When The U.S. Army Occupied PA's Anthracite Coal Region
Authored by Jake Wynn via RealClearPennsylvania,
In October 1862, Irish mineworkers in the rural coal mining villages of western Schuylkill County rose up in armed opposition to Pennsylvania’s first attempt to create a drafted militia to add soldiers to the United States Army.
They marched from mine to mine across Cass and New Castle Townships, shutting down mining operations as they went. Several hundred men, some armed with pistols and other weaponry, stopped a train carrying recruits for the Army at the village of Tremont and ordered them to return to their homes. Chaos reigned through mid-October in Schuylkill County, raising alarm bells in the county seat in Pottsville, the state capital in Harrisburg, and even among leaders in Washington.
It was the second autumn of the Civil War and a month since the U.S. Army’s victory at the Battle of Antietam, resulting in President Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation freeing enslaved people in the Confederate states.
The war effort, however, had not been going particularly well for the Union. The summer of 1862 included a string of defeats for the U.S. Army in Virginia and in other theaters of the conflict, resulting in a series of Confederate invasions into the border states of Kentucky and Maryland.
With morale sagging across the Northern states, the Lincoln administration and state leaders like Pennsylvania’s Gov. Andrew Curtin sought other ways to boost enlistment into the state’s military forces serving under the Federal government. Curtin’s administration initiated mechanisms to begin drafting men into state militia units, infuriating opponents of the Republican administrations in Harrisburg and Washington.
The Irish population of western Schuylkill County had many grievances as the Civil War raged on. Often relegated to the worst jobs in the mining hierarchy of the anthracite coal fields, they lived in the tiny hamlets and patch towns around mining operations, or collieries, scattered across the rugged landscape north and west of Pottsville. They faced dangerous working conditions, low pay, and company-owned housing that was often barely fit for human habitation.
With the issuance of an executive order regarding the freedom of the South’s slaves, the anger of the immigrant working class of Schuylkill County grew to fever pitch. Conspiracy theories spread about the Lincoln administration’s motive to free the enslaved.
“We can tell the President of the United States, and his Abolition advisers, that they must keep their negroes out of the Coal Regions, unless they desire to inaugurate war in the North,” wrote the Pottsville Standard newspaper in fall 1862. “The people of this section of the State will not allow emancipated slaves to be thrown in competition white labor.”
Fears about the replacement of white, working-class laborers in the mines, though baseless, mixed with early attempts by the mineworkers of Schuylkill County to organize themselves. They sought to improve working conditions in the mines and the pay they received as the price of anthracite coal reached new heights due to extensive war-time demand.
The organization of Schuylkill County mineworkers and their armed marches from colliery to colliery in October 1862 created panic in Harrisburg and Washington.
“Notwithstanding the usual exaggerations, I think the organization to resist the draft in Schuylkill, Luzerne, and Carbon counties is very formidable,” wrote Gov. Curtin in a telegram to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton on October 23, 1862. “There are several thousands in arms, and the people who will not join have been driven from the county … One thousand regulars would be most efficient, and I suggest that one be ordered from the army.”
Secretary Stanton responded by sending an infantry regiment and a battery of artillery to Pottsville to take on the armed mineworkers if necessary. Those orders never came in October 1862. Instead, intervention by the Catholic Church helped avert a confrontation during this brief, but wild uprising.
Bishop James Wood arrived in Schuylkill County from Philadelphia in the midst of the crisis and traveled from town to town speaking to the largely Catholic working-class protesters and convincing them to put down their arms.
The threat to the government and the Union war effort had, for the moment, subsided.
However, by December 1862, marches and protests began again in Schuylkill County. On December 13, hundreds of miners went out on strike at the Phoenix Park Colliery just west of Minersville, threatening the mine’s supervisors with violence and destruction of the colliery. A pattern of such behavior continued as mineworkers used their leverage in a wartime economy that desperately needed the product they mined from the ground.
By 1863, mineworkers continued to organize strikes, oppose the enactment of state and then Federal enlistment, and threatened mining officials who sought to utilize the military to force them back to work. Murder and mayhem often reigned in the mining villages and towns northwest of Pottsville and in other scattered outposts around the Coal Region.
The Lincoln administration, partnering with local and state government, used the U.S. Army to occupy Schuylkill County, as well as parts of Carbon and Luzerne counties, to quell draft resistance and threaten efforts by mineworkers to strike for better pay and working conditions. This remained the status quo in the region for the remainder of the Civil War.
When the war ended, mine operators and the powerful Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, sought to maintain a military-style force in the region to exert the control and force over the working classes in the region. In 1865 and 1866, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed a law and a supplement that allowed for the creation of a private police force at the behest of corporate interests in the state. The first “Coal and Iron Police” forces, as they became known, were formed in Schuylkill County. They remained a powerful and controversial part of Coal Region life through the early 20th century.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/18/2025 - 23:25
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