----- Original Message ----- From: Ted Meehan To: drumkeeranfolk@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 11:16 PM Subject: Re: [drumkeeranfolk] White Boys and Mollie Maguires The Whiteboy movement started up in Ireland in the early 1700s as a response of some of the Catholics to the Penal Laws passed in the wake of the Williamite War - in direct violation of the Treaty of Limerick. There were laws on the books which prohibited Irish Catholic children from receiving an education. The Catholics were forced to pay a tithe (10% of earnings) to the Protestant church. Catholics were not allowed to own a horse worth more than 5 pounds - and if he did own a fine horse, English soldiers often would steal the horse by giving the Irishman 5 pounds. (Resistence meant death.) No Catholic could buy or sell land, nor could a Protestant bequeath it to them. If a Catholic son of a landowner renounced his religion, he immediately was awarded his family's estates. The Whiteboys were so named because they disguised themselves with sheets, and often took reprisals against the usurping planters by cutting the tendons in the cattle's legs. This had the effect of preventing the cattle from eating, and causing the planter much anxiety trying to bring the cattle to market. More often than not, an enormous amount of beef had to be slaughtered and wasted. Eventually, these reprisals became ohysical attacks upon the planters themselves. The English response was a virtual suspension of Habeas Corpus, and hanging every Catholic they suspected. The rule of law meant nothing, and hangings became a daily event - spurring the Whiteboys to more reprisals. Eventually, in the latter part of the century, Theobold Wolfe Tone tried to unify all opposition to English absentee rule by unitng Catholics and Irish Protestants into the United Irishmen. After the success of the American Revolution, he solicited the aid of the French Revolutionists in the ill-fated Rising of 1798. The violent reprisals after the Rising of 1798 discouraged most Irishmen - and the Catholic Church's prohibition from joining any secret societies discouraged more. So the movement - at least under that name - died out. Other secret societies did spring up, mostly under Republican oversight. These would be the forerunners of the modern IRA. Irish emigrants often sought work in the coal fields of Pennsylvania in the America. Sometimes, the Orange officials would make deals with American Mine Operators to send them a specified number of men to work the mines. Often they selected those they suspected of being ring leaders. The miners in America ran into injustice, as well. They would be cheated out of the fruits of their labor by dishonest checkweighmen - whose job was to weigh the load of coal brought out by a miner each day. Often the checkweighman would suggest that much of the load was just rock and gravel, and short the miners. The Irishmen reacted by forming a secret society based upon the Whiteboys approach. They would go out at night and beat the dishonest checkweighman. As in the case of the Whiteboys, the violence escalated over time, and the Pennsylvania government officials overreacted by suspending the rule of law, in order to hang those irishmen they suspected of being Molly Maguires. There are a number of fine books on the Molly Maguires, but my personal favorite was written by Aurand. There is a fine fictional novel that will provide a glimpse of the Whiteboy situation called "The Year of the French" by Thomas Flanagan. Siochain, Ted Meehan