced the action of the Philadelphia hierarchy as an injustice that was only worthy of the despot of Russia.”

Of the wholesale identification of the AOH with alleged “Molly Maguire” violence, the unnamed priest from Ohio concluded: “The movement against you is a Know Nothing strike at every Irish organization, and every man concerned in it deserves to be loaded with execration.”

To further explore this history, visit www.kehoefoundation.org.

From Hamden to Litchfield: A Trail of History

As its name suggests, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University, dedicated on September 28, 2012, seeks to inform the public of the causes and consequences of Ireland’s Great Hunger. A potato fungus, bad weather and an inhumane British government policy combined from 1845 through 1852 to cause more than one million deaths from starvation and related diseases, and the emigration of more than two million Irish people from their native land.

A recent trip to the museum revealed it has chosen a compelling medium to render this history: art, executed by Irish artists.

The full power of the museum shows itself on the second floor. Formed in the shape of a ship, it holds 20^th-century artworks, along with an exhibit of 19th-century news publications.

In John Behan’s bronze “Famine Cart,” an emaciated horse hauls skeletons. A small-scale replica of Behan’s “Famine Ship” shows three masts depicting the crosses of Calvary, with skeletons as ship’s sails. Robert Ballagh’s beautiful stained-glass triptych “An Gorta Mor” gives weight to the full cycle of events, from bucolic farm scene to blight to eviction.

Margaret Lyster Chamberlain’s “The Leave-Taking,” also in bronze, depicts 17 Irish people moving toward starvation or the perils of the Atlantic crossing. For her depiction, Chamberlain relied on photographs from Auschwitz.

With the technology of photography in its infancy in the mid-1800s, no known photos have surfaced of Irish famine victims. But illustrated newspapers depicted the horrors. The illustration of Brigid O’Donnel with her two starving children, rendered in bronze by Behan and on display at the museum, came to symbolize the national plight.

In Micheal Farrell’s “Black ’47,” skeletons serve as prosecution witnesses against Charles Trevelyan and British policy. Farrell’s work shows the legal nature of man’s inhumanity to man. Kieran Tuohy’s “The Lonely Widow,” carved from 5,000-year-old bog oak, hints at its antiquity.

The sultan of Turkey, depicted in Farrell’s large painting, offered Ireland £10,000 in famine relief. Britain persuaded him to reduce his offering to £1,000 in deference to Queen Victoria, who offered the Irish £2,000. The sultan complied with Britain’s request. He then secretly sent three ships loaded with food to the beleaguered country.

My sojourn to Quinnipiac was followed by a trip to Litchfield, Connecticut, where the Litchfield Historical Society hosted the daylong program “The New America: Discovering and Documenting the Immigrant Experience.” Grace Brady, executive director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, closed the program’s events. Brady’s presentation included slides of the museum’s collection.

The slides included Lilian Davidson’s “Burying the Child,” its blues reminiscent of Picasso. In Davidson’s painting, a father whose skill in digging potatoes helped his family to thrive now uses that skill to bury his child. The mother stands holding the baby, a study in despair. The adults in this painting who witnessed the burial will soon find their own graves.

Pádraic Reaney’s “Departure,” a haunting work in red and blue, shows skeletal figures aboveground stalking toward death from starvation or emigration. Figures buried below suggest Oscar Wilde’s quote: “Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.” Brady spoke of succeeding Irish generations telling children to take note of where they trod, and of what lay buried beneath them.

Brady spoke of the Choctaw Indians, a decade and a half after their forced march along the “Trail of Tears,” identifying with the oppression of the Irish by the British government. At the height of the Great Hunger in 1847 the Choctaw, in the midst of their own privations, sent $170 to Ireland for relief efforts.

Brady also spoke of “callous neglect” on the part of the British government. She described the use of battering rams by British soldiers to empty cottages of families, and the “unroofing” of cottages in the midst of winter. She spoke of the desire on the part of some in the British government to deal with “the surplus” of Irish people, with policies that proved an effective strategy.

