In 1835 the New York neighborhood known as Five
Points was centered on an intersection
created by Orange Street, now Baxter Street; Cross Street, now Mosco
Street, and Anthony Street, now Worth Street which ran northwest
direction, dividing one of the four corners into two triangular
blocks. After London’s East End
it was the most densely populated,
disease ridden, and squalid slum in the Western
World. Built around 1811on reclaimed land where the Lenape Indians once had a fishing
village, it began to sink back into the mire and was plagued by
disease carrying yellow fever mosquitoes
and cholera breeding drinking
water polluted by human
waste. Middle class residents fled the area within a few years leaving it
to the most despised inhabitants of the city including a remnant of
the Lenape, known locally as the Canarcies,
Blacks including many who had been freed
in the culmination of New York State’s
gradual emancipation in 1827, and beginning about the same time the first
wave of immigration by impoverished displaced Irish Catholic tenant farmers.
A few years later Charles Dickens described Five Points
in his book American Notes:
What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us?
A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy
wooden stairs without. What lies behind this tottering flight of steps? Let us
go on again and plunge into the Five Points....
This
is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left and reeking
everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruit
as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at
home and all the world over....
Debauchery
has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling
down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes
that have been hurt in drunken forays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they
ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all fours, and
why they talk instead of grunting?
It was an uneasily integrated community with the Blacks
and Irish often brawling in the streets while consorting in the taverns and beer halls and sometimes even cohabitating. The two groups were united mainly
in the need to defend themselves from the depredations of native
Protestant gangs. In
1835 the Nativists had rampaged
through the neighborhood during the Anti-abolitionist
riots burning Black homes and churches and murdering any they found
on the streets. Organized politically as
the Know Nothings the same goons rose to local political power
on an anti-Catholic and anti-Immigrant platform and its gang
member supporters attacked Catholic churches, schools, and businesses.
On May 4, 1835 a number of
disgruntled Irishmen met at nearby St. James Church to devise a plan to defend
their community. They had a model—the Hibernians, a super-secret
society many had belonged to in the Ould
Sod which defended Catholics from the persecutions of the English and the local Protestant elites by violence if need be. They named their new organization in the
States The Ancient Order of Hibernians
(AOH) subservient to the
secret societies in Ireland. They even
got the organization a New York State
charter, making it official, something that the outlawed organization in Ireland could never be. Despite this overt step, they took pains
to make the proceedings and activities of their new organization secret
from prying eyes.
The origins of the Hibernians
in Ireland are shrouded in mystery and
myth.
The AOH itself traces the linage to Rory O’Moore, a Catholic nobleman
who organized secret Defenders against
the Earl of Essex Thomas Radcliffe,
famed as the lover of Queen Elizabeth I,
who was made Lord-Lieutenant of
Ireland in 1562. Essex prohibited
all monks and priests from either eating or sleeping in Dublin,
ordered the head of each family to attend Protestant services every Sunday
under the penalty of a fine, and perhaps worst confiscated the
property of Catholic nobles.
First off, the Hibernians get it
wrong, it was not Rory O’Moore a/k/a Sir
Roger Moore who was born about 1600 but his uncle, the clan chief Ruairí Óg Ó Mórdha, King of Laois that waged war on
Essex.
Rory came along two generations later and was one of the four organizers
of the Rebellions of 1641, a failed coup d’état by the ancient Catholic
nobility against authorities at Dublin
Castle then fought the prolonged Irish
Confederate Wars which took back much of the country outside of
Dublin. Then he resisted the invasion
by Oliver Cromwell but ultimately
was crushed and died in hiding or exile.
It is doubtful that there was any
direct organizational connection between the followers of either Ruairí Óg Ó
Mórdha or Rory O’Moore and the later Hibernians except by way of inspiration
for Catholic resistance.
In the 18th Century for instance rural Catholic tenant farmers organized secret Whiteboy societies to protest
rack-rents, tithe collection,
evictions, and other oppressive acts by night
raids on landlords,
burning barns and estates, assaults, and assassinations. The name derived
from the white peasant smocks many
of the night raiders wore. At the time
the authorities called them Levelers and
they called themselves by different names including Queen Sive Oultagh’s Children, Fairies,
or followers of Sheila Meskill. There were three outbreaks of Whiteboy
violence—1761–64; 1770–76; and 1784–86 with
low level activity in between. Each
outbreak was ruthlessly and violently suppressed leaving parts of some
counties wastelands. Some of the surviving Whiteboys rallied to the United Irishmen uprising and the small French invasion force dispatched by Napoleon in 1798. But others were deeply distrustful of
the United Irishmen which was largely led by liberal Protestant Dissenters.
