In July of 1877, a strike on the Baltimore and Ohio railroad threw the United States into a crisis that shook its very foundations. The outburst became the first nationwide general strike in US history, travelling across major and minor railroad lines and spreading into countless other industries. The strike was borne out of the heightening contradictions of the Gilded Age, a period following the Civil War marked by the massive accumulation of wealth and a dominant system of industrial wage-labor. A speculative bubble fueled by this growth burst in the Panic of 1873, which thrust working people into the clutches of desolation. When the strike began, workers who rose up were met with military force and violence erupted across fourteen states. In the Appalachian Forest, battlegrounds erupted in Cumberland, Keyser, Sir John’s Run and in the mountains and woods along the B&O line. The uprising crossed divisions of race, gender, and status as the downtrodden rose up against an absolute power. For some observers this massive upheaval appeared to be a second American Revolution.

The economic and industrial boom that emerged in the aftermath of the Civil War was driven by railroads. With a practical monopoly over transportation, they sustained the beating heart of the American economy. The B&O railroad itself was one of the wealthiest corporations in the country, with net earnings of $4 million in 1876 ($128 million in 2025). The strength of the United States was tied up in the interests of the railroads, who nurtured close connections with the American government. Railroad companies enjoyed land grants and tax exemption status (after the strike in Cumberland, the B&O had charged that the city would be accountable for property damage due to their tax exempt status). The railroads also had legions of attorneys at their disposal who turned into friendly judges when appointed to the judicial system. The railroad presidents themselves commanded unprecedented and unyielding authority. Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, amidst controversy in the election of 1876, secured the votes of southern Democrats to elect President Rutherford Hayes in exchange for a Texas Pacific Railroad.

The fearsome tramp in an 1879 political cartoon, via Larry Coffin

During the depression that followed 1873, workers suffered consistent wage cuts and withstood poor living conditions while companies protected their stockholders first and foremost. Industrial wage-labor was a relatively new phenomenon, a system where workers became reliant on external income versus their own means of production. Unemployment surged to an unimaginable scale, with one in every five industrial workers without a job. The cultural image of the tramp emerged: a transient, unemployed person, cut loose in society without traditional means of support. The American worker lived one step away from the fate of the “tramp,” with sinking wages, high rents, and an economic life marred by extortion. With a meager income to survive on, many workers became dependent on their employers, who offered debt traps in the form of company houses, towns, equipment and stores and offered little security.

The railroad worker lived on the verge of starvation, for one B&O worker, “we eat our hard bread and tainted meat two days old… and when we come home, find our children gnawing bones.” The wage of the railroad worker had been steadily diminishing during the depression, and was among the lowest on the B&O. Workers were only paid for the days they were employed, and could be unemployed for up to four days a week. When they did work a job, they were often made to do unpaid labor usually completed by other tradesmen. Their work itself was extremely dangerous. As trains were mostly controlled manually, there was ample opportunity to be maimed or thrown to one’s death. Injury lawsuits rarely served workers either, as the courts were generally in the railroad’s pocket. In between jobs workers were usually required to “lay over” at company hotels, such as the Queen City Hotel in Cumberland, and wait for a job in the opposite direction to take them home. Paying full price for a room and waiting for two to four days for the next job threw many men into company debt. The reach of the railroad was inescapable. In Cumberland, the B&O owned the aforementioned Queen City Hotel, the Consolidated Coal Company, several iron and steel works, machine shops, flour mills, a Rolling Mill, and more, while scheming to crush the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal which challenged their transportation monopoly.

In May of 1877, the four major trunk lines (the B&O, the Pennsylvania, the New York Central, and the New York and Erie Railroad) met and agreed to a wage reduction of 10 percent across all railroads. They were confident the cut would go peacefully as their workers were loosely organized if at all. Their shadows tailed any potentially seditious employees, as they embedded spies into a nascent Trainmen’s Union that attempted to organize all classes of railroad workers into striking in June of 1877. While the spies sabotaged the attempt and suspected union members were fired en masse, the Trainmen’s organizers had reached workers from Baltimore to Chicago. As discontent fermented, a Trainmen’s leader, Robert Ammon, overheard workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia grumbling that they would surely strike if the B&O cut wages by 10 percent as they had months earlier.

On July 11th, President John Garrett of the B&O announced that the scheduled 10 percent reduction of wages would be effective July 16th. The Baltimore Sun published the annual report of the B&O a few days later: profits were satisfactory, dividends for stockholders were dished out, and the board would adjourn for a sleepy summer. On Monday, July 16th, firemen and brakemen in Baltimore walked off on the job and began to halt freight trains. Word of the spontaneous strike spread along the B&O line, to Martinsburg, then Cumberland, MD, Keyser, WV, and all the way to Wheeling, WV.

