Progress in the Mill—A Quartet of Aristocratic Non-Unionists—Sickness Breaks Out—More Arrests—Jack Clifford Suspected of Treachery, but is Held Without Bail for Murder—167 True Bills Returned—Supreme Justice Paxson in the Saddle—He Orders Arrests for Treason and is Generally Condemned—Snowden Favors the Gallows for Homesteaders—Judge Agnew on Treason—Paxson Instructs the Grand Jury and Pronounces the Homestead Men Traitors—Carnegie in Scotland. DURING the month of August, the mill continued to fill up rapidly with non-union recruits. Among these there was an admixture of worthless characters, who went to Homestead only for the novelty of the thing or for the purpose of securing a few square meals and perhaps a little money from the Company without imposing any special tax on their energies. Men of this type rarely spent more than a day or two in the mill. Once their curiosity or rapacity was satisfied they deserted, threw themselves into the arms of the strikers, represented themselves as having been deluded by the The exodus of idlers and incapables did not, however, in any way impair the progress which Superintendent Potter and his new hands were making, despite the reports to the contrary circulated among the strikers. The force of employees increased rapidly and as the wages offered were considerably higher than the average earnings of clerks and young men just beginning a professional career, many representatives of those classes were attracted into the Carnegie Company's service. Among the persons of education and refinement thus enlisted were four once prominent brokers on the Pittsburgh oil exchange, Messrs. Linn L. Dilworth, C.D. Leslie, John McLaughlin and J.L. Agnew. Mr. Dilworth was set to work running an engine, Mr. Leslie became foreman of the cold saw department, and Mr. Agnew was placed in the armor-plate department. Mr. McLaughlin, who was at one time considered the "highest roller" on the Oil City and Pittsburgh floors, accommodated himself to the duties of a subordinate position at fair wages. The completion of the last piece of armor-plate for the government cruiser Monterey, on September 3, made it About this time sickness began to spread among the non-unionists. The Company physicians had their hands full and a large number of men had to be conveyed to the Pittsburgh hospitals. John McGeorge, a resident of Allegheny, was taken to his home and died there, and McGeorge's son, who had been working in the mill with his father, was also stricken down. The attending physician diagnosed the malady in these cases as typhoid fever and assigned as the cause the impurity of the water used for general consumption in the mill. At first the Company hushed up the rumors of the presence of what seemed to be an epidemic among the men, and it was not until many deaths had occurred that the matter was publicly ventilated. Of the mystery involved in this affair and the manner in which it was solved an account will be given in another chapter. Weekly mass meetings, at which the men were assured that the company was only "making a bluff" and that, sooner or later the old hands would have to be reinstated, the Amalgamated Association recognized and wages kept With the exception of an information for murder lodged against Edward Burke, who was already in jail on charges of riot and unlawful assemblage, Secretary Lovejoy's program of prosecutions remained untouched throughout the month of August. At the beginning of September, Mr. Lovejoy warmed up to his work again and caused warrants to be issued for the arrest of Hugh O'Donnell, Hugh Ross, Matthew Foy and William Foy for the murder of Detective John W. Klein. All the defendants were already under $10,000 bonds on the charge of killing T.J. Conners and Silas Wain, and the apparent design was to multiply the amount of bail until the resources of the union leaders were exhausted and confinement in jail could no longer be avoided. Matthew Foy was arrested at once. O'Donnell surrendered two weeks later, on his return from New York. Elmer E. Bales, Harry Bayne and Oscar At the hearing on the conspiracy charge against Hugh O'Donnell, George W. Sarver, David Lynch, William T. Roberts and William McConegy, before Alderman McMasters, a sensation was created by the testimony of George S. Hotchkiss, an assistant superintendent in the employ of the Pinkerton agency. Hotchkiss swore that he had held several conferences with Jack Clifford, of the Homestead advisory board, and obtained from Clifford information incriminating O'Donnell and others. The nature of Clifford's revelations was not made known, objection to the admission of second-hand testimony being raised by attorney Brennen for the defense and sustained by the magistrate; but the report went out that Clifford had turned informer and caused consternation among the strikers. The members of the advisory board, however, defended their associate and explained that he had conferred with the Pinkerton man solely for the purpose of "pumping" him. Subsequent events bore out this assertion. The five men heard before 'Squire McMasters were held for a court trial. Shortly after O'Donnell and his companions had been disposed of, Clifford was arrested on a second charge of murder, preferred by the industrious Lovejoy, and committed to jail. He was also held for conspiracy, but gave bail on this charge. Next day his application for bail on the murder charge was brought before Judge Ewing, as was also that of Matthew Foy. Foy, against whom there was practically no evidence, was released on $10,000 bail. The testimony against Clifford, however, was very damaging. Captain John Cooper, of the Pinkerton On September 21, the grand jury returned true bills in all the Homestead cases presented to that body, 167 in number. The following is the list:
