In the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania, the first great labor "terror" prosecution was a wholly private affair: the Reading Railroad's president hired the Pinkerton agency, whose operative James McParlan spent two years inside the Irish miners' lodges; the railroad's own attorneys then prosecuted the "Molly Maguires" before juries from which Irish Catholics were excluded, on McParlan's uncorroborated word. Twenty men were hanged between 1877 and 1879 — ten on a single day, June 21, 1877, "the Day of the Rope."

The condemned went to the gallows protesting their innocence; a century later Pennsylvania posthumously pardoned John Kehoe, acknowledging the trials as corporate vengeance against the miners' union movement. The Mollies stand first in this database's long line of labor's executed and imprisoned — the proof, at the tradition's origin, that in the coalfields the state's justice could be leased.