Scenes at Martinsburg echoed across the country, Via Harper’s Weekly

Almost immediately B&O officials demanded President Hayes to send out the military to crush the strike. Hayes employed General French. French started in Martinsburg where crowds of railroad strikers, joined by boatmen of the C&O canal, had lined up engines and cars and stopped all through traffic. The C&O boatmen who had been on strike for a month already had ample grievances with the railroad, which severely undercut canal shipping rates while owning one of the coal companies that was refusing to pay the boatmen’s demanded wage.

When federal troops under Colonel Curtis were finally able to get a crew of strikebreakers to take an engine westward out of Martinsburg, it was detained by hundreds of boatmen who had been maintaining a canal blockade at Sir John’s Run, in Morgan County of West Virginia. From behind laurel bushes and trees the scrappy canalmen lobbed stones at the engine and scabbing engineers and forced it to stop. When the US troops on board hopped off the train to attack, the guerillas disappeared into the brush.

In Cumberland the strikebreaking train was met by crowds of boatmen and railroaders who stopped it once again, uncoupling the train cars. By midnight the railroad officials had managed to get the cars recoupled and left for Keyser, where torpedoes (small detonators) laid on the tracks, notifying the strikers of their arrival. Keyser, which housed workshops of the B&O, swarmed with strikers. Curtis’ force consisted of a mere ten regulars, who met an intimidating crowd in the hundreds. Defeated, the strikebreakers gave up and returned east.

Workers at the B&O shops in Cumberland, via the City of Cumberland

Into the evening the crowds of workers in the striking cities grew. These individuals, immigrants, Black, White, young and old met to strengthen their resolve. The action from the first days of the strike had unleashed the fight within these workers, many of whom had gained tactics and experience from the grislyviolence of the Civil War. In Cumberland, five hundred assembled to hear speeches that preached class solidarity. Speeches against the greed of rich men came in conjunction with fundraising for families on the verge of starvation.

Black and White workers in Mineral County met and planned together. Miners of Piedmont, WV saw the railroad men’s struggle as theirs as well and decided to set out for Keyser the next day. Together they drafted the manifesto “WE SHALL CONQUER OR WE SHALL DIE” which proclaimed that 15,000 miners, in addition to local business owners and community members, were united with the strikers and that the “God of the poor and the oppressed of the earth is with us.” On the morning of the 20th, this militant document, in which the miners threatened to blow bridges, tear up tracks, set fire to shops, and destroy hotels, was posted at depots along the B&O line. The threats of violence were backed by the reality of surviving the depression, “strike and live! Bread we must have! Remain and perish.”

Map of the C&O canal and the B&O road, Keyser is listed as Paddy Town (it was renamed in 1874 after William Keyser, a vice president of the B&O), via Library of Congress

While the strike in Martinsburg had been broken by July 20th, the locus of the fight travelled down the line to Cumberland. The laborers, including the railroad men, Canal boatmen, workers at the B&O-owned Rolling Mill, and miners, were joined by young boys, women, and the unemployed. The crowd's animosity towards the railroad was especially sharp in a city that had staked its identity on the C&O Canal and experienced pervasive exploitation from the B&O and its countless subsidiaries. The freight trains sent from Martinsburg were first stopped at Sir John’s Run by a multiracial collection of coal miners, boatmen, and railroad strikers who again used the forest as cover to snatch coupling pins and pelt projectiles at the trains. Only when a freight with troops arrived were the trains able to continue.

Once in Cumberland, the strikebreakers faced the city itself. Young people ran through the cars, sabotaging brakes and taunting troops. The strikebreakers abandoned their posts on all trains save the one which hosted two companies of regulars. That locomotive eventually moved on to Keyser, where it met another diverse assemblage of people. By Keyser the strikebreakers were ultimately spooked for good. Perhaps the inflammatory messages emanating from Piedmont had reached them–or maybe the strikers were making good on those threats. The train went no further, as the strikebreaking crew holed up in the soldiers’ quarters.

On the 21st of July the State closed in on Cumberland. The Keyser train returned with two companies of regulars while two more companies arrived from the east after sweeping up Sir John’s Run. General French, arriving from Martinsburg, was directed by the B&O to set up shop in Cumberland. When relations broke down between French and the B&O’s representative, Colonel Sharp (a former Confederate general whom French hated with conviction), he requested President Hayes to replace him if he could not act independent of the railroad. General Getty assumed control of the US forces from French, who was subsequently maligned as a drunk by railroad officials.

