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History of the United States From the Compromise of 1850 to the Mckinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896; 1877-1896
History of the United States From the Compromise of 1850 to the MckinleyBryan Campaign of 1896 18771896 Author:James Ford Rhodes General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1920 Original Publisher: The Macmillan company Subjects: United States History / United States / General History / United States / 19th Century History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877) Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no... more » illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II My relation of the occurrences at Reading and Scranton has taken us amongst the population of the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania. No history of the time can be complete without some reference to the Molly Maguires whose activity caused a profound sensation in the coal region and attracted considerable attention from the rest of the country. The field of that most useful of domestic fuels, anthracite coal, embraces an area of 472 square miles ' all contained in the counties of Dauphin, Northumberland, Columbia, Schuylkill, Carbon and Luzerne, which had in 1870 a population of 436,437 and produced in 1876 more than twenty million tons of coal.2 The operations of the Molly Maguires which I shall relate centre in Schuylkill and Carbon counties, north of Reading and south of Scranton. The name and organization of this hide-bound secret order came from Ireland: no one but an Irish Roman Catholic was eligible for membership. The authorities differ as to the exact time when the real outrages of the Molly Maguires began and, during the Civil War, there is some confusion between them andthe "Buckshots" whose main idea was resistance to the draft; but a review of the specific character of their work leaves no doubt that, from 1865 on, the Mollies were in full swing. The time and place could hardly have been more favorable. During the war there had been an enormous demand for anthracite coal at high ...« less