Having exhausted its catalogue of murder, riot and conspiracy charges, obtained true bills against 167 strikers, and buried the leading spirits among the Homesteaders beneath an avalanche of bail bonds, Mr. Frick now proceeded to play what he considered to be his trump card. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, of which at this time Hon. Edward Paxson, a close friend of C.L. Magee, was Chief Justice, came to Pittsburgh to hold its annual session. It was deemed possible that the Homestead affair might come before this body in some shape, after the lower courts disposed of it, but to nobody aside from the members of the Carnegie Company and their attorneys did it occur that the superior judiciary would, of its own motion, undertake to deal with the labor trouble at first hand. This, however, was what Mr. Frick counted on as the culminating stroke which was to break the back of the Homestead strike. The step from the alderman's office to the supreme court room was one which probably no other individual or corporation in the state would have dreamt even of suggesting; but Mr. Frick managed to take it The blow fell on the morning of September 30. The Chief Justice and his six associates met in the supreme court chamber of the county court house and held an hour's conference, at the expiration of which Judge Paxson sent for District Attorney Clarence Burleigh, and P.C. Knox, Esq., principal counsel for the Carnegie Company. When these two gentlemen arrived another hour was spent in consultation. Judge Paxson then sent for County Detective Harry Beltzhoover, whom he instructed to subscribe to an information made before him (Paxson) and to arrest the persons named therein. The information was worded as follows:
The law under which the proceeding was brought is the Crimes act of 1860, under which the penalty for treason is fixed at a fine not exceeding $2,000 and imprisonment by separate and solitary confinement at labor, not exceeding twelve years. It was announced that Judge Paxson would hear in person the application of any of the accused strikers for bail; that when the cases came before the grand jury he would instruct the jurymen as to what constitutes treason under the statutes of Pennsylvania, and that, if the cases should be brought to trial, he would sit on the bench in the court of oyer and terminer and try them himself. In short, Edward H. Paxson, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, was master of the situation. The court of last resort had been by a Frickian turn of the wrist, converted into a court of preliminary resort, intermediate resort and all other known varieties of resort, Detectives Farrell and Mills, assisted by a half dozen deputy sheriffs, were detailed to capture the defendants named in Beltzhoover's information. The task was not an easy one, for most of the reputed "traitors," realizing the difficulty of procuring bail, went into hiding and their friends took care to throw the officers off the track. Five of the men—Thomas Crawford, George Rylands, T.W. Brown, W.H. Baird and John Dierken—were caught on Friday, the day on which the warrant for their arrest was issued. On Saturday, Attorneys Brennen and Cox went before Judge Paxson with a petition for the admission of the accused to bail. Messrs. Burleigh and Knox were called in, and, after a consultation, the Chief Justice made an order authorizing the release of any of the defendants on $10,000 bail at the discretion of any judge of the oyer and terminer court. Judges Kennedy and Porter heard the applications, but rejected the bondsmen offered except in the case of William Baird. Despite the supposedly sacred character of the supreme bench, criticism of Judge Paxson's extraordinary action was freely indulged in by the members of the Pittsburgh bar and reproduced in the public press. Hardly a voice was raised in commendation of the Chief Justice's arbitrary interference, and the consensus of legal opinion, as mirrored in the newspapers, was to the effect that the disturbance at Homestead, being a purely local affair and The boldness with which this view of the case was stated by competent authorities gave much encouragement to the strikers, and at the regular weekly mass meeting, on Saturday, October 2, Vice-President Carney, of the Amalgamated Association, and other orators were emphatic in their claims that the treason charge was trumped up as a measure of intimidation and would fall to the ground if ever put to the test of a court trial. The strikers were, therefore, advised to stand their ground, and the Carnegie Company was warned that, when all the members of the advisory board were imprisoned, there would be other men to take their places, and that if all the men in Homestead were cast into jail the women would still be there to keep up the fight for the rights of organized labor. These sentiments were received with clamorous approval. No little surprise was created by the publication of a statement from Major-General Snowden setting forth that he was originally responsible for the treason prosecution. During his sojourn at Homestead in command of the militia, General Snowden said, he had suggested to the Carnegie attorneys, Messrs. Knox and Reed, that the advisory committee was guilty of treason. The lawyers pooh-poohed the idea, but evidently thought better of it, for three weeks prior to the issuance of