by Eamon Javers
Webster’s bravery, though, is unquestionable. He continued to send back detailed reports until a slipup by a separate team of Union spies in the South revealed Webster’s identity as a Pinkerton. Webster was arrested, and on April 28, 1862, hanged for espionage in front of thousands of spectators on the Richmond fairground.
In his last message from his cell, Webster told a female Pinkerton agent who had come to visit him, “Tell the major I can meet death with a brave heart and a clear conscience.”*
WHEN THE WAR ended, the industrializing North once again offered opportunity for corporate espionage. The Pinkertons would again use undercover techniques in the late 1870s, under circumstances almost as dangerous as those faced by Timothy Webster.
The postwar era was a time of violent unrest in the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania, where child labor, unsafe working conditions, and an economic depression in the middle of the 1870s combined to provoke violent strikes by miners and brutal reprisals by management. Illiterate, poverty-stricken foreign immigrants vied with each other for work in the mines, and organized themselves into warring camps along ethnic lines.
Amid the chaos, some Irish-Catholic immigrants created a secret society they called the Molly Maguires. Historians aren’t quite sure where the name came from, although the organization seems to have had roots in secret societies in Ireland through which poor tenant farmers waged secret class wars against English landowners. There are those who believe that the Mollies never existed at all, and the society left almost no records for historians to examine. Legend holds that “Molly Maguire” herself was a poor widow whose cause was taken up by the local workingmen. Or she could have been a fiery Irish lass who led nighttime raids on wealthy landlords in Ireland. No one knows.
In coal country, the Mollies became a violent and vindictive gang motivated by both criminal agendas and the class war. In their lively account of the saga in their book The Pinkerton Story (1951), James Horan and Howard Swiggert wrote that the Mollies were believed to be responsible for numerous crimes in the area, including these over just a two-month period in 1870: ambushing a mining foreman, shooting a merchant, beating up a bridge watchman, beating a mine superintendent, and murdering a mine boss.
By 1873 Franklin Gowen, the president of both the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, had had enough. He wrote to Allan Pinkerton and asked him to come to Pennsylvania. Gowen’s concern was not so much for the lives of the men on both sides of the fight as for the fate of a business venture. Gowen was diversifying out of the railroad business and into the coal business. The Reading railroad had purchased enormous tracts of land, and planned to transport the coal mined from the land on its own rail lines. But the crime wave was bad for business. Gowen tasked Pinkerton with bringing down the Mollies.
Allan Pinkerton told Gowen that the operation had to be conducted with the utmost secrecy. He didn’t want anyone other than Gowen to read the Pinkerton reports, and he didn’t want the company to keep any records that would show it had hired the Pinkertons. He knew the Mollies had deep contacts inside the company, and might even be able to read Gowen’s own documents. Pinkerton began putting together a plan to infiltrate the Mollies with one of his own men. He knew he’d need an Irish-Catholic immigrant capable of passing as a hardened miner. And the recruit would have to be able to function even while fearing for his own life. Pinkerton settled on James McParland, a thin, red-haired twenty-nine-year-old immigrant from Ulster who had just begun work as a detective.
Pinkerton told McParland he could refuse the mission with no penalty to his career, but McParland agreed to the job. To keep up the secret, McParland left the Pinkerton service, and took the cover name “James McKenna.” Posing as an out-of-work immigrant, he made his own way to the coal country. He began to frequent local saloons, drinking heavily and spouting off publicly against English landlords. In Pottsville, Pennsylvania, he settled into the Sheridan House, where he bought a round of drinks and impressed the locals with his singing voice and dancing skill. The owner of the saloon, charmed, gave McParland a letter of introduction to Muff Lawler, who was the leader, or “body master,” of the Mollies in Shenandoah.
