The Price of Coal

By the late 1860s, a miner in Pennsylvania’s anthracite fields earned roughly $1.50 per day when work was available. Many weeks brought nothing. Companies paid in scrip redeemable only at company stores, where prices ran 40 percent above market rates. Debt became inescapable.

The work itself was lethal. In one seven-year period in Schuylkill County alone, 566 miners were killed and 1,665 more seriously injured. Men descended into shafts 500 feet deep, breathing coal dust and methane, six days a week. Breaker boys as young as eight sat at sorting screens for ten-hour shifts, their fingers bloody from handling slate and coal.

Between 1865 and 1868, wages fell by 20 percent while coal prices rose. The operators, led by the railroads that controlled transportation, dictated every term of employment.

The Birth of the WBA

In 1867, Pennsylvania passed a law making the eight-hour workday legal, provided no conflicting agreement existed between employer and employee. To enforce this new law, coal miners met in convention in early 1868 and formed the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association.

John Siney, an Irish immigrant who had worked the coal mines of Lancashire before settling in St. Clair, Pennsylvania, in 1863, became the union’s first president. Siney was a moderate who believed in negotiation over violence. He strictly forbade WBA members from using force against operators or strikebreakers.

By 1869, the WBA had grown to 20,000 members organized across 22 districts throughout the anthracite region. It was the largest miners’ union in American history to that point.

The Strike of 1868

In early 1868, operators announced another wage cut. Siney led a six-week strike that succeeded in blocking the reduction. It was the WBA’s first major victory and proved that organized miners could resist the coal companies.

The operators took note. They began planning a longer-term response.

The 1869 Strike and Avondale

On May 10, 1869, miners across the region walked off the job again, demanding wage increases and enforcement of the eight-hour law. In Scranton and Hyde Park, tensions flared between Welsh miners who supported the strike and those who wavered. At one meeting, 126 Hyde Park workers held a test vote: 110 favored returning to work, 16 opposed. When word spread, up to 2,000 protesters marched through the neighborhoods threatening the wavering miners.

The strike dragged through the summer. In August, Pennsylvania Coal Company employees in Pittston voted unanimously at a meeting of over 1,000 workers to continue the suspension. Organizers from the WBA traveled the region to keep solidarity firm.

Then, on September 6, 1869, fire broke out at the Avondale Colliery near Plymouth Township. The wooden lining of the shaft ignited and flames engulfed the coal breaker built directly overhead. The shaft was the only entrance and exit. One hundred and eight men and boys suffocated underground. Two rescuers died attempting to reach them.

The Avondale disaster was the deadliest mine accident in American history to that point. Sixty-nine of the victims were of Welsh descent. John Siney stood among the thousands who gathered as bodies were finally removed.

The First Labor Contract

The tragedy strengthened the miners’ resolve. On April 12, 1869, Pennsylvania became the first state to regulate mine safety, passing a law specific to Schuylkill County that required state inspection and minimum ventilation standards. The following year, the legislature extended these protections statewide and mandated that all mines have at least two exits.

On July 29, 1870, representatives of the Anthracite Board of Trade and the WBA signed a contract. It was the first written agreement between a coal miners’ union and a mine owners’ organization in American history.

The contract established a sliding scale tying wages to coal prices. Representatives from both sides would meet monthly to review prices and adjust wages accordingly. The WBA agreed not to protect members fired for incompetence or misconduct. The operators agreed not to fire workers for union activities. Signatories included John Siney, George Corbett, and James Barry for the miners, and William Kendrick, Baird Snyder, and Samuel Griscom for the operators.

Franklin Gowen’s Campaign

By 1872, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad had become the largest coal company in the anthracite region. Its president, Franklin B. Gowen, had acquired 100,000 acres of coal lands and viewed the WBA as an existential threat to profits.

In 1871, Gowen testified before a state legislative committee investigating coal field unrest. He portrayed the WBA as having at its core a murderous secret society. This was the first public articulation of what would become his central strategy: conflate legitimate union activity with criminal conspiracy.

In 1873, Gowen approached Allan Pinkerton about destroying the WBA. Pinkerton received $100,000 to place operatives inside the union. On October 27, 1873, a 29-year-old Pinkerton agent named James McParlan arrived in Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, using the alias James McKenna. His orders were explicit: remain in the field until every suspected criminal in the organization was brought to justice.

