Robert Bruce, historian of the 1877 strikes, writes (1877: Year of Violence,) about a flagman named Gus Harris. Again, it happened outside the regular union, pent-up anger exploding without plan. The strike spread to Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Louis had already felt the effect of the premonitory shocks of the uprising. Illinois, and especially its great metropolis, Chicago, apparently hung on the verge of a vortex of confusion and tumult. The great State of Pennsylvania was in an uproar New Jersey was afflicted by a paralysing dread New York was mustering an army of militia Ohio was shaken from Lake Erie to the Ohio River Indiana rested in a dreadful suspense. Strikes were occurring almost every hour. The rebellion of the rail workers now spread. Five hundred soldiers arrived and Baltimore quieted down. The governor asked for federal troops, and Hayes responded. Soon, three passenger cars, the station platform, and a locomotive were on fire. Half of the 120 troops quit and the rest went on to the train depot, where a crowd of two hundred smashed the engine of a passenger train, tore up tracks, and engaged the militia again in a running battle.īy now, 15,000 people surrounded the depot. When the evening was over, ten men or boys were dead, more badly wounded, one soldier wounded. The streets now became the scene of a moving, bloody battle. The crowd hurled rocks, and the soldiers came out, firing. In Baltimore, a crowd of thousands sympathetic to the railway strikers surrounded the armoury of the National Guard, which had been called out by the governor at the request of the B&0 Railroad. Federal troops arrived in Martinshurg, and the freight cars began to move. ![]() Morgan, August Belmont, and other bankers now offered to lend money to pay army officers (but no enlisted men). Congress had not appropriated money for the army yet, hut J. army was tied up in Indian battles in the West. ![]() In fact, the militia was not totally reliable, being composed of many railway workers. The West Virginia governor applied to newly elected President Rutherford Hayes for federal troops, saying the state militia was insufficient. Six hundred freight trains now jammed the yards at Martinsburg. His arm was amputated later that day, and nine days later he died. The striker was shot in his thigh and his arm. ![]() A train tried to get through, protected by the militia, and a striker, trying to derail it, exchanged gunfire with a militiaman attempting to stop him. ![]() B&0 officials asked the governor for military protection, and he sent in militia. A crowd of support gathered, too many for the local police to disperse. It began with wage cuts on railway after railway, in tense situations of already low wages ($ 1.75 a day for brakemen working twelve hours), scheming and profiteering by the rail companies, deaths and injuries among the workers-loss of hands, feet, fingers, the crushing of men between cars.Īt the Baltimore & Ohio station in Martinsburg, West Virginia, workers determined to fight the wage cut went on strike, uncoupled the engines, ran them into the roundhouse, and announced no more trains would leave Martinsburg until the 10% cut was cancelled. That year there came a series of tumultuous strikes by railway workers in a dozen cities they shook the nation as no labour conflict in its history had done. Soon, to judge from the past, there will be a thousand deaths of infants per week in the city.” That first week in July, in Baltimore, where all liquid sewage ran through the streets, 139 babies died. The New York Times wrote: “…already the cry of the dying children begins to be heard. That summer, in the hot cities where poor families lived in cellars and drank infested water, the children became sick in large numbers. In the year 1877, the United States was in the depths of the Depression. Heavy repression hit the strikers and other American workers and despite winning some concessions eventually the strikes were broken, leaving 100 dead. Beginning with opposition to wage cuts and poor conditions the strikes led to near-insurrections in parts of Pennsylvania.
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