The spirit of the Whiteboys,
if not their organization, was revived around 1813 by the Ribbonmen, an agrarian Catholic secret society formed
to prevent landlords from evicting their tenants. The also attacked tithe and process servers. Strongest in Ulster, they became deadly enemies of the Protestant Orange Order and the two
groups often fought pitched battles.
The Ribbonmen were named for the bits of green ribbon they wore
in their buttonholes, but they called their organization the Fraternal Society, the Patriotic
Association, or the Sons of the Shamrock. It was to the secret leadership of these
societies that the new American AOH pledged
their allegiance in 1835.
The AOH grew rapidly despite the
secrecy with which it surrounded itself.
In New York City they organized patrols
armed with clubs and blackthorn sticks to defend Catholics,
particularly their Churches and Priests
from assaults by Nativist gangs. More
importantly, they began organizing politically
and within a few years wrestled control of the 6th Ward whose heart was Five Points from the Nativist Tammany Wigwam and elected Irish
Catholics to local office—the first time this kind of political success
was had by the Irish in this country and a model
in embryo for the political
machines they would come to command in many cities.
A second locus of growth in
the early years was at Pottsville, Pennsylvania in the heart of the state’s anthracite coal region where Irish
miners had been recruited to work the pits. It was extremely dangerous
hard work. Fourteen hour days, six
days a week were standard. Pit operators
often failed to meet payrolls and levied fines for minor offensives and made employees pay rent on tools and equipment.
Trade unions were in their infancy and manual laborers like coal
miners, especially Irishmen, were
not considered intelligent enough to
manage their own affairs. A secret
society, like those of tenant farmers in the old country, seemed like the
natural way for the miners to organize to protect themselves. So, the
Hibernians spread over the coal fields.
After the Civil War the Hibernians were deeply established over the
anthracite district. By then they were operating
semi-openly as an ethnic benevolent
society, a type of organization that spread widely in the second half of
the 19th Century which, among other things, raised money for the many widows and orphans caused by frequent mine accidents, fires, and shaft collapses. The men could assemble for
meetings—invariably on Sundays after Mass, the only time of the week they were not working—without
attracting too much attention. But what
went on in those meetings was an oath
sealed secret.
Conditions in the mines had grown
worse under the insatiable demand for fuel for the emerging steel industry, other heavy industry, and the ever-expanding network
of railroads knitting the
country together. New mines opened
regularly. Ownership in many cases
passed form individual entrepreneurs
to corporations and consortiums tied to the steel industry
meaning that the real bosses were
far away and seldom seen. Demand for
increased production meant corners were cut to already scant safety procedures including
inadequately timbering the shafts
and careless handling of black powder explosives led to ever
more dangerous working conditions. To
work the mines the bosses turned increasingly to children for jobs away from the mine face, especially as breaker
boys. By 1870 nearly a third of all
workers in the district were boys 16 years of age and under, numbering more
than 10,000.
Worst of all from the perspective of
the Irish miners, who were relatively established in the district, was the
importation of non-English speaking
immigrants, especially Italians and
Slavs to work the mines. Not only were these newcomers considered
dangerous to work alongside because they could not speak English and were un-instructed
in even rudimentary safety practices, but they were paid even less, driving
down wages across the district.
Suddenly the Irish were in the same boat as their old Know Nothing and nativist enemies and they behaved in much the same way to the newcomers.
Some early attempts at unionizing
the field began in 1869 with the Workingmen’s
Benevolent Association (WBA) after a particularly gruesome Avondale mine disaster took the lives
of 110 miners—just some of 566 miners had been killed and 1,655 maimed in Schuylkill County alone in a seven year
period. The attempt to unionize was met
by violent repression by the bosses, including almost daily beating of
suspected members as well as a number of ambush
shootings. All of this intensified
after the Panic of 1873 brought
rounds of wage cuts across the
district.
The time was ripe for the Molly McGuires. Historians are divided three ways
concerning the Mollies—that they and the Hibernians were virtually one and
the same, that the Mollies simply took advantage of the Hibernian
meetings to infiltrate the organization and use its secrecy to plan
their operations, or finally that there never was a real organization of
Mollies at all except for possibly individual or small groups of men inspired
the legend to act on their own against their immediate exploiters. Only those who are apologists for the employers’ version of history,
including some modern Libertarians
maintain that the Mollies and Hibernians were the same organization. The second viewpoint is the most widely held
and the third, that the Mollies did not really exist at all, is held by a
number of labor historians.