McParlan spent the next eighteen months working undercover, eventually becoming a secretary for a local branch of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish fraternal organization that Gowen claimed harbored the so-called Molly Maguires.

The Coal and Iron Police

The operators had another weapon. In 1865 and 1866, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed laws allowing corporations to create private police forces. For one dollar per commission, the state granted police powers to whoever the companies selected. A total of 7,632 such commissions were eventually issued.

These Coal and Iron Police, established first in Schuylkill County under Pinkerton supervision, nominally existed to protect company property. In practice, they functioned as strikebreakers. They evicted miners and their families from company housing, intimidated union organizers, and crushed picket lines.

Miners called them “Cossacks” and “Yellow Dogs.” The force recruited common gunmen and adventurers with no training and minimal oversight. Accusations of assault, kidnapping, and murder followed them through the coal fields. The Coal and Iron Police would not be abolished until 1931.

The Long Strike of 1875

By autumn 1874, it was widely understood that operators intended to provoke a ruinous strike. In January 1875, the companies announced a 20 percent wage cut for miners and 10 percent for laborers. This brought wages to just 54 percent of their 1869 level.

The miners struck. What followed became known as the Long Strike.

Gowen had stockpiled enough coal to outlast the workers. He offered protection to anyone willing to return. Armed militiamen guarded mines where a trickle of strikebreakers resumed operations. In some areas, the Pennsylvania National Guard was called in. The general commanding the Pittston militia dismissed them from duty because they were composed almost entirely of miners whose sympathies leaned toward the strikers.

Ethnic divisions fractured solidarity. Irish and German miners, suffering starvation for a cause from which Welsh miners had more to gain, began returning to work by early spring. Welsh strikers responded with violence against strikebreakers and sabotage against company property.

The strike lasted 170 days. By June, it was over. Those miners not blacklisted had to abandon the WBA and accept the wage cuts. The union was destroyed.

The Molly Maguire Trials

With the WBA crushed, Gowen turned to the courts. Beginning in 1876, men accused of being Molly Maguires were brought to trial in proceedings where Gowen himself held prosecutorial status. The primary evidence came from James McParlan’s undercover testimony.

On June 21, 1877, ten men were hanged on a single day. Six died at the Pottsville prison: James Carroll, James Roarity, Hugh McGehan, James Boyle, Thomas Munley, and Thomas Duffy. Four more were executed at the Carbon County prison in Mauch Chunk. The date became known as “Black Thursday” or “the day of the rope.”

Over the next eighteen months, ten additional men were hanged at Pottsville, Mauch Chunk, Bloomsburg, and Sunbury. The last was John “Black Jack” Kehoe, called the “King of the Mollies” by prosecutors, who died on December 18, 1878.

Twenty men in total went to the gallows. Many were union leaders and ordinary miners. The evidence was later described as tortuous and contradictory. In 1979, more than a century after his execution, Governor Milton Shapp granted Kehoe a full posthumous pardon. Shapp declared the executed men “martyrs to labour” who faced charges designed to criminalize trade unionism.

The Aftermath

The anthracite strikes of 1868-1876 produced contradictory legacies. The WBA had won the nation’s first mine safety laws and signed the first written labor contract in American coal mining. It proved that miners could organize on an industrial scale.

But the union’s destruction was total. Those not hanged or blacklisted returned to work at lower wages with no organization to represent them. The backlash against the alleged Molly Maguires discredited militant tactics in mainstream labor circles for a generation.

The desperation that followed the Long Strike helped fuel the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when workers across the country walked off the job in what became America’s first nationwide strike. In Scranton, that strike would turn violent on August 1, 1877, when armed citizens fired on strikers, killing four.

Terence Vincent Powderly, a Scranton machinist who had watched the WBA’s defeats, concluded that strikes alone could not win lasting change. He would go on to lead the Knights of Labor, the largest labor organization in America during the 1880s, pursuing a strategy that emphasized political power and worker cooperatives over work stoppages.

The seeds planted in the anthracite fields would eventually produce the United Mine Workers of America, founded in 1890, and the landmark strike of 1902 that brought President Theodore Roosevelt’s intervention. But for the miners who lived through the 1870s, the immediate legacy was loss: wages at 54 percent of their former level, twenty men dead on the gallows, and a union reduced to memory.