Who Were the Molly Maguires? And Did They Really Exist?

You might have heard about the Day of the Rope. It was June 21, 1877, and on that day, ten members of the Molly Maguire organization were hanged for the murders of Morgan Powell, John P. Jones, and Benjamin Yost. Powell, Jones, and Yost were coal mining bosses in Pennsylvania, but who were the Molly Maguires?

The history of the Molly Maguires in Ireland is a good deal more verifiable than the history of the Molly Maguires on American soil. In Ireland, the Molly Maguires were founded officially in 1843 as a vigilante order that battled with Irish landlords on the behalves of their tenants. The name of the Molly Maguires was taken from that of one woman, a widow in early 1940s Ireland that may or may not have really existed, who died at the hands of her landlord. According to the story, the man ordered Maguire off of her property. When she refused to vacate the premises as directed, the landlord razed the house while she was still in it. Whether it was true or not, the narrative of this kind of landowner brutality spread through the lower classes and provoked a wave of violence against landlords in the country.

If the Molly Maguires existed in the United States, they held stations in Lackawanna county, Luzerne county, Columbia county, Schuylkill county, Carbon county, and Northumberland county, all in Pennsylvania. Like their Irish predecessors, who operated quietly from the underground, the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania were a gang of outlaws, who used their methods of violence and threats against those they saw as their oppressors, this time the heads of the coal mining companies for whom many Irish immigrants worked.

The Ancient Order of Hibernians transplanted to the United States with the Irish to help Irish immigrants in their new land. The purpose of the Ancient Order of Hibernians was to combat discrimination against the Irish and Catholics. The Molly Maguires held the same goals, but where the Ancient Order of Hibernians utilized the tactics of discussion and informing, the Molly Maguires stuck to their usual tactics of terrorizing and bloodshed.

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the Molly Maguires allegedly continued to add to their roster of intimidation. Having used their violent ways to their advantage with the coal companies, they turned to the bullying of political opponents and religious opposition.

Leading up to the Day of the Rope in 1877, the ten executed members of the Molly Maguire organization were arrested when the main law enforcement organization of the time, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, infiltrated and informed on the Molly Maguires' activities. The arrests led to the forced disbanding of the Molly Maguire organization.

Some historians do not believe that the Molly Maguires even existed in the United States though. The possibility that the coal mining companies were simply unwilling to be undermined by their Irish employees, and made up the stories of intimidation, is too great to ignore. The history of the Molly Maguires in the United States becomes lost in the jumble of a time when wage earners were at odds with wage givers, and any attempt to form a union would have looked to railroad owners like terrorism from its employees. Perhaps the fact that the man who commissioned the Pinkertons to act upon the group of men accused of being Molly Maguires was also the owner of the Reading Railroad at the time is telling indeed.