Back in Ireland secret groups identifying
themselves as Molly McGuires began to emerge during the Potato Famine. They
were even more rural, local, and Gaelic than the previous
Ribbonmen. Local Molly leaders were
reported to have sometimes dressed as women as cover for
their attacks. Membership and/or
activity in the Mollies against the landlords and abusive merchants
may—or may not—have coincided with the shadowy Irish Hibernians to whom the AHO
owed fealty.
At any rate a rash of counter-violence
including the murders of pit bosses,
foremen, and suspected spies, as well as sabotage of the mine shafts and heads with the placement of black powder bombs was soon being blamed
on the Molly McGuires and the AOH lodges were suspected to be the center of a vast
conspiracy.
In 1873 Franklin B. Gowen, the President
of the Philadelphia and Reading
Railroad, and of the Philadelphia
and Reading Coal and Iron Company and the wealthiest anthracite coal
mine owner in the world, hired Allan
Pinkerton’s detective service to deal with the supposed
Mollies. But his real target was
the WBA, which had grown to claim a membership of thirty thousand—85% of
Pennsylvania’s anthracite miners and a real threat to mine owners profits. The leadership of the WBA was not Irish but were
English Lancastershire miners who
were adamantly opposed to violence
and known to be trying to crack down on the acts credited to the
Mollies. Pinkerton was instructed to
gather evidence that would tie the WBA and its leadership, as well as the
AOH. Out of 450 Hibernians in Schuylkill
County, 400 were found to be union members.
In 1874 Pinkerton assigned one of
his top agents, 30 year old James
McParland who was born in County
Armagh, to infiltrate the
AOH. Working as a miner under the name
of James McKenna McParland seemed to
have no trouble infiltrating the Hibernians and gaining the trust
of leading members. He sent detailed
daily reports to his employer.
McParland showed a basic ignorance of the history of the AOH when
he wrote that the lodge was created by the Mollies as a cover for their
activities, despite the fact it had been active for decades before the violence
attributed to the Mollies ever began. He
also complained in his reports that he was making little progress in tying the
Hibernians to the Mollies. He was, however,
readily able to identify a number of union members.
In response to a general 20% wage
cut announced by Gowen’s Schuylkill
Coal Exchange combination of mine operators, the WBA went out on strike
on January 1, 1875. It would be a long strike,
punctuated by violence by the notorious Pennsylvania
Coal and Iron Police, the Pennsylvania Militia, and vigilantes on
one hand and retaliation attributed to the Mollies on the other.
Pinkerton either turned over
or allowed employees of Gowen to have access to the identity of the
union members uncovered by McParland. He
also recommended to Gowen that vigilantes be formed to attack known unionists,
supposedly in revenge for Molly attacks.
A union leader and AOH member Edward
Coyle, was murdered in March. Another member of the AOH was shot and killed
by the Modocs, a Welsh gang operating led by a mine
superintendent. Another mine boss, Patrick Vary, fired into a group of
miners and, according to the later boast by Gowen, as the miners “fled they
left a long trail of blood behind them”. At Tuscarora, a meeting of miners was attacked, and one miner was
killed and several others wounded.
Then on December 10, 1875, three men
and two women were attacked in their home by masked men. One of the men
and one of the women, the wife of a miner, were killed. The other two men were able to escape with
wounds, although McParland would later charge that they were hunted down and
killed by the Coal and Iron Police. The
vigilante raid outraged McParland who had no objection to the
assassination of union men but was furious that his reports had been used to
murder a woman who he considered innocent. He angrily submitted his resignation but was
enticed to stay with promises that his notes would no longer be turned over to
vigilantes. His scruples salved, McParland withdrew his resignation—and Gowen
continued to turn over the names of union members he identified to the
vigilantes.
First
Lt. Frank Wenrich, of the Militia, was eventually arrested as the
leader of the vigilante attackers but released
on bail and never tried.
Violence and retaliation continued
on both sides while Union leaders appealed for calm and tried to arrange arbitration. In May of 1875 28 national and local
union leaders were arrested. They were
all convicted at trial for conspiring to raise wages depressing the price of a vendible commodity and sentenced to a year in jail. With the WBA leadership in jail, the strike
struggled on loosing strength day by day, but violence on all sides
escalated, especially since the strongest voices for peace on labor’s side had
been effectively silenced.
After six months with their families
starving the strike and union was broken.
The men returned to work accepting the 20% pay cut and many were black balled from ever working in the
mines again. The end of the strike,
however, did not end the violence with both vigilantes and alleged Mollies
committing revenge murders well into 1876.
McParland now announced he had at
last been able to identify suspects in several planned or executed murders and
bombings. In the end several men went to
trial on murder or attempted murder charges based on McParland’s reports and
testimony beginning in January 1876.
Mine boss Gowen got himself named as special prosecutor in the case.
In all ten men were convicted and sentenced to hang. One man, Jimmy
Kerrigan, the brother-in-law of McParland’s fiancé, was acquitted in a second trial after an initial mistrial. On June 22, 1877 the ten men were hanged in
two batches, six at the prison at
Pottsville, and four at Mauch Chunk, Carbon County.
Another ten men were convicted and
hanged on evidence not from McParland and a last accused Mollie was tried and
hung in 1878. All of the dead were
identified as Hibernians and most as union members.
The Hibernians, union, and the
Mollies were all shattered. The national
leadership of the AOH far from supporting their accused brothers, denounced
them and officially dissolved the “guilty” lodges and expelled
all the members in an attempt to mollify public anger.
The Hibernians remained active in
both the United States and Ireland, however.
Increasingly tied to the Church, they became the extremely conservative wing of the Irish Nationalist Movement. In
Ireland it still did not have an official form
or identity. Many of its leaders were supporters of Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish
Parliamentary Party. They were the
bitter enemies of the more secular Irish
Republican Brotherhood (IRB)
just as the AOH in America opposed the IRB’s allies here, the Fenian Brotherhood.
In the U.S. the Hibernians split in
1884 between a minority that supported a continued allegiance to the Board of Erin consisting exclusively of
Hibernians in Ireland and Britain and a much larger group that wanted American
elected officers. The majority
became the Ancient Order of Hibernians
of America and the smaller group called itself Ancient Order of Hibernians, Board of Erin. By 1897 the Board of Erin group had only
40,000 members in pockets around New York city and in Illinois while the AOHA boasted 120,000 in every state. In addition, the AOHA chartered a ladies auxiliary, The Daughters of Erin in
1894 that had more than 20,000 members.
The two groups re-united in 1898 under the American leadership but
expressing a special relationship with Hibernians in Ireland.
The Irish Hibernians finally got legal
status in the 1890’s under the leadership by Joseph Devlin of Belfast. Heavily concentrated in Ulster, now also officially the Ancient Order of Hibernians spent much
of its time challenging the Orange Order
and contesting its annual Twelfth of
June Marches commemorating
the Protestant victory at the Battle
of the Boyne. That single mindedness
proved very popular in Ulster where membership blossomed from 9,000 members at
the turn of the century to 64,000 in
1909. They also began to make inroads
elsewhere in Ireland, but their extreme sectarianism
was viewed by many in the South as an impediment to retaining
the support Protestant Dissenters and even making inroads among the Anglo-Irish of the Church of Ireland.
The Hibernians were among the first
to openly recruit and train an armed militia of their
own. They generally opposed the
raising of Irish regiments and troops for The Great War
and entered a somewhat shaky alliance with the emerging Irish Volunteers. They bitterly opposed the James Connolly’s socialist and labor Irish Citizen Army. None-the-less one company of Hibernian Rifles joined the Volunteers
and Citizen Army in the 1916 Easter
Rebellion.
During the War of Independence many Hibernians joined the Irish Republican Army but in the Civil War that followed they supported the government and
Treaty Forces. Its influence waned outside of Ulster,
and even on its home ground. By the
1930’s they were drifting to fascism
and supplied troops to the Irish
Brigade fighting for Franco in
the Spanish Civil War.
In Ulster the Hibernians had long
sponsored their own proactive parades to taunt the Orangemen. At the beginning of the Troubles in 1968 they voluntarily called off their annual
marches in the interest of peace but resumed them in 1975 as the
organization became increasingly identified and allied with the
nationalist Provisional IRA.
Today only a few thousand strong its
mostly elderly members continue to confront their ancient enemies
yearly.
In the United States the AOHA
remained active, although organizations more directly connected to arming and
supplying the IRA gained popular support.
In 1965 they reported 181,000 nationwide. Like all fraternal organizations in this
country, membership dropped precipitously over the next few years as
elderly members died with no youthful replacements in sight.
Less than 10,000 remained when a
revival of sorts began in Montana with
the establishment of the vigorous Thomas
Francis Meagher Division No. 1, named for the Civil War General of the Irish Brigade, and Montana Territorial Govern in Helena, in 1982. Within a couple of years six more Montana
towns formed units. Other new divisions
were founded in California and in
2018 a new division was founded in Tennessee. Several Divisions have lately been
successful in recruiting young members.
The order organized the New York City St Patrick's Day Parade
for 150 years until 1993, when control was transferred to an independent
committee amid controversy over the exclusion of Irish-American gay
and lesbian groups.
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