The Court-Martial of Mother Jones

In March 1913, labor agitator Mary Harris "Mother" Jones and forty-seven other civilians were tried by a military court on charges of murder and conspiracy to murder, charges stemming from violence that erupted during the long coal miners' strike in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek areas of Kanawha County, West Virginia. Immediately after the trial, some of the convicted defendants received conditional pardons, but Mother Jones and eleven others remained in custody until early May.
This arrest and conviction came in the latter years of Mother Jones's long career as a labor agitator. Eighty-one and feisty as ever, she was able to focus national attention on the miners' cause and on the governor's tactics for handling the dispute. Over the course of seven months, more than two hundred civilians were tried by courts-martial. Only during the Civil War and Reconstruction had the courts been used so extensively against private citizens, and the trial raised a number of civil rights issues.
The national outcry over Mother Jones's imprisonment led the U.S. Senate to appoint a subcommittee to examine mining conditions in West Virginia, the first Senate subcommittee ever appointed to investigate a labor controversy. Public sentiment eventually forced a release of the prisoners and brought about a settlement of the strike. In the face of overwhelmingly adverse publicity, the governor suppressed publication of the trial transcript. It was long thought to have been destroyed, until Edward M. Steel, Jr. uncovered the trial proceedings amid private papers at the West Virginia and Regional Collection.
Together with Steel's discerning introduction, the transcript of this landmark trial sheds new light on the Paint Creek/Cabin Creek strike and provides insights as well into the Progressive movement, the history of the United Mine Workers, the development of congressional investigation committees, and the beginnings of the Labor Department. Most of all, it shows the use of an unusual judicial process that created legal questions unresolved to this day.

Edward M. Steel, Jr. is professor emeritus of history at West Virginia University.