McParland told Lawler and his crew that he had been affiliated with secret societies in Ireland but had been out of contact for some time. He explained his ready access to cash by telling them it was the spoils from a murder in Buffalo, New York. And he covered his need to duck away frequently to meet with his Pinkerton supervisor by explaining that he was a counterfeiter and needed to meet a contact. He would show off real money to his new friends, telling them that it was his counterfeit stash and daring them to spot any imperfections.
Eventually, McParland landed a real coal mining job, hauling twenty tons of coal in each ten-hour day. And on April 14, 1874, McParland came up for formal initiation into the Molly Maguires. The local group met at Muff Lawler’s house, and McParland waited downstairs under supervision of a Molly officer. McParland couldn’t be sure that he was really there for an initiation at all. Could the Mollies have figured out that he was a spy? Could they have a spy of their own inside the sprawling Pinkerton organization? It was impossible to be sure. But shortly he was led into a room upstairs, where he knelt down, swore an oath, made the sign of the cross, and paid the treasurer $3.
McParland remained in the society, before long as elected secretary of his local chapter, through 1875, dodging requests that he kill or commit crimes, and narrowly escaping discovery. The brutal Mollies would surely kill him instantly if they discovered that he was a Pinkerton spy.
Tension rose as the company sent in scab labor to break a miners’ strike. McParland talked his fellow Mollies out of blowing up a railroad bridge across the Susquehanna River, but despite his efforts toward peace, agitators still managed to burn a telegraph office and derail a train. McParland sneaked off to meet his Pinkerton supervisor and advised him to send in a force of police to control the area. He had already requested that the Pinkertons have one man arrested—if only to keep him safe from the Mollies, who wanted him dead. McParland broke away for a trip to Chicago to debrief Pinkerton on the operation, which had now been under way for a year and a half.
McParland wasn’t able to prevent the Mollies from spiraling into an increasingly violent rampage. He could speak out against some proposed killings, but if he opposed every crime that was planned, he’d arouse the suspicion of the gang. Despite McParland’s best efforts to talk them out of it, Molly gunmen shot a man named Bully Bill Thomas as he stood tending his horse in a stable. But they botched the job, and Thomas survived. Then they turned their attention to Benjamin Yost, a night watchman who had earned their enmity by arresting several Mollies for minor infractions. The Molly killers Hugh McGehan, James Boyle, and James Kerrigan lay in wait for Yost at two o’clock in the morning, when they knew he’d emerge from his house to climb a ladder on the sidewalk and put out the street lamp. McGehan fired his pistol in the darkness, and Yost collapsed. A man working nearby rushed to his side, and Yost, dying from the gunshot wounds, was able to tell him that the killers were Irish. What’s more, he’d seen them in a saloon earlier in the night. He even ruled out some suspects before he died at 9 A.M.
McParland didn’t know who the killers were, but he thought he could figure it out. He carefully gathered evidence. He asked to borrow a pistol, and was given one that matched the caliber of the murder weapon. He pulled together bits and pieces of information about who had been on the scene at the time of the shooting. He also picked up word of yet another planned killing, this time of the mine boss J. P. Jones, and was able to get word to the Pinkertons to spirit Jones out of town until the danger passed.
McParland bided his time even as Molly gunmen killed one man at a fire department picnic and engaged in a gunfight with another target. Soon after that, Mollies proposed killing a mine boss, Tom Sanger. There were getting to be so many murder plots that McParland, still undercover as “James McKenna,�
� couldn’t warn the Pinkertons in time to head off each one. Molly assassins hit Sanger before McParland could do anything about it. When the mine boss Jones, thinking that the threat to his life had passed, returned to the area, three Mollies shot and killed him on a train platform in front of 100 witnesses. They got away.
McParland wrote up a detailed report for his Pinkerton bosses about each murder, listing the killers and their accomplices. He was convinced he was doing the right thing. After all, the reports would be evidence for eventual court proceedings against the murderers.
