Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  The Smith killing, the fourth near Audenreid in five weeks, showed the classic hallmarks of Molly Maguire vengeance in more than just disguise. Smith fit the victim profile of having violated his killers’ moral code by entertaining soldiers who were in the area to enforce the draft, to whom he was “suspected of giving certain information as to the domicile of drafted men.” Once again, no one was tried for the murder due to a lack of evidence and an abundance of alibis for all suspects. In fact, several men who were taken into custody were forcibly released by a mob of antidraft miners, and were never arrested again.29

  Benjamin Bannan was not the only one to view the murders, labor activism, and attempts to subvert coal production as related elements of a picture that included a terrorist, conspiratorial organization at its center. By the end of the war the Molly Maguires were being blamed for almost any labor action or social violence in the region. However, although it was widely anticipated that the conclusion of the conflict would end these activities, such optimism soon proved misplaced.

  • • •

  The years following the end of the Civil War saw a high level of social unrest and crime throughout the reunited country, including in the industrial North, the rebuilding South, and the expanding West. However, in few places was the extent of disorder greater than in the anthracite region. This instability was exacerbated by a downturn in coal prices and workers’ wages, the return of thousands of now-unemployed soldiers, the continuing influx of job-seeking immigrants, a growing militancy in the labor movement, and a broad public antilabor sentiment to which the famed clergyman Henry Ward Beecher put a voice in 1877 when he stated, “Laborers’ unions are the worst form of despotism and tyranny in the history of Christendom.”30

  In the anthracite region, violence soon became commonplace. In August 1865, David Muir, the Scottish-born superintendent of a colliery near Cass Township, was murdered in broad daylight. Less than five months later, Henry Dunne, an Irish Protestant mine superintendent, was killed on the road between Pottsville and Heckscherville. Both murders were blamed on the Molly Maguires, but this was only the tip of the iceberg according to The Miners’ Journal, which reported that beatings, robberies, and destruction of property in Schuylkill County were overshadowed only by the fourteen murders in 1863, fourteen in 1864, a dozen in 1865, and six in 1866.31

  Other newspapers also sounded the alarm. “There is probably no district or county of the same dimension, within the United States, that harbors so many vile and desperate characters as portions of Schuylkill County,” editorialized the Lebanon Courier, from the county immediately southwest of Schuylkill. “And the law seems to be inoperative there, or unable to arrest crime or punish criminals.”32

  That was reemphasized in March 1867, when William Littlehales, superintendent for the Glen Carbon Coal Company, who often carried the company payroll with him, was murdered on the road between Pottsville and Cass Township. Another such attack again resulted in murder in October 1868, when Alexander Rea, the general superintendent of the Locust Mountain Coal and Iron Company, was shot six times at close range on a lonely four-mile stretch of highway between Centralia and Mount Carmel, just north of Schuylkill County.33 Neither crime resulted in a successful prosecution at the time.

  In the midst of this period, in a desperate attempt to restore order, big business struck back. In February 1865, the Pennsylvania Legislature—acknowledging the lack of law-enforcement organizations in the state—empowered railroad companies to create private police forces with virtually full police powers and consisting of individuals granted a commission by the governor to serve as law officers. In April a year later, an extension was passed to “embrace all corporations, firms, or individuals, owning, leasing, or being in possession of any colliery, furnace, or rolling-mill within this Commonwealth.” Thus were born the private police forces jointly called the “Coal and Iron Police.”34

  Although the violence subsided, this was less to do with the new forms of law and order than with the growth of an organization many owners would have expected to be the last thing to restrain workers: a union. Earlier efforts to form a local miners’ union had achieved little, but that changed in 1868 when the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA) was founded in St. Clair, two miles north of Pottsville.35 The formation of the union came in the midst of a strike at the Eagle Colliery, which ended successfully and peacefully when the mine operator rescinded a 10 percent pay cut.

