===Mollys in Ireland===

The name Molly Maguires was imported from Ireland, where it had been used to designate one of the Ribbon]societies that devoted its energies to intimidating process servers and the agents of landlords, and whose greatest activity was between 1835 and 1855. The Irish society of Molly Maguires seems to have been organized in 1843 in the barony of Farney, County Monaghan, to co-operate with the ribbonmen, and its membership seems to have been confined to the very lowest classes of society.

Molly Maguire is said to have been an actual woman, a widow, who would not leave her cottage when Protestant Irish, English, Welsh, or Scottish attempted to remove her for her Catholicism. The English had passed various Penal Laws to force out Catholic landowners that were sufficiently effective that by 1776 Catholic land ownership in Ireland stood at only 5%. A cross-dressing trend among angered Irish land tenants was born, as men would dress up in women's clothing (probably as a disguise) when they performed these acts of violence. "Take that from a son of Molly Maguire!" was often heard before an offensive person of authority was assaulted.

The Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania consisted of Irishmen from similar social classes, but there seems to have been no direct connection between the two societies.

==Mollys in the USA==

In the nineteenth century, Irish immigrants transplanted a form of their Molly Maguire organization into America and continued its activities as a clandestine society. Irish miners in this organization employed the tactics of intimidation and violence previously used against Irish landlords in a violent confrontation against the anthracite, or hard coal mining companies in the 19th century. They were located in a section of the anthracite coal fields dubbed the Coal Region.

The Mollys were found in the counties of Lackawanna, Luzerne, Columbia, Schuylkill, Carbon, and Northumberland County, Pennsylvania.

The largest group of laborers by far in the anthracite coalfields were Irish immigrants. Hated and reviled by the Welsh, Scot and Anglo-Saxon "betters," and perhaps hating them back with equal zest, the Irish, fleeing famine and peonage in Ireland during the Great Hunger of 1848-49, arrived in the United States by the tens of thousands. At a time when America was riven by ethnic tension, when anti-immigrant groups like the Know-Nothings held sway in both politics and business, the Irish were considered almost subhuman. Elsewhere, it was common to see signs on businesses reading, "Help Wanted, Irish Need Not Apply," but the coal mines had a voracious appetite for manpower.

The miners were men who got up before the sun rose to plunge deep into the pits and returned home after dark. It was said men could go years without ever seeing the light of day. Workers earned less than $12 a week and often they were paid for their long hours of backbreaking work in scrip: company-issued paper money, worthless outside the coalfields, and redeemable only for goods from the company store. Children were also employed, some as young as seven, for between $1 and $3 a week. In Schuylkill County alone, according to one 1955 history, it was estimated that of 22,000 miners working at the latter half of the 19th century, nearly a quarter (more than 5,000) were boys under the age of 16.

Law enforcement in Pennsylvania at the time did not exist beyond county sheriffs and the Coal and Iron Police who were a private police force employed and paid by the various coal companies. Although the Coal and Iron Police nominally existed solely to protect private property, in practice the companies used them as strikebreakers. The coal miners called them "Cossacks" and "Yellow Dogs." For one dollar each, the state sold to the mine and steel mill owners commissions conferring police power upon whomever the owners selected.

It was in these circumstances that Irish miners began to band together to form organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a semi-secret society dedicated to the advancement of the Irish in America. Among those who counted themselves as loyal members of the A.O.H. were many who would become leaders of the union movement and others who would later be targeted as leaders of the Molly Maguires.

By 1857, Benjamin Bannon had declared in his paper, the Miner's Journal, that the violence in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania was, at least in part, the work of Molly Maguires, a secret band of killers, hidden within the AOH. There is some speculation the Mollys existed only during the early to mid 1860's during the Civil War. As Black Jack Kehoe would later write from prison while awaiting execution as a Molly Maguire, by the 1870's there was no longer any need for them because "the war was over."

There is ample historical documentation that the fury over the draft during the Civil War helped fuel the simmering clash between the Irish miners and their bosses. As Valerie-Anne Lutz wrote in her tract "The Old Country in the New World," based largely on the papers of noted Pennsylvania historians Anthony F.C. Wallace and his son, Paul A.W. Wallace, "many Irish immigrants aligned with the copperhead Democratic resistance to the war and the draft." There was a degree of racism in the Irish resistance, but the war also helped drive home the fact that as non-naturalized residents of the country they were expected to fight the war while they were unable to vote. In 1863, the same year there were Irish draft riots in New York City, a riot also was reported in Cass Township in Schuylkill County, the heart of anthracite coal country.

