Great Railroad Strike of 1877 Erupts Across Nation, Federal Troops Deployed Against Workers

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 begins when Baltimore & Ohio Railroad workers walk off the job in response to a 10% wage cut—the second reduction in eight months during the severe economic depression following the Panic of 1873. The strike spreads rapidly across the nation’s rail network, involving workers in Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri, eventually shutting down two-thirds of the country’s railroad trackage and involving over 100,000 workers. This becomes the first general labor uprising in American history and the first instance of federal troops being deployed to suppress a domestic labor action.

Violence erupts in Baltimore on July 20, 1877, when Maryland National Guard troops clash with crowds of thousands, resulting in 10 civilian deaths and 25 wounded. President Rutherford B. Hayes issues a federal proclamation on July 21 and deploys 2,000 federal troops and 600 U.S. Marines to Baltimore, establishing the precedent of using military force to break strikes and protect corporate property. Similar confrontations occur in Pittsburgh, where Pennsylvania Railroad workers battle state militia, burning railroad property and resulting in over 40 deaths. In Chicago, 30 civilians are killed when federal troops and police fire on striking workers.

The strike is systematically crushed by early August 1877 through coordinated federal and state military intervention, but the uprising demonstrates the emerging power of organized labor and the lengths to which government will go to protect corporate interests. The strike exposes the deep class divisions of the Gilded Age and establishes a pattern of federal intervention on behalf of capital that will persist through the Pullman Strike (1894), the use of injunctions under the Sherman Antitrust Act against unions, and modern union-busting campaigns. The death toll exceeds 100 workers killed by state and federal forces, with millions in property damage, marking it as the bloodiest labor conflict in American history to that point.