  Within a year, the WBA had expanded to include approximately thirty thousand of the thirty-five thousand mine workers in the region, men with a diversity of tasks in the mines and a variety of national backgrounds: Irish, Welsh, English, German, Scots, and American. Part of this success was because from its beginning the WBA had clear aims that could be supported by all grades of mine workers—safer working conditions and higher wages. The union also created a comprehensive program to achieve welfare for sick or incapacitated members, to build a hospital that would provide medical care for workers suffering from mining-related diseases, and to establish an eight-hour workday.

  But it was safety that was an ever-present concern to the men who descended far below the surface of the earth to a grim, black hell, where they faced a constant risk of death, injury, and exposure to hazards that would produce long-term debilitating disorders.36 The most obvious danger was a large fall of rock or coal that could crush men on the spot or block off their exit passage and shut out the air. Their only warnings might be the sudden eerie departure of thousands of rats that lived in the mines or the horrible creak of the pillars—sounds known as “squeezes”—shortly before they buckled under the thousands of tons of rock.

  The miners also faced the threat of flooding should there be a collapse near a river or the boring suddenly reach an unknown body of water. Fire, propelled by noxious gases trapped underground, and sometimes set off by the regular gunpowder explosions, not only burned men to a cinder but asphyxiated whole shifts of workers. Even without fire, many gases killed silently, including “blackdamp” (a mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen), “stinkdamp” (hydrogen sulfide), “whitedamp” (carbon monoxide), and “afterdamp,” a deadly combination of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen that formed after an explosion, threatening rescue parties.

  In addition to constant dangers in the mines themselves, the workers faced a variety of fatal pulmonary disorders—called “miners’ asthma,” “miners’ consumption,” or “black lung disease”—caused by the inhalation of coal and rock dust, smoke, gunpowder, and underground gases.

  Although the WBA’s program for fighting such conditions and to raise pay for those who faced them was a key factor in its success, virtually as significant was its leadership, particularly in the person of John Siney.37

  Born in 1831 in Queen’s County (now County Laois) in the heart of Ireland, Siney was only four when his father, a tenant farmer, was evicted from his small holding after a periodic failure of the potato crop (one of many in parts of Ireland prior to the devastating blight that launched the Great Famine). Shortly thereafter his family moved to the industrial town of Wigan in Lancashire, England. Three of Siney’s brothers worked in local coal mines, while at the age of seven John began working as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, bringing the reels to the women running the looms and collecting the full bobbins of spun cotton or wool thread. He remained at the mills for nine years until, at the age of sixteen, he was discharged for refusing to accept a pay cut.

  Thereafter apprenticed to a brickmaker, in the ensuing years he advanced to the position of journeyman while being exposed to the radical economic and social ideas of the Chartist movement. Despite being illiterate, he helped organize the Wigan Brickmakers’ Association, for which he served as president for seven years. In 1863—a year after he was widowed—he experienced the severe economic downturn in Lancashire brought about by the cessation of cotton shipments from the Confederacy. He thereupon emigrated, joining several former
Lancashire colleagues in St. Clair, where he gained work at the Eagle Colliery. Siney began as a laborer and within a year rose to the position of contract miner while simultaneously learning to read and write.

  Siney and his friends from Lancashire were the key leaders in the founding of the WBA in 1868, and the new organization reflected their beliefs in the revolutionary unionism they had experienced in Wigan. The quiet, moderate Siney proved the most influential voice in the union’s founding and early development. His strategy—and the policy of the WBA—was to use gradual, systematic, and peaceful means to improve the lot of the mine workers. This meant establishing a conciliatory position and using persuasion, arbitration, and joint agreements rather than the rough talk and violent actions of the Molly Maguires—acts that the union publicly forbade under threat of expulsion. But Siney’s willingness to work closely and openly with owners and operators did not mean he lacked courage or conviction. With his own followers he could be a strict disciplinarian, and once, when threatened personally by Molly Maguires, he bluntly resisted them and their demands.38