The B&O railroad through the Appalachian range, from Cumberland to Grafton, via The Library of Congress

The mountains past Keyser provided cover for three more days of conflict, via Library of Congress

Getty traveled down the line, from Cumberland onwards, deploying troops at each station and quashing the strike. While Cumberland fell shortly, the militants between Keyser and Grafton persisted for three days. There, in the mountainous refuge of West Virginia, the strikers could launch attacks, halt and overturn trains, and evade the regulars. Yet eventually even Keyser succumbed and by July 30th, the last flicker of rebellion on the B&O line was snuffed. By then, however, much of the nation had witnessed the flames.

Dissent on the B&O was quickly replicated across the major trunk lines in addition to countless minor lines that sprouted off of them. In cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago, Buffalo, Indianapolis, Jersey City, St. Louis, and Galveston, a coalition of railroad strikers, laborers, the unemployed, and general members of the public met state and federal forces. At least fourteen states were impacted by the strike. A mounting response from police, state militias, and the US Army summarily quashed the strikes. By the beginning of August, the status quo had been restored to the railroad lines of the United States.

Immediate responses to the uprising remarked that American society had narrowly missed a great upheaval. J.A. Dacus, a St. Louis newspaper editor, remarked that “with a purpose of revolution… it was within the grasp of the railroad employees and other classes of laborers to have taken absolute possession of every commercial center in the nation; aye! Even to have overturned the Government itself!” In the aftermath of the strike one newspaper headline remarked that “THE REIGN OF THE COMMUNE DRAWING TO AN END.” The Paris Commune of 1871, in which working-class revolutionaries seized the city of Paris, had been fresh in the minds of those allied with capital. Could the United States be subject to the same labor unrest that characterized the Industrial Revolution in Europe? When reflecting on the strike Thomas Scott, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, had viewed the post-Civil War era as “such unbroken prosperity that we had perhaps come to expect exemption from many of the worst problems which perplex other and older civilizations.” 1877 showed that despite westward expansion and a great accumulation of wealth, the nation was not immune to the contradictions of the Gilded Age.

Contemporary accounts singled out duplicitous elements as responsible for the nationwide unrest such as tramps and communist agitators, separating the “strikers” from the “rioters.” In this narrative, the strikes had a narrow scope that was taken advantage of and turned into wanton destruction by unrelated elements. However, the monopolizing power of the railroads had brought together all varieties of workers against them. More so, the unity of corporations in wage cuts and layoffs that led to impoverishment and unemployment created a foundation of common cause from tramps to locomotive engineers to the wives of workers.

The strike was a wake up call for those in power of the fraying relationship between capital and labor. Some railroads saw reform, ending attempts at further wage-cuts (some lines even reversed the 10 percent cut of 1877, although most didn’t). The B&O began granting workers leave to return home and providing more guarantees for full-time work. Railroads also ensured the firing and blacklisting of any strike leaders they could identify.

There were also demands for a stronger grip on the working class, with calls for legislation against tramps and limiting suffrage. Most impactful was the growing argument for a large standing army and emboldened local forces. Police forces and state militias reorganized to meet this desire across the nation. For Railroad baron Thomas Scott, it was key to “ascertain in what ways the government can so exhibit its military force as to secure the utmost possible efficiency in the enforcement of law and order without jarring or disturbing the general framework of our institutions and our laws.” The 1877 strike also answered the question of how the government should act in the case of major labor disputes, setting a precedent for the use of federal force which would later come to pass at the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The uprising also energized forces from below. The Workingmen’s Party and other labor-oriented and socialist organizations gained “the sympathetic ear of the discontented toiler” according to one WPU member. Slowly the trade union movement grew as well. The emergence of labor as a political and economic power would clash with the militarized response assembling in the state, resulting in the bloody struggles of the 1880s and 1890s. The shadow of 1877 loomed over the Haymarket affair of 1886, the Homestead Strike of 1892, and the Pullman Strike in 1894.

The Uprising of 1877 did not begin the “second American Revolution” as one labor newspaper had predicted. However it did energize and organize a united class unlike never before. Amidst a Gilded Age of proclaimed progress and prosperity, the crowds revealed the abject inequality and exploitation of the time. In the Appalachian Forest, a range of identities coalesced into communities of resilience. When faced against the resources, influence, and reach of one of the wealthiest corporations at the time, the Appalachians endured.

References

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A Second American Revolution? The Great Railroad Strike of 1877

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