The Corporate Spy: Pinkerton Agent Whose Testimony Hanged 20 Coal Miners

The Pinkerton agent — the man whose word hanged twenty anthracite miners — spent two and a half years living among them, drinking with them, and rising to secretary of the lodge he was paid to destroy. The company that hired him also hired the lawyers, supplied the witnesses, and stood in the courtroom arguing for the rope. The state of Pennsylvania furnished the gallows. Everything else was private. In Schuylkill County, between 1868 and 1875, 566 miners were killed underground. The men who complained were Irish. The juries that tried them were not. No Irish Catholic sat. Several judges held stock in the mines. There was almost no physical evidence. Twenty men were sentenced to death. Ten of them hanged on the same day, June 21, 1877. Alexander Campbell pressed his hand to the wall of Cell 17 on the way to the scaffold and said the mark would never be wiped out. The wall has been painted, scrubbed, and replaced. The handprint is still there. The coal companies investigated, prosecuted, and hanged their own workers. Union organization in the anthracite fields was gone for a generation. The cost of organizing was a rope. #AmericanHistory #LaborHistory #MollyMaguires #Pinkerton #CoalMining #1877 #UnionHistory