  Ultimately, Siney’s and the union’s efforts returned to the goals of safety and higher wages. Siney wanted to establish control over the production, and therefore the distribution, of coal, because he believed limiting the supply would maintain it at a high price. As wages were essentially set by the market, it followed that restricting production would keep wages high, while at the same time making a profit for the operators. The best way of limiting production was through lengthy strikes or suspensions from work involving the majority of the mining workforce—which occurred each year between 1868 and 1873. As the WBA newspaper, The Anthracite Monitor, explained: “[T]he reduction or depletion of the surplus of coal already in the market, together with the preventing, if possible, of the enormous over-supply that was going to the market” would stabilize the market, increase wages, and empower the WBA and its miners.39 It was a powerful and logical strategy, but, unfortunately for Siney, mere months after the local unions joined the WBA in 1869, a new opponent appeared with a very different goal—and that man was Franklin Gowen.

  Like Siney, Gowen hoped to control the production and distribution of coal coming from the southern anthracite region. But rather than keeping prices up by limiting production, his strategy was to ship and sell as much as possible, thereby making the largest profit for his railroad: the exact opposite of Siney’s strategy. However, it was not just Gowen’s goals that differed from those of Siney; so did his tactics. When negotiation was not successful, Gowen was willing to crush the opposition, economically or otherwise. To do this the Reading not only had to buy or lease the lines of the competing railroads that transported coal to market, but also had to take over the operations of the retailers in Philadelphia and the independent mining operators in Schuylkill County, as well as to eliminate any unwanted interference from the trade union. This would require time, capital, political clout, and merciless business ethics. Gowen had each in abundance.

  • • •

  When Franklin Gowen became acting president of the Reading in 1869, he was, in one sense, an outsider to the labor issues in Schuylkill County. The Reading did not own any coal lands and was prohibited from doing so under its charter. However, it made substantial profits hauling coal to Philadelphia, and one of Gowen’s initial goals was to take over all such transport. In his first year as president he began leasing lines from other railroads to open new targets for the Reading, eventually connecting to Norristown, Danville, Williamsport, Chester, and Allentown. He also coveted the Schuylkill Canal, which ran 108 miles from Port Carbon—the southern region’s main distribution center—to Philadelphia. In 1870, he leased it to prevent competition, and two years later he leased the Susquehanna Canal to open a route to Baltimore.40

  Meanwhile, intending the Reading to become a major force in the coal industry, Gowen took an active interest in the skirmishes between the WBA and the operators. Strikes were called in both 1868 and 1869, but both were undermined by the unwillingness of the miners in the northern anthracite region to honor the general work suspension. In the lead-up to the resumption of work in June 1869, the union leaders proposed a package consisting of a minimum wage tied to a sliding scale.41 Each region conducted negotiations separately, but in Schuylkill County, the minimum, or “basis,” was tied to the price of coal at Port Carbon. When coal sold there for $3 a ton, workers would receive their base pay, which varied according to the level of the job and whether the individual was employed as a wage worker or an independent contract miner. Outside laborers on a regular wage, for example, would receive $11 per week, inside laborers $12, and miners $14, with an increase of 5 percent for every rise of 25¢ in the price of coal. The minimum would still be paid if the price of coal fell below $3 a ton.

  After six months of harmony, in December 1869 the recently formed Anthracite Board of Trade (ABT), the operators' association in the lower region, became concerned that coal was then selling for under $3 a ton—meaning it was their profits that were being lost, as the miners were receiving the same pay as at the $3 rate. The ABT therefore proposed a new basis of $2 per ton, with the mine workers having a 25 to 40 percent base pay cut depending on their position. This decrease was immediately rejected, as was a compromise offer of $2.50, and the union demanded that the 1869 pay scales remain in place. The operators then gave the union an ultimatum: accept the compromise or face a suspension on April 2. When the union refused to budge, the southern operators shut down the fields, causing both privation and extreme bitterness among the miners. It was not a coincidence that on April 15, Patrick Burns, a foreman at Silver Creek Colliery in Tuscarora, was killed, the first murder since the nonviolent WBA had been formed.