Allan Pinkerton, writing from Chicago to his lieutenants on the scene, worried that the local authorities would never be able to get a conviction in counties heavily populated by Irish Catholics who supported the Mollies. Pinkerton advised his men to put together a vigilante party of their own to murder the Mollies and be done with them. That plan was too overt, and the Pinkertons in Pennsylvania developed a more hands-off solution. They printed up a handbill with the names of 374 Mollies and began circulating the document among the population. On December 10, a crowd of masked men broke into a home and opened fire on Mollies living there, killing Charles O’Donnell and his sister, Ellen McAllister, and wounding two others who escaped during the firefight. It’s clear that the Pinkertons hoped someone would take the law into his own hands and start killing Mollies, but it’s not clear if they arranged these particular killings.
McParland may not have known all the details, but he suspected that his own organization had somehow provoked the killings. He was horrified that his work had led to the killing of an innocent woman. He dashed off an angry letter to his boss: “As for the O’Donnells, I am satisfied they got their just deserving,” he wrote. “I reported what those men were…. Now I wake up this morning to find that I am the murderer of Mrs. McAllister. What had a woman to do with the case[?]” McParland tendered his immediate resignation. “I am not going to be an accessory to the murder of women and children.”
Allan Pinkerton convinced his valuable agent that the detective agency had nothing to do with the murders, and talked McParland into staying in his undercover position. Suspicion was swirling. The Mollies wanted to know who had circulated the handbill. How did that person get a list of Mollies? There must be a traitor in their ranks. When someone accused McParland of being the traitor, he bluffed his way out of the situation once again, demanding a full internal investigation by the Mollies and a trial of his case, and loudly proclaiming that he’d prove his innocence.
Told that a local priest had fingered him as a detective, he went to the church and confronted the priest. Still, he noticed that he was regularly being tailed by armed Mollies, and he heard a rumor that leaders had ordered his killing. McParland decided he couldn’t bluff his way out any longer. On March 7, 1876, he boarded a train heading north, with a Pinkerton captain keeping watch over his train car. McParland’s run as an undercover Molly was done, almost two years after he’d been sworn into the murderous secret society.
But McParland’s role in breaking the Mollies wasn’t done: Pinkerton asked him to take the witness stand in court. That would expose his real name and identity, and possibly subject him to retaliatory violence from the Mollies. McParland agreed—after some persuasion—to testify in public. During the trial for the murder of Yost, McParland made his first appearance on the witness stand—giving the Mollies the first indication of how badly their organization had been penetrated. Here was a man they knew as a drunken brawler, transformed into a clean-shaven, articulate, well-dressed detective. One contemporary newspaper account described the astonishment of the Mollies as they realized what had happened. “Carroll was as if struck by lightning. Boyle shook like an aspen as the prosecutor announced, ‘We will produce to you the full and complete confession of James Carroll and Hugh McGehan of their part in this murder made to James McKenna, a detective.’”
Eventually, twenty Mollies would hang for their crimes, with McParland’s testimony serving as the crucial evidence to break the gang’s back.
McParland lived a long life, and went on to become one of the Pinkerton Agency’s most legendary detectives. He was still solving cases of mine-related violence in Idaho as late as 1906. But Franklin Gowen, who had started the whole Molly case, met a much different fate. The railroad company came close to failure, and Gowen was pushed out of its management. He became a private lawyer, and in 1889 he was summoned to Washington, D.C., as part of a case against Standard Oil. There, in his room at Wormsley’s Hotel, he shot himself.
The Pinkertons thought his death might not be suicide at all, and investigated it as a possible hit by the Mollies. But despite their suspicions and a thorough investigation, they came up with no evidence that it had been anything other than a sad man alone in a hotel room, far from home, with a gun.
THE PINKERTONS HAD their share of casualties in their ongoing war against the enemies of their clients. The Adams Express Company hired the agency to track down a group of outlaws known as the Jesse James gang: former Confederates who had been robbing trains and banks across the middle of the country. In 1874, two Pinkerton detectives—Louis Lull and Joseph Wicher—were killed by the Jesse James gang. These brutal, execution-style killings seem to have unhinged Allan Pinkerton. He wrote to his deputy, “I know that the James Youngers [The Youngers were four brothers who made up the core of the James gang, along with Jesse’s brother, Frank] are desperate men, and that when we meet it, it must be the death of one or both of us…. My blood was spilt, and they must repay, there is no use talking, they must die.”
