New Frontiers: Westward Expansion and Industrial Growth, 1865-1877

Although the United States had gained legal authority over lands stretching to the Pacific Ocean before the Civil War, the nation had still not fully settled, much less conquered, this vast territory. Native Americans and Mexicans, resident in the West for centuries, did not willingly relinquish their property or their rights. At the same time, white Americans, immigrants, and African Americans continued to look to the West for economic opportunities and the chance for a fresh start. All of these groups increasingly competed with big business, especially railroads, for land and authority on this contested terrain.

By the late 1870s, thousands of African Americans across the South joined hundreds of thousands of new settlers—native-born and immigrant, Black and white, women and men—and headed west, hoping for a new start on the “open lands” of the frontier. Some hoped for wealth from newly discovered mineral resources. Others sought land for farming. Still others searched for a refuge from the repression and conflicts of their former southern homes.

The railroad turned these dreams of western expansion into a reality not only for eastern and southern migrants but also for corporate investors. Between 1867 and 1873, railroad companies laid 35,000 miles of track in the United States—as much as was built in the three previous decades. In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Congress had chartered the Union Pacific and Central Pacific corporations to construct a line between Omaha, Nebraska, and Sacramento, California. In 1869, a golden spike—hammered into place with great ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah—marked the completion of the link between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

The largest government subsidies in U.S. history financed the railroad boom. Between 1862 and 1872, Congress gave the railroad companies more than 100 million acres of public land and over million in loans and tax breaks. The Republican congressmen who had voted for these huge grants linked assistance to the railroads with what appeared to be a path breaking land bill, the Homestead Act of 1862. This act opened the West to settlement and allowed any adult citizen or permanent immigrant to claim 160 acres of public land for a fee; final title to the land would be granted after five years of residence. (In 1862 Congress also passed the Morrill Act, which gave land grants to states to build state universities using profits from the sale of public lands to the railroads.) A law such as the Homestead Act had long been demanded by urban workers, and its supporters heralded it as the salvation of the laboring man. “Should it become a law,” wrote the Radical Republican George Julian before it was passed, “the poor white laborers . . . would flock to the territories, where labor would be respectable, [and] our democratic theory of equality would be put in practice.”

A vast expansion of farming in the West did follow closely on the heels of the railroads. In the decade following the completion of the transcontinental line in 1869, Kansas attracted 347,000 new settlers. Similarly dramatic increases occurred in the other Plains states. Only about a tenth of the new farms in these years were acquired under the Homestead Act, however. The land was free, but a city laborer, making perhaps 0 a year, could not even pay the entry fees to file a claim, let alone raise the substantial funds necessary to buy farm equipment and move west. Indeed, many workingmen, including European and Asian immigrants, native-born whites, and African Americans, could only make the journey to Kansas and similar destinations by signing on as laborers with the heavily subsidized railroad companies.

Instead of western lands going mainly to individual small farmers, some people staked claims under the Homestead Act as a means of acquiring land for large mining and lumber companies. A provision of the act allowed homesteaders to obtain full and immediate title to land by paying .25 or .50 an acre for it. The large companies paid individuals to stake claims, and quickly acquired huge tracts of land at prices well below their actual value. Later amendments to the act made the acquisition of western land by large companies even easier.

The dreams of small prospectors fared little better than those of small farmers. Major discoveries of silver and gold in Colorado and Nevada drew miners to the Rockies and eastern Sierras in the 1860s, as did subsequent discoveries in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and the Black Hills of Dakota. Unlike the veins of precious metals found in California, however, those in Colorado and Nevada often ran three thousand feet deep or more and required extensive capital and technology to retrieve. As a result, individual prospectors who discovered veins of gold or silver, such as Nevada’s spectacular Comstock Lode, were rapidly displaced by mining companies. These enterprises employed large numbers of wage-earning miners in impersonal (and often unsafe) settings. The subsequent industrialization of hardrock mining, the emergence of powerful mining syndicates, and the movement of independent prospectors into the ranks of wage- earning employees stood in stark contrast to the dream of a free and open West.

The development of hard rock mining also had devastating effects on the environment. In 1866, Congress passed the Mineral Act, which granted title to millions of acres of western land to mining companies, assuring their control over mineral deposits. Six years later, the Apex Mining Act gave rights to the entire vein of ore below the surface to the “individual” who discovered its apex (the point closest to the surface). Since large corporations already owned the land on which most apexes were discovered, mining companies could now freely blast through mountains as they worked the entire span of a particular vein. Trees not already decimated by the passage of thousands of pioneers, by massive cattle drives, or by the movement of Native Americans into previously unoccupied lands, were either felled for lumber to build deep mine shafts or lost in the efforts to demolish the rocky terrain in order to reach the rich ore below. Huge piles of broken rock, deep and dangerous abandoned shafts, and polluted lakes and streams were left in the wake of such operations as mining companies depleted a vein and moved on.

How did John Gast’s 1872 painting, which was widely disseminated as a commercial color print, convey a range of ideas about the frontier?

During the 1860s, the dreams of Native Americans as well as their lands were being destroyed. The rapid spread of railroads, mining companies, cattle ranchers, and settlers across the Plains and Far West led to violent conflict not only between Native peoples and settlers from the East, but also among the various Native nations themselves. These incursions pushed Očhéthi Šakówiŋs (Sioux), Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee), Ndés (Apache), Dinés (Navajo), Numunuus (Comanches), and other Native peoples off their ancestral lands and forced them into greater contact with one another. Nomadic nations that had survived by hunting now overran lands on which other groups had settled to farm. As more and more Native Americans were crowded into smaller and smaller areas, some nations raided the stores and fields of others, touching off a series of mini-wars. Old animosities, like those between the Dinés and the Mescalero Ndés, flared when the U.S. government