What is known of the Molly Maguires is almost exclusively what was reported by James McParlan. According to his testimony the organization was cellular in structure. Among the region’s Ancient Order of Hibernians existed separate divisions for each village, “bodies,” microcosmic groups each with its own body master, treasurer, secretary, and outstanding members (brethren). The bodies would meet to discuss societal events, terrorist acts, and other issues. Decisions were made by voting. If violence was decided on the job would be allotted to another body across the county. The men in the local chapter would be advised as to the time when the assault would take place and would set up valid alibis for themselves. The imported Mollies would perform the task at hand as unknown strangers to the said community. Later, the “return of a favor” would be granted upon request of the helpful body.

They were forced to disband in 1877 after being in existence for about thirty years because, in an effort commissioned by Reading Railroad president Franklin B. Gowen (who was also at the time the most influential mine owner in the area), Pinkerton National Detective Agency agents infiltrated the organization and informed on the activities of the members.

===James McParlan===

James McParlan, a Pinkerton agent, arrived October 27, 1873 in Port Clinton, Schuylkill County, using the alias James McKenna. After reaching Pottsville in December 1873, he began to frequent the Sheridan House, a popular saloon run by an Irishman named "Big Pat" Dormer. McKenna managed to become popular around the bar, entertaining customers by spinning tall tales and dancing Irish jigs. In conversation, McKenna let it be known that he was wanted for murder and counterfeiting in Buffalo, New York. The Coal and Iron Police arrested McKenna at the bar, interrogated him, and roughed him up, an act probably ordered by Captain Linden to secure McParlan's cover. Linden was the only person in the coal region who knew McKenna's true identity, and was a fellow Pinkerton agent (the Coal and Iron Police worked closely with the Pinkertons) who used the "interrogations" as a way to transfer information. By February 1874 McKenna had managed to receive an invitation to join the AOH; on April 14, 1874, McParlan later testified, he became a confirmed member of the Molly Maguires.

McParlan testified that over the next two years he observed or participated in several highly publicised acts of violence. However the standing of 'James McKenna' began to unravel after the Wiggans Patch Incident, near Mahanoy City. Early in the morning of December 10, 1875 a group of armed and masked men burst into the home of the three men believed to be involved in the deaths of Thomas Sanger and William Uren. The vigilantes killed suspected murderer Charles O'Donnell and also the pregnant wife of Charles McAllister. According to rumor the men were locals acting at the behest of Captain Robert Linden of the Coal & Iron Police. Linden may have been acting on information passed to him by McParlan.
The Molly Maguire trials began in January of 1876 in the town of Mauch Chunk (renamed Jim Thorpe in 1954) and in Pottsville in May, after the Coal and Iron Police had rounded up dozens of men on charges ranging from assault to murder.

McParlan testified in numerous Molly cases. The defense attorneys repeatedly sought to portray McParlan as an agent-provocateur who was responsible for not warning people of their imminent deaths. McParlan testified that the AOH and the Mollys were one and the same, but most historians disagree. At the end of the trials twenty men were found guilty of murder and were sentenced to death. Ten of them were hanged--four at Mauch Chunk and six at Pottsville--on June 21, 1877, a date remembered as "Black Thursday." Four members of the Molly Maguires, Alexander Campbell, John "Yellow Jack" Donohue, Michael Doyle and Edward Kelly, were hanged on June 21, 1877 at a Carbon County, Pennsylvania prison in Mauch Chunk, for the murder of mine bosses John P. Jones and Morgan Powell, following a trial that was later described by Carbon County judge, John P. Lavelle, as follows:

The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows.

The prosecuting attorney during the trials was Franklin B. Gowen, who in addition to being the district attorney for Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania was the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and had hired the Pinkertons to infiltrate the Molly Maguires. Franklin Gowen took advantage of the miners' alleged crimes to tarnish the entire cause of organized labor through the advertisements he placed in major newspapers.