How a worker revolt almost became a revolution
In the summer of 1877, the United States endured an outbreak of labor unrest so widespread and violent that some thought a new American revolution was in the offing, this time tinged with the communist ideals that had just burned through France.
The Great Strike of 1877 began in Martinsburg, W.Va., on July 16 when railroad workers responded to yet another pay cut by shutting down the yard. Violent clashes broke out, and from there the trouble raced along the great railroad lines into Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago and St. Louis, building in ferocity as it went.
Nearly two square miles of Pittsburgh went up in flames. Mobs of police and mobs of rioters hunted each other down in Chicago. The strike disrupted the B&O, the Erie and the Pennsylvania railroads, swept up miners, iron workers, longshoremen and canal boatmen, and touched places as far apart as Worcester, Mass., and San Francisco, as far south as Nashville and Galveston, Texas.
By the time the strike was put down, an estimated 100,000 workers took part and about 100 people died. It was the closest the young nation had come to a nationwide general strike and pointed to the need for a more progressive future.
“[M]any Americans would look back to the summer of 1877 as a turning point,” writes Philip Dray, whose book There Is Power in a Union documents U.S. labor history.
The spark came when John W. Garrett, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, signed off on a 10 percent wage cut. It came as Americans were still struggling after the Panic of 1873.
B&O workers in Baltimore tried to stage a protest but were thwarted by police. So the action moved down the line to Martinsburg, the terminus of that B&O section.
On July 16, a cattle train’s crew walked off the job, leaving the beef to roast in the heat. The militia took command of the cattle train the next day and got it moving, but they were met by strikers. Shots were exchanged: one striker was killed, and a militia member was wounded. West Virginia Gov. Henry M. Mathews called on President Rutherford B. Hayes to send federal troops. Hayes complied.
Maj. Gen. W.H. French arrived in Martinsburg with 200 soldiers and the hope, Dray writes, that a show of bayonets would be enough to restore order. The soldiers, without help from B&O workers, got the trains running.
But the strikers began a low-grade guerilla conflict. Railroad workers — joined now by miners, iron workers and boatmen from the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal — hid under bridges or behind blind curves, emerging to ambush trains with stones or block their tracks with debris.
Maryland Gov. John Lee Carroll, seeing his neighboring state in turmoil, called out the Maryland National Guard in Baltimore and dispatched them to Cumberland, a key B&O junction not far from Martinsburg. As 5th Regiment guardsmen marched from the city’s armory to Camden Station, Baltimore factory workers came into the street to cheer — until word got out about why the soldiers were afoot. And soon the cheering crowd became a stone-throwing mob.
Soon, the rage traveled the rails to Pittsburgh. Once again, police were powerless to intervene, and local militia stacked arms in sympathy with the strike. Pennsylvania Gov. John F. Hartranft summoned the Pennsylvania National Guard from Philadelphia, the Iron City’s cross-state rival.
The Philadelphia troops — many Civil War veterans — arrived in a train gouged by stones and chunks of coal. They were heavily armed, with artillery and a Gatling gun. On Saturday, July 21, at the corner of Liberty Avenue and 28th Street, the soldiers clashed with a mob of about 6,000 people. Shots were fired, killing least 20 people. “Shot in Cold Blood by the Roughs of Philadelphia,” a local newspaper blared. “The Lexington of Labor Conflict Is at Hand.”
Afterward, the railroad barons were unrepentant. The B&O’s Garrett thought the soldiers should have killed more strikers. But despite losing the strike, laborers changed perceptions: More Americans came to believe that government should do more for social justice. “What labor won was a new appreciation of its own strength,” Dray writes, “and of the power of the strike.”