The Pinkertons deployed their private army against the James gang, tracking them to their family farm in Missouri. They surrounded the place, nicknamed “Castle James” by the locals, and prepared for battle. What they didn’t know was that their own heavily armed band had attracted notice. The James brothers had skipped town, leaving their mother, Zerelda; her husband (who was not the James boys’ father); and the couple’s two children, who were half siblings of the James brothers.
Someone from the Pinkerton side—exactly who was never determined—lobbed an early type of hand grenade into the building, and Zerelda’s husband pounced on it, skittering it into the fireplace. The device exploded, lacerating Zerelda’s arm and wounding the James brothers’ eight-year-old half brother, Archie, who died soon afterward.
Following this incident, the Pinkertons suddenly became bad guys in the eyes of the public. In the remnants of the Confederate south, the agency was seen as the heavy-handed enforcer of the northeastern moneymen who ran the railroads and banks. The James gang had captivated the public, since their targets tended to be large corporate concerns, and only rarely individuals. The local papers denounced the Pinkertons’ tactics, and the pulp press churned out homages to the glamorous James boys. The Pinkertons never caught the James gang. Jesse James would be killed by a traitor within his own ranks in 1882. Frank James surrendered to authorities a few months later. He lived into his seventies, and died in 1915.
Allan Pinkerton didn’t outlive Jesse James by long, dying of a tongue infection in 1884. He left the company in the hands of his two sons, Robert and William. The sons had different priorities from their father. He was an immigrant, but they were first-generation Americans. He had been raised in poverty, but they were the sons of a wealthy man. He built a company with his bare hands, and they inherited one. Before long, the company began to depart from the code of conduct established by Allan Pinkerton in the early days, taking on more overtly antiunion work.
The brothers’ first major test came soon enough. In 1892, a labor strike loomed in Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. The executive in charge was Henry Clay Frick,* an overseer with the Carnegie, Phillips Steel Company. Instead of going to the local police to handle the trouble, Frick turned to the Pinkertons. More than 300 Pinkerton men traveled to Homestead by barge, taking fire from armed strikers on the riverbank as they attempted to land. The Pinkerton men, pinned down on their barges, fired back, setting off
an intense firefight with the strikers. The fighting lasted twelve hours, and three Pinkertons and ten strikers were killed. Exhausted and unable to retreat, the Pinkertons surrendered.
The incident became a flash point in the American labor movement. Workers denounced the Pinkertons as hired killers and called the shootings the “Homestead massacre.” Congress held hearings, weighing whether or not private firms should be allowed to wield police authority without government oversight. Should bands of armed men be allowed to cross state lines? Were the Pinkertons modern-day Hessian mercenaries? Could they be a threat to national sovereignty?
Still, the Pinkertons saw themselves as the victims. In prepared testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in July 1892, Allan’s sons Robert and William Pinkerton said their men had acted legally:
After the surrender all our men, including the wounded and helpless, were brutally beaten and robbed by the strikers, and the leaders made no real or honest effort to protect them. Our men were robbed of watches, money, clothing, in fact, everything, and then mercilessly clubbed and stoned. Conners, unable to move or defend himself, was deliberately shot by one of the strikers and then clubbed. Edwards, also wounded and helpless, was clubbed by another striker with the butt end of a musket. Both died, and subsequently another watchman became insane and committed suicide as a result of the fearful beating after having surrendered. All our men were more or less injured. The acts of the strikers, after our men surrendered, would be a disgrace to savages. Yet, because done in the name of organized American labor, sympathy, if not encouragement, is shown for such deeds by part of the press and by political demagogues.2