A Second Civil War?

The summer of 1877 was not a great time to be working on the railroad all the livelong day.

This was the Gilded Age, a sardonic turn of phrase coined by Mark Twain to describe the moral bankruptcy of the political and financial elite who were getting unfathomably wealthy on the backs of workers thanks to turbocharged capitalism. The so-called labor question had supplanted slavery as the dominant moral crisis of Reconstruction-era America.

Unions were a marginal force in rapidly industrializing cities in the North, and laborers endured long hours and starvation-level wages, with few rights on the job. Their robber baron bosses kept whittling down workers’ salaries after the Panic of 1873, the worst financial depression in American history until that point.

“Are not railway employees . . . enduring a tyranny compared with which British taxation in colonial days was as nothing, and of which the crack of the slave whip is only a fair type?” published the Journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers in 1873.

The situation reached a boiling point in 1877, as railroad magnates colluded to slash workers’ wages twice, despite raking in huge profits. Shareholders and managers did just fine, but ordinary workers’ pay was cut by up to half.

The aforementioned Martinsburg railroad workers, who unintentionally kicked off the Great Upheaval, struck on July 16 in reaction to their third pay cut that year. They demanded a 10 percent raise instead, and began uncoupling train cars to keep them at a standstill. The strike migrated east to west along significant rail routes in the North. The strikers were not just railroad workers. Others walked off the job in solidarity, including miners and boatmen in West Virginia, box makers in Baltimore, and butchers in Chicago.