The Day of the Rope
The Molly Maguires became international news on June 21, 1877, when the authorities💥 hanged ten Irish miners in a single day in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.💥
Known as #Black#Thursday, or Day of the Rope, it was the second largest mass execution in U.S. history.
(The largest was in 1862, when the U.S. government executed 38 Dakota warriors).
The authorities accused the Irishmen of being terrorists from a secret organization called the #Molly#Maguires.
They executed ten more over the next two years, and imprisoned another twenty suspected Molly Maguires.
Most of the convicted men were #union#activists.
Some even held public office, as #sheriffs and #school#board members.
However, there is no evidence that an organization called the Molly Maguires ever existed in the U.S.
James McParland, an agent provocateur who worked for the #Pinkerton#Detective#Agency,
and who provided the plans and weapons the men purportedly used in their crimes,
provided the only serious evidence against the men.
The entire legal process was a travesty:
a private corporation (the #Reading#Railroad) set up the investigation through a private police force (the Pinkerton Detective Agency) and prosecuted them with their own company attorneys.
No jurors were Irish, though several were recent German immigrants who had trouble understanding the proceedings.
Nearly everything people “know” today about the Molly Maguires comes from Allan Pinkerton’s own work of fiction, "The Molly Maguires and the Detectives" (1877),
which he marketed as nonfiction.
His heavily biased book was the primary source for dozens of academic works, and for several pieces of fiction, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes novel, "Valley of Fear" (1915), and the 1970 Sean Connery film, "Molly Maguires."
According to legend, there was a widow living in Ireland in the 1840s named Molly Maguire,
who hated the landlords who were abusing the poor tenant farmers.
She supposedly carried a pistol strapped to each thigh.
She, or her followers, would beat or murder the tyrannical landlords, their agents, and bailiffs, whenever they tried to evict a tenant.
No one knows if she ever really existed, but other tenant farmer activists were said to cry out,
“Take that from a son of Molly Maguire!” when protesting against unscrupulous landlords.