The Haymarket case had been appealed in…

The Haymarket case had been appealed in 1887 to the Supreme Court of Illinois, then to the United States Supreme Court where the defendants were represented by John Randolph Tucker, Roger Atkinson Pryor, General Benjamin F. Butler and William P. Black.

The petition for certiorari was denied.

After the appeals have been exhausted, Illinois Governor Richard James Oglesby commutes Fielden's and Schwab's sentences to life in prison on November 10, 1887.

On the eve of his scheduled execution, Lingg commits suicide in his cell with a smuggled blasting cap which he reportedly holds in his mouth like a cigar (the blast blows off half his face and he survives in agony for six hours).

The next day (November 11, 1887) four defendants—Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies—are taken to the gallows in white robes and hoods.

They sing the Marseillaise, at this time the anthem of the international revolutionary movement.

Family members including Lucy Parsons, who attempt to see them for the last time, are arrested and searched for bombs (none are found).

According to witnesses, in the moments before the men are hanged, Spies shouts, "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!"

Witnesses report that the condemned men did not die immediately when they dropped, but strangled to death slowly, a sight which left the spectators visibly shaken.

Notwithstanding the convictions for conspiracy, no actual bomber is ever brought to trial, "and no lawyerly explanation could ever make a conspiracy trial without the main perpetrator in the conspiracy seem completely legitimate." (Messer-Kruse, Timothy (2011). The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-12077-8.)

Historians such as James Joll and Timothy Messer-Kruse say the evidence points to Rudolph Schnaubelt, brother-in-law of Schwab, as the likely perpetrator.

Howard Zinn, in A People's History of the United States, also fingers Schnaubelt, suggesting he was a provocateur, posing as an anarchist, who had thrown the bomb so police would have a pretext to arrest leaders of Chicago's anarchist movement.

The Haymarket affair is a blow to organized labor.

Portrayals of the anarchists as bloodthirsty foreign fanatics in the press along with the 1889 publication of Captain Schaack's sensational account, Anarchy and Anarchism, on the other hand, will inspire widespread public fear and revulsion against the strikers and general anti-immigrant feeling, polarizing public opinion.