  Throughout the closure, Gowen nervously watched the Reading’s coal cars remain idle while the northern operators made inroads into supplying anthracite to Philadelphia. In July, with more than a little self-interest, he offered his services as a mediator, and he soon won Siney over to what became known as the Gowen Compromise.42 Gowen’s plan set the new basis at $2 a ton, but for each 25¢ rise in the price, the wage workers would receive an increase of 8.25 percent (instead of 5 percent). This meant that if coal prices held at $3, those on wages would make essentially the same as in 1869; contract miners were also offered a better package. As coal was then selling for more than $2.75 per ton and the union hoped it would return to $3, this was extremely attractive to its members. However, the danger of the compromise to the miners was that if prices dropped, the wages would go down the same 8.25 percent per 25¢ until coal reached $2. Thus, the gamble for the miners was that if coal prices would remain high, so would their wages, but if the prices dropped to $2 they could lose up to 33 percent of that potential higher wage.

  Siney enthusiastically supported the compromise and, trusting Gowen’s assurances about the future, advised his union members that Gowen was, in fact, working on their behalf. The operators were considerably more hesitant, but they eventually accepted the agreement and the mines reopened. By late 1871, however, it was the miners who were dissatisfied, as the price of anthracite had dropped substantially, and their wages had decreased by 24.75 percent.

  In November, representatives of the WBA and ABT met to determine the basis for the Schuylkill area for the following year. An accord was reached, but before it could take affect the miners from the northern region announced a strike. Despite the northern miners having broken faith by not supporting past southern strikes, the Schuylkill County workers ignored Siney’s recommendations to honor their agreement with the ABT and resolved to suspend operations in support of the northern miners. The strike began in January 1871, and shortly afterward the Schuylkill miners took an even more radical step by voting to hold out for the 1869 basis.43

  This backtracking had a profound impact on how Gowen thereafter proceeded in his efforts to gain control.44 Frustrated by the failure of negotiation and compromise, he replaced those conciliatory strat
egies with a straightforward effort to break both the operators and the union.

  The first to feel the force of Gowen’s new mission were several operators who, fearing bankruptcy due to a third consecutive year marred by strike, agreed to concede to the 1869 basis. Gowen quickly crushed the attempt by unveiling new freight charges that doubled (and then tripled) the cost of transporting coal from Port Carbon to Philadelphia, establishing a price so prohibitive that it terminated any attempt to continue mining operations in Schuylkill County.45 The WBA leaders were incensed but, knowing they were beaten, approached the ABT to accept the rate previously offered. But with Gowen now pulling the strings, their offer was not accepted, and the head of the ABT insisted that he was not authorized to deal with them.46

  In short order, Gowen’s highhandedness and exorbitant charges launched a wave of protest. The State Journal of Harrisburg warned that “the precedent, if established, will be one of the most dangerous infringements on personal rights ever inflicted on the people of this State. . . . If a railroad company can advance and lower its charges for transportation at will, then there is not an industrial operation in the State that may not be destroyed in a month.”47 Governor John White Geary felt the full force of the media and public opinion and called for a legislative investigation.

  On March 8, 1871, the hearing opened, but union hopes were quickly shattered. Gowen was the first witness, and, using his considerable skills, he convinced the legislative committee that much more important than the specific legal issues at stake were the reasons and conditions behind the series of strikes that he insisted threatened the entire industry. Once accepted, this assumption allowed him to dismiss the legal questions and to follow with the claim that the Reading had the right to charge whatever it wished, as the rate increases were not to restrain trade but to cover operating costs. Following a series of denials about the way he took control of the negotiations between the operators and the union—contradicting all known facts—he plied his charismatic eloquence to turn the proceedings into an indictment of the WBA. The union, he insisted, was dominated by a small group of secret conspirators who twisted it into a lawless organization that prevented men from working, forced them into poverty, led the honest majority astray, and singlehandedly caused the depressed conditions in the industry.48