Banquet at Delmonico's by Barry Werth

Author:Barry Werth [Werth, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-798-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

SPENT AND DEPLETED after four brutal years, the railroads—America itself, it seemed—verged on a general failure. On July 11, the board of directors of the Baltimore and Ohio, noting that the continuing “depression in the general business interests in the country” was hurting earnings, voted a 10 percent pay cut throughout the line—the second reduction since January. Brakemen, who risked dismemberment and death earning $1.75 for a twelve-hour day and who had to pay their own return fares after their jobs took them hundreds of miles from home, went on strike. Conductors earning $2.78 per day and firemen making $1.90 joined them. In Martinsburg, West Virginia, workers walked off the job, uncoupled the engines, ran them into the roundhouse, and pledged to stop all traffic until the cut was reversed. When a supportive crowd gathered, the company asked the governor for military protection. Days later, a militiaman shot and killed a striker.

With six hundred freight trains clogging the Martinsburg yards, the governor applied to President Hayes for federal troops. The U.S. Army numbered twenty-five thousand soldiers, down from a high of about one million during the war, and most of them were deployed against the Indians. Hayes as governor had used state guardsmen to restore order after labor troubles, and he now ordered two small detachments to Martinsburg. Once the trains resumed running, strikers in Baltimore assembled at the Camden yards, three miles from the city, and halted them there, and the Maryland governor ordered out that state’s militia.

Baltimore erupted. Across the teeming city, thousands of poor families lived in cellars and drank contaminated water. Liquid sewage ran through the streets, and each summer children got sick in alarming numbers: 139 babies died during the first week of July alone. After an angry mob of more than two thousand men, women, and children surrounded the armory, 150 militiamen marched on the crowd, killing nine people and wounding many more. Again, Hayes replied with a presidential proclamation and ordered in five hundred soldiers. During the next several days, as the strike spread from state to state, shutting down transit, crippling commerce, and threatening civil order, he also sent troops to Pittsburgh and Chicago.

“The sixth and seventh days of the revolution9,” Harper’s Weekly reported, “were the darkest and bloodiest of all.” Local authorities in Pittsburgh tried to arrest strikers at the Union Depot and were met by a shower of stones and a revolver shot fired into the ranks. For the next three minutes, guardsmen shot into the crowd, killing sixteen and wounding many more. Then, as news of the slaughter spread through the city, the streets filled with rolling-mill hands and other workers who broke into a gunworks and captured two hundred rifles and additional small arms. By nightfall, twenty thousand people squared off at the large roundhouse at Twenty-eighth and Liberty streets against eight hundred soldiers with Gatling guns and two other large battery pieces. Over the next two days, amid running street battles, seventy-nine buildings were burned to the

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