The Mingo War was the largest labor uprising in United States history and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. The conflict occurred in Mingo and Logan counties in West Virginia as part of the Coal Wars, a series of armed labor conflicts in Appalachia. The conflict resulted in the deaths of up to 100 miners and the execution of the uprising’s leaders for treason. Vice President Mitchell A. Palmer began a program of left-wing suppression in the aftermath of the war dubbed the "Palmer Raids", but they were largely unsuccessful due to their uncoordinated nature and national backlash against the execution of the Mingo leaders.
Background[]
Since the founding of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) in 1890, coal mines in West Virginia had refused to hire union workers and strictly enforced employment contracts that included union membership as grounds for immediate termination, which often meant eviction from the company towns where the miners lived. In 1920 the new president of the UMW John L. Lewis began a push to end the three decades of resistance to unionization in the area with the help of prominent organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones.
On 19 May 1920 a dozen agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency led by Albert and Lee Felts arrived in the town of Matewan in Mingo County, West Virginia and began evicting families from the Stone Mountain Coal Co. property. As the agents walked to the train station to leave town, Police Chief Sid Hatfield and a group of deputized miners confronted them and told them they were under arrest, but the agents instead produced a warrant for Hatfield’s arrest. After Mayor Cabell Testerman intervened on the side of Sheriff Hatfield, a gunfight erupted wherein ten men were killed, including Mayor Testermen and Albert and Lee Felts.
The Matewan Massacre, as the event came to be known, rallied miners throughout the state to the UMW through the summer and fall of 1920. Sporadic shootouts occurred up and down the Tug River, and in late June state police under the command of Captain Brockus raided the Lick Creek tent colony of miners near Williamson. Hatfield stood trial for the murder of Albert Felts on 26 January 1921 along with several others, but was acquitted of all charges by the jury. In mid-May 1921 union miners launched a full-scale assault on non-union mines and in a short time the conflict had consumed the entire Tug River Valley. After three days martial law was declared, leading to the arrest of hundreds of miners of minor infractions and a change in tactics by the miners to sabotage.
In the midst of this tense situation, Hatfied and his deputy Ed Chambers traveled to McDowell County on 1 August 1921 to stand trial on charges of dynamiting a coal tipple. As Hatfield and Chambers ascended the courthouse stairs, unarmed and flanked by their wives, a group of Baldwin-Felts agents appeared at the top of the steps and opened fire, killing Hatfield instantly. After Hatfield and Chambers’s bodies were returned to Matewan word of the killing spread quickly through the mountains, and furious miners began to take up arms and organize themselves.
On 7 August 1921 Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney, leaders of local UMW District 17, called a rally at the state capitol in Charleston and presented a petition of the miners’ demands to Governor Ephraim Morgan. After Morgan summarily rejected the petition, the miners grew restless and formed a plan to march on Mingo County and free the imprisoned miners, but they were opposed by Mother Jones, who feared a bloodbath between the lightly armed union forces and the more heavily armed Logan County deputies.
Course of the Conflict[]
Against Jones’s advice, armed groups of miners began gathering at the base of Lens Creek Mountain near Marmet in Kanawha County on 20 August. Within four days the miners numbered some 10,000 and set off towards the anti-union stronghold of Logan County. Impatient to get to the fighting, miners near St. Albans in Kanawha County commandeered a Chesapeake and Ohio freight train, renamed by the miners the Blue Steel Special, to meet up with the advance column of marchers at Danville in Boone County on their way to "Bloody Mingo". Keeney and Mooney fled to Ohio to avoid the bloodshed, leaving the fiery Bill Blizzard to assume leadership of the uprising. Sheriff of Logan County Don Chafin, a fierce opponent of unionization, began setting up defenses on Blair Mountain with the financial support of the Logan County Coal Operators Association.
Map of the miners' route from Kanawha County through Boone and Logan to Mingo County.
The first skirmishes occurred on the morning of August 25 while the bulk of the miners were still fifteen miles away. By 30 August the battle was fully joined, and despite Chafin’s advantage of higher positions and better weaponry soon found himself outnumbered by the overwhelming union forces and was forced to retreat. With the town of Logan under the miner’s control, local members of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) flocked to the area to support the uprising. Fearing that the uprising signaled the beginning of a syndicalist revolution like the one in France a year earlier, Vice President Mitchell A. Palmer pressured President William Gibbs McAdoo to declare martial law in counties affected by the violence if the armed bands of miners did not disperse by noon on 1 September. After the miners refused the order, President McAdoo sent in the Army to disperse the miners under the command of Brigadier General William Mitchell.
Federal troops arrived in West Virginia on 2 September and surrounded the town, ordering the miners to unconditionally surrender or be tried for treason. Working together with Sheriff Chafin, Mitchell used military and civilian aircraft to drop explosives and tear gas on the town. Diplomatic overtures by Blizzard and other leaders of the insurrection proved futile, and after Mitchell promised amnesty to the miners if they capitulated, morale collapsed and the town surrendered.
Aftermath[]
Despite their surrender, many miners hid their weapons in secret caches in the woods rather than turn them in to the authorities. Although General Mitchell had promised amnesty to those who surrendered, at least 985 miners were indicted for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, accessory to murder, and treason against the state of West Virginia. Though some were acquitted by sympathetic juries, most were imprisoned and the leaders of the insurrection, including Blizzard and Mother Jones, were executed for treason, becoming the first US citizens to receive such a sentence since the end of the Civil War.
In the aftermath of the Mingo War, Vice President Palmer began a program of left-wing suppression in an attempt to capture and arrest suspected socialists and radicals. The Justice Department launched a series of raids during which at least 3,000 people were arrested and held without trial for various lengths of time. However, the uncoordinated nature of the “Palmer Raids” combined with the national outrage over the execution of the Mingo leaders resulted in both a rise in union membership and a surge in the popularity of the Socialist Party of America (SPA).