warrants by Judge Paxson, Mr. Knox met the General in Philadelphia and asked his help in the preparation of briefs. General Snowden responded that it would hardly be wise for him, while serving as commander of Perhaps the most significant deliverance of the hour on the subject of the treason charge was that embodied in a letter written to the Pittsburgh Commercial-Gazette by the veteran jurist, Hon. Daniel Agnew, ex-chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Judge Agnew declared that the Homestead affair was riot and not treason. "It is easy," he said, "to distinguish treason from riot. It lies in the purpose or intent of the traitor to overthrow the government or subvert the law or destroy an institution of the state. Riot is a breach or violation of law, but without a purpose against the state." Those of the Homestead men charged with treason, who were not already held for murder, managed, for the most part, to find bail. Many continued in hiding. Burgess McLuckie, tired of running after bondsmen, had betaken himself to Youngstown, O., and, acting on the advice of Attorney W.T. Anderson, of that city, refused to return without a requisition. Honest John was lionized by the Youngstown people, delighted them with his speeches about high tariff and high fences and could have found a body guard any time to defy the Carnegie Company, the Supreme Court, the militia and all the other powers in Pennsylvania. The gravity of the occasion was felt by everyone and dead silence prevailed as Judge Kennedy opened the day's proceedings with a few words to the jurors stating that, in view of the unusual nature of the treason cases, Judge Paxson had "kindly consented" to instruct the jury. The Chief Justice began his charge by explaining that his intervention was due to the supreme importance of furnishing an authoritative interpretation of the law in the Homestead cases and that he acted at the invitation of the county judges. He then entered upon a review of the conditions and events at Homestead. "The relation of employer and employee," he said, "is one of contract merely. Neither party has a right to coerce the other into the making of a contract to which the mind does not assent. The employer cannot compel his employee to work a day longer than he sees fit nor his contract calls for, nor for a wage that is unsatisfactory to him. It follows that the employee cannot compel his employer to give him work or to enter into a contract of hire, much less can he dictate the terms of employment. When the negotiations between the parties came to an end, the contract relations between them The organization and plan of campaign of the Advisory Committee were reviewed at length, its chief object being stated as "to deprive the company of the use of its property and to prevent it from operating its works by the aid of men who were not members of the Amalgamated Association." Then followed a narrative of the Sheriff's preliminary manoeuvres and of the Pinkerton expedition, as viewed from a strictly Paxsonian standpoint. After recounting the details of the battle at the mill landing, the surrender of the Pinkertons, and the occupation of Homestead by the military, the Chief Justice went on to say: "We can have some sympathy with a mob driven to desperation by hunger as in the days of the French Revolution, but we have none for men receiving exceptionally high wages in resisting the law and resorting to Proceeding to the law in the case, the Chief Justice held that when the Carnegie Company employed watchmen to guard its works, "it mattered not to the rioters, nor to the public, who they were, nor whence they came. It was an act of unlawful violence to prevent their landing on the property of the company. That unlawful violence amounted at least to a riot upon the part of all concerned in it. If life was taken in pursuance of a purpose to resist the landing of the men by violence, the offense was murder, and perhaps treason." The legal definition of treason was then read and its supposed application to the Homestead conflict pointed out as follows:
In conclusion, Judge Paxson said: "We have reached the point in the history of the state when there are but two roads left us to pursue; the one leads to order and good government, the other leads to anarchy. The great question which concerns the people of this country is the enforcement of the law and the preservation of order." While the events narrated in this chapter were in progress, while the workmen of Homestead were being taken to jail in batches and charge after charge heaped upon them, and while the Supreme Court of the state was engineering the last grand coup by which the revival of an obsolete offense was to be made instrumental in winding up the strike at Homestead, Mr. Andrew Carnegie was busily at work reaping encomiums for his philanthropy, which at this particular time found vent in the donation of a memorial library to the town of Ayr, in Scotland. The corner-stone of this edifice was laid by Mrs. Carnegie two days after the treason warrants were issued at Pittsburgh. An address of thanks was made by the mayor, to which Mr. Carnegie replied, part of his remarks being as follows: "I feel more strongly bound than ever to devote the remaining years of my life less to aims ending in self and more to the service of others, using my surplus wealth and spare time in the manner most likely to produce the greatest good to the masses of the people. From these masses comes the wealth which is entrusted to the owner only as administrator." A few groans and cries about Homestead were |