Civilized societies honor their history. The girds of civilization help mitigate even the most unimaginable horrors. In Litchfield, the historical society that offered the venue to explore this dark history offered a boxed lunch. Curried chicken salad came alongside a small plate of brie, with sliced green apple and a few pansy blossoms.

The society’s tour included a visit to St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on South Street. There, visitors viewed the church’s stone and wood carvings chiseled by Italian immigrants. In the warm light, the anonymous wooden faces glinted with humor and intelligence.

The transformative power of art remains one of the most enduring tools in our collective march toward civilization. Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum owes its existence to the vision of John Lahey, president of Quinnipiac University, and to the generosity of Murray Lender. Without their efforts, this compelling body of work would not be securely housed under one roof.

Lahey helped secure Rowan Gillespie’s “The Victim” as the collection’s first work of art. In Gillespie’s bronze, a sitting boy wrapped only in a cloak lifts his face toward the future. The work captures both the horror and the endurance of humanity during that time. It serves as a touchstone for all who wish to honor, preserve and value our collective history.

Justice Lies Bleeding

The Wednesday evening of April 15, 2015, at Penn State’s Hazleton campus arrived a little warmer than predicted. Those climbing the concrete steps from the parking lot to the Evelyn Green Academic Building didn’t need their winter coats. An arrow on a sign reading “Irish History” directed visitors to the Greater Hazleton Historical Society presentation of “The Irish Experience in Northeastern Pennsylvania.”

Breándan Mac Suibhne, associate professor of history from Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey, opened the presentation attended by almost one hundred people. Mac Suibhne examined the emergence of Ireland’s so-called “Molly Maguires,” men banded together to fight the privations of Ireland’s Great Hunger. He discussed an Irish schoolmaster’s claim, in 1856, of a list of alleged “Mollies”—a list the schoolteacher shared with the local magistrate, and then received passage for himself and his family to Australia. Mac Suibhne shared his family’s history and their integration of the painful legacies of privation and emigration.

Then Mark Bulik, author of The Sons of Molly Maguire, used the venue to discuss his understanding of Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” history. Bulik's account traces vestiges of mummery in Ireland, a traditional British theatrical form sometimes characterized by male actors dressed in women’s clothing, to alleged “Molly Maguire” violence in Ireland to a transplantation of that violence to the Pennsylvania coalfields.

Both Bulik’s presentation and his book rely on a skeleton of previous histories that casually accept the guilt of Pennsylvania’s Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) men prosecuted as “Mollies.” Almost all of these previous histories accept the account of events promulgated by Pinkerton agents, in reports and trial testimony, and in Allan Pinkerton’s fiction, a dime novel version of this complex conflict.

The Pinkerton rendition of events from this period has controlled the entire documentation of this history, including Martin Ritt’s film, vetted by Pinkerton agency attorneys before its release in 1970. The Pinkerton version of events focuses attention on trials in four anthracite region counties. Trials actually took place in eight counties, in both the anthracite and bituminous regions. The Pinkerton version of events portrays the Hibernians as banded assassins. Exhaustive research into their biographies suggests Irish Catholic men who combined compassion with an urge for political reform.

In the late 1870s, a defense attorney asked one of the few Irish defense witnesses with the courage to take the stand his opinion of the alleged terrorist group called the “Molly Maguires.” The witness declared them a fairy story, a tale generated to entertain and scare listeners. The discussion at Penn State Hazleton added a new wrinkle to an old story. This time, per Bulik, Ireland’s alleged “Molly” terrorists wore dresses.

Bulik’s theory provides the latest red herring in the long, distorted, telling of Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguire” prosecutions, a telling often used to titillate and entertain. This latest theory, as described in Bulik’s new book, derives in part from a survey of a hundred mummers' scripts archived at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum.

The history of the “Molly Maguire” trials in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny, Carbon, Columbia, Fayette, Luzerne, Northumberland, Schuylkill, and Westmoreland counties has its roots both in Ireland and in the powerful hybrid of Irish Republicanism and American democracy. This hybrid proved so potent it required twenty-one executions in five counties to halt its forward movement.

Bulik’s theories provoke in other ways. He informed the audience that Pennsylvania’s alleged “Molly Maguire” violence arose after an influx of famine refugees diluted the old “middle class leadership” of Pottsville’s AOH. Bulik’s references to alleged “Molly Maguire” crimes as “the ultimate trick or treat gone bad” and to alleged “Mollies” as the “evil twins of the Mummers” brought expected laughs from the audience.

Many, if not all, of Pennsylvania’s AOH men charged as “Mollies” were naturalized U.S. citizens. The youngest among them decorated the walls of their cells with American flags. They believed in the power of the American system of justice. Up to the time of their executions, they refused to believe their executions could be secured through evidence supplied by self-confessed murderers, corroborated by testimony scripted and delivered by paid Pinkerton operatives. The juries that weighed this evidence included German farmers. Some of them spoke little English.

Bulik gave a glancing reference to John Kehoe, Schuylkill County’s AOH delegate hanged as the “King of the Mollies.” Had Bulik stretched his research a bit, he may have discovered Kehoe’s letter to a Pottsville editor in 1875—a letter that Kehoe wrote from his position as Girardville's high constable. In it, Kehoe urged area residents “to encourage brotherly love instead of sowing seeds of antagonism which sooner or later may lead to bloodshed.”

A quote from Macbeth, included in the program’s handouts, summed up the proceedings for this observer: “… this sore night / Hath trifled former knowledge.”

Bulik’s treatment of this tragically complex social justice history—including prosecutions that ridiculed the protection the U.S. Constitution affords its citizens—further clouds the discussion of the social, religious, ethnic, political, financial, and industrial issues that defined it. These issues still beg for explication.

A dimly remembered quote from the 1870s sums up the ongoing need in the telling of this history: “Justice lies bleeding. / Come fly to her aid.”

Pennsylvania's "Molly Maguires"

Irish Terrorists - or Christian Martyrs?



In January 2015 Fordham University Press will release The Sons of Molly Maguire. Mark Bulik’s upcoming work is the latest in a line that characterizes Pennsylvania’s alleged “Molly Maguires” as Roman Catholic men influenced by an alleged Irish form of violent reprisal that had its origins in alleged secret society activity.

But historical evidence shows that all of the Irishmen charged as Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguires” belonged, not to a secret society, but to the benevolent order known as the “Ancient Order of Hibernians” (AOH). Many were county delegates.

Pennsylvania’s twenty-one AOH men hanged from 1877 to 1879, and dozens more imprisoned, moved under a legal charter filed in 1871 with their state legislature. Their prosecutions took place not just in five counties in Pennsylvania’s hard coal region, but in three soft coal counties as well.

Their 1871 AOH charter included the motto “True Christian Charity, by doing to each other, and all the world, as we would wish they should do unto us.” The charter that governed Pennsylvania’s alleged “Molly Maguires” embraced the Golden Rule. Historical evidence suggests that Hibernians charged as “Mollies” helped draft that charter.

In 1874 Daniel McDermott, a hostile parish priest, covertly accused Patrick Hester, AOH county delegate later hanged as a “Molly,” as one of two Hibernians “who lobbied the charter through the Legislature.” Hester’s political acumen reinforces this probability.

At the height of the Pennsylvania trials the Philadelphia Times ran a column that included this statement: “The constitution book, it is alleged, until lately had printed in it, after the conclusion of the by-laws, the names of the framers of the charter of the organization. The books, as printed at present, contain no such names. It is merely hinted that this is because some of the framers of the charter are at present awaiting trial or sentence for murder.”

The most likely “framers of the charter of the organization” included county delegates Hester, Thomas Fisher, and John Kehoe, all charged and executed as “Mollies.” All three were charged with capital crimes that had taken place in the past—in Kehoe’s case, the far distant past. All three asserted their innocence.

Adherence to their Roman Catholic faith defined these men. Events proved them willing to die for it.

Kehoe, high constable for Girardville and former hopeful for state assembly, left behind in his prison cell a biography of St. Alphonsus Liguori, the persecuted founder of the Redemptorist order. In spring 1878, Kehoe wrote to a friend from Pottsville Jail: “I would sooner die than swear a wilful [sic] lie on my fellow man.”

On the morning of Kehoe’s execution, at the close of the second Mass said on his behalf—celebrated in a prison work cell transformed by six nuns—Kehoe, father of five young children, “expressed his satisfaction that the day was one of the Virgin Mary’s feast days, for, he said, he had great confidence in her intercessory power.”

As he approached the gallows, Kehoe wore a rosary around his neck. In one hand, he carried a blessed, lighted candle.

AOH county delegate Fisher showed similar fortitude. In addition to his AOH duties, Fisher served as treasurer to the Summit Hill division of the Emerald Benevolent Association, a Roman Catholic order that had issued a call for Catholic colleges worldwide. Shortly before Fisher’s arrest, an area editor named him as likely successor for county tax collector.

“Of course whatever is the will of God I will abide by,” Fisher told a reporter a few days before his execution. “I am ready whenever God calls me.”

Fisher died alone on the gallows at Mauch Chunk. His was the fifteenth of twenty-one “Molly Maguire” executions—executions driven by a corrupt industrialist, a hostile press, a hostile regional clergy, a near-bankrupt detective agency, and a region in the grip of ethnic hatred fueled by local nativist lodges and a vicious ethnic caricature.

An older married man, Fisher had no children. But his nephew, J. S. Fisher, served as secretary to Carbon County’s division of the national Greenback Labor Party.

On the gallows Fisher, as did so many condemned Hibernians, carried a crucifix before him. It was fashioned of ebony and gold. As the Coal and Iron policeman pulled the rope over his head, Fisher prayed aloud. He continued to pray as the sheriff knotted the rope around his neck. When hoisted, Fisher prayed until he had no breath left to pray.

AOH county delegate Hester, grandfather and former school director, tax collector, township supervisor, and overseer of the poor, had four grown daughters. All four served as area schoolteachers. In February 1878, Hester wrote to his wife “it appears to me that there was some great foul dodge worked in this Business but Everything has to Come as God wills it.” In March, Hester comforted his co-defendants, urging “may God prepare us for the next and better world.” Hester asked God’s forgiveness for those who drove his arrest and prosecution.

Of his upcoming execution, Hester told his co-defendants: “as for death, I am not afraid, for I am almost tired of this sinful world … All that troubles me about dying is, to die of what I am not guilty of … may God in His mercy do what is just and right to all.” Hester carried a small ivory crucifix before him on the gallows.

Kehoe died rather than swear a lie against his fellows. Fisher and Hester shared Kehoe’s fortitude. Fisher, Hester, and Kehoe all governed younger Irish Catholic men under the charter of their benevolent organization—a charter they likely helped draft. Their stoicism, their willingness to die rather than perjure themselves, their utter lack of cynicism, their steadfast faith—all prove more enduring than a century and a half of continued attempts to portray these Hibernians as alleged “Molly Maguires.”

A Plea to Historians

Search for the Facts

Mark Bulik’s upcoming work, The Sons of Molly Maguire, is the latest in a long line that characterizes Pennsylvania’s Ancient Order of Hibernian (AOH) men charged as “Molly Maguires” as transplanted Irish terrorists.

The Oxford University Press website gives Bulik’s theory of Pennsylvania’s Hibernians: “A secret society of peasant assassins in Ireland that re-emerged in Pennsylvania’s hard-coal region, the Mollies organized strikes, murdered mine bosses, and fought the Civil War draft.”

In the 1870s Franklin Gowen, the bombastic and delusional railroad president who hoped to monopolize Pennsylvania’s entire hard coal trade on a small amount of borrowed capital, was the original promoter of this conspiracy theory: that the AOH, an Irish Catholic benevolent order legally chartered with Pennsylvania’s state legislature, and the “Molly Maguires,” an alleged Irish terrorist organization, were one and the same.

It looks like Bulik’s upcoming work, like so many previous works, also ignores discoverable facts. Many of the Irish Catholic community leaders charged as Pennsylvania’s “Mollies” were skilled political and labor advocates who actively promoted nonviolence, not murder.

Bulik’s upcoming work (again, from the Oxford Press website) tells of the peasant “folk justice” of Pennsylvania’s alleged “Mollies.” But in 1871 John Slattery, one of Pennsylvania’s most prominent Hibernians charged as a “Molly,” narrowly missed an election as associate judge for Schuylkill County’s criminal court. Peasant justice did not enter into Slattery’s Democratic candidacy for judgeship—nor into his election as school director, his election as township supervisor, or his colleagues’ consideration of him, in 1873, as a senatorial Labor Reform nominee.

Many prominent Hibernians charged as “Mollies” were on their way up the political ladder. The Roman Catholic ideology that shaped their AOH charter also shaped their political and labor advocacy.

In October 1875, Bernard Dolan, Schuylkill County hotelkeeper and former AOH delegate targeted as a “Molly,” publicly spoke the AOH creed: “to assuage the sufferings of the poor laboring class …”

Prominent Schuylkill County AOH delegate John Kehoe, executed as the “King of the Mollies,” publicly advocated nonviolence. Hotelkeeper, high constable for Girardville, and 1872 contender for Democratic nomination to state assembly, Kehoe pleaded in 1875 with area nativists thirsting for violence “to encourage brotherly love instead of sowing seeds of antagonism which sooner or later lead to bloodshed.”

In 1873 Christopher Donnelly, future AOH county treasurer charged as an alleged “Molly,” served as delegate to the county Labor Reform convention that considered Slattery as a nominee. In Pennsylvania in 1873, “Labor Reform” meant removing seven-year-old boys from slate-picking rooms and placing them in classrooms. A few months before his arrest as a “Molly,” voters elected Donnelly, a miner, as school director for New Castle.

At least four Hibernians charged as “Mollies” served as area school directors. Two of them were miners.

Patrick Hester, hotelkeeper and prominent Northumberland County AOH delegate executed as a “Molly,” served as school director, tax collector, township supervisor and—in keeping with the AOH creed—overseer of the poor.

Prominent Carbon County Democrat Thomas Fisher, hotelkeeper and AOH delegate executed as a “Molly,” served as township tax collector. At the time of his arrest as a “Molly,” Fisher stood in line for election as county tax collector. During the Long Strike, Fisher advocated—with a sympathetic priest by his side—on behalf of the mineworkers’ wage. Fisher’s actions, too, promoted the AOH creed: “to assuage the sufferings of the poor laboring class.”

The Irishmen charged as “Mollies” who sat in jails in eight Pennsylvania counties and swung from gallows in five used their growing political power, before their untimely deaths, on behalf of those less fortunate.

With so much discoverable fact, it remains a mystery why contemporary scholars, historians, and authors continue to portray Pennsylvania’s Hibernians as members of a transplanted Irish terrorist group—the same fiction promoted by a hostile nineteenth-century press and a near-bankrupt detective agency. Gowen purchased this fiction to remove influential Irish Catholics from the political and industrial arena. Gowen’s plan worked. His “Molly Maguire” prosecutions effectively destroyed the burgeoning power of the AOH, along with the reforms that it threatened.

We have a mandate to examine our history—however dark that history may be. Historians who investigate Pennsylvania’s “Molly Maguires” would be better served if they resisted the lure of sensation and nineteenth-century nativist rhetoric, searched for discoverable facts about the Irish Catholics persecuted in eight Pennsylvania counties, and followed the trail of those facts—wherever that trail might lead.