Biography
James McDonnell was convicted of the November 1863 murder of mine owner George K. Smith at Audenried and hanged at Mauch Chunk on January 14, 1879 — among the last of the Molly Maguires executed. The Molly Maguires were a secret society of Irish and Irish-American coal miners in the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania, blamed for a campaign of violence against mine bosses and officials during the labor conflicts of the 1860s–1870s. Twenty men were convicted and hanged between 1877 and 1879 in trials driven by Franklin B. Gowen — president of the Reading Railroad and a major coal operator — and built largely on the testimony of James McParland, a Pinkerton detective who had infiltrated the group. Historians have long regarded the trials, in which a private corporation’s police investigated, its lawyer prosecuted, and coal-company interests shaped the juries, as a grave miscarriage of justice used to crush both the society and the miners’ union.
