Whiteboys, nibbonmen, and Molly Maguires

Abstract Contrary to the nineteenth-century conspiracy theorists, it is highly unlikely that an organization called the “Molly Maguires” was imported directly from Ireland to the United States. Nonetheless, the social structure and cultural practices in the parts of Ireland where the American Mollys originated offer some important clues about the nature of Molly Maguireism in Pennsylvania. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Irish countryside was infamous for its violence. At the heart of the violence was a mysterious, secret-society tradition that had emerged with the Whiteboy movement of the 1760s. In time, the term Whiteboyism came to be used generically, describing agrarian violence as a whole. So, too, did the term Ribbonism, though there was also a distinct Society of Ribbonmen active in the 1820s and 1830s. The Molly Maguires, who emerged in Ireland in the 1840s, were the last of the long line of rural secret societies that began with the Whiteboys. The American Molly Maguires were a rare transatlantic example of this Irish rural tradition. Without an understanding of Irish rural history, the eventual outbreak of Molly Maguire violence in Pennsylvania makes little sense. A detailed examination is needed, first, of the general pattern of protest and violence in the Irish countryside; and second, of the highly distinctive history and culture of north-central and northwestern Ireland. For it was in this part of Ireland, and the single county of Donegal in particular, that most of the American Molly Maguires originated.