On June 23, 1877, just two days after ten alleged Molly Maguires were hanged in Pottsville and Mauch Chunk, a striking letter appeared in the pages of the New York Sun.

While most newspapers across the United States praised the executions as a victory for law and order, this writer – using the pen name Fiat Lux – offered a very different view.

They argued that the violence in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region in the 1860s and 1870s could not be separated from the brutal conditions faced by immigrant mineworkers and the working class, or from the growing power of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the coal companies that controlled nearly every aspect of life in the anthracite fields.

Coming in the wake of the failed Long Strike of 1875, when operators starved out the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association and cemented one of the nation’s first great industrial monopolies, the letter reads as an early critique of unchecked corporate power.

It foreshadows the moral and political arguments that, a generation later, would fuel the Progressive Era and the rise of a national labor movement.

What follows is Fiat Lux’s plea to reconsider where the true guilt of the violence in the Coal Region in the 1870s lay – and to understand the mass hangings of the Molly Maguires not only as a legal event, but as a warning from the early stages of the Gilded Age.

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THE MOLLIES AND THE MINE OWNERS.

All the Guilt not on the Side of the Men who were Hanged Last Thursday.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN—Sir: On Thursday, in the mining districts of Pennsylvania, eleven human beings, men of flesh and blood, of bone and sinew, men with immortal souls who go before their Maker to render up their final accounts, were put to death. Let us hope that in the next world they may receive the mercy denied to them in this. [Note: the 11th man was an Irishman named Andrew Lanahan or Lenahan who was executed on the same day in Wilkes-Barre – his crimes were unconnected to those in Schuylkill and Carbon counties]

The journals throughout the country will doubtless indulge in numerous homilies bearing upon the crimes of these unfortunate men, and pointing to their fate as a triumph of those principles of law and order which should always prevail in such a just, honorable, law-abiding, and God-loving community as that of the great American people is universally recognized (by themselves) to be. But there are two sides to every question, and at least two lights in which to view every subject.

Grievous, indeed, have been the crimes of these men; yet, perhaps, we may find in examining the motives which actuated them, some extenuating circumstances which might have tempered justice with mercy and consigned them for the balance of their days to the prison cell rather than have launched them, shrouded in mental and moral darkness, into eternity.

The coal regions of Pennsylvania are notoriously owned and controlled by a few (once) powerful corporations, which, from mere transporters of coal, have grown into the almost total ownership of the regions from which this valuable staple is drawn. Between these and the mining populations which they assume to rule, there has existed for years the same bitter strife which we constantly see arising upon every side between organized capital and organized labor; and out of this strife have been evolved the crimes for which these ignorant, imbruted Mollies have atoned with their lives.

Now I ask any fair-minded man who is familiar with the Pennsylvania coal regions whether the corporations controlling them have dealt in a spirit of fairness, honesty, and justice with those of their fellow men whose destinies chance has placed in their hands? Has aught been done to elevate, improve, and humanize the most hard-worked and least-favored class of our laboring population? Have facilities for education, for moral and mental improvement, even to the extent of those now provided for the Southern negro, been extended to these poor Northern white trash, who, with pick and spade, and with toil and constant peril, bravely hew out a vast portion of our national wealth? Have they not, on the contrary, been trodden down and almost refused recognition as members of the great human family?

Emerging from the damp, dark, noisome mine, where the sunlight never penetrates, they find themselves herded together in rude, unpainted, bare, comfortless shanties, with nothing refining or civilizing in their surroundings. Seeing themselves and their offspring condemned to an existence below that of the brute, is it to be wondered at that they learn to hate those whom they believe to be soulless oppressors, or even that they are led on to shed the blood of those to whom in their ignorance they naturally ascribe their wretched condition of life?

Let the capitalists who revel in the wealth extracted from the very life blood of these miserable people once realize and perform toward them the sacred duty of man to man, a duty which they have long and wilfully ignored; let them extend to the benighted coal miner that hand of helping fellowship which Christ so freely put forth, and the records of such events as that which darkened Thursday will soon be wiped forever from our calendars.

FIAT LUX.

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Read more about the Molly Maguires and the Coal Region

“Something more than a river” – The West Branch in “Sons of Molly Maguire”

“The hour of doom” – The Molly Maguire executions in Pottsville on June 21, 1877

Alexander Campbell | From the shores of Ireland to a gallows in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region

“The Irish in Pennsylvania Coal Country” | Interview on the “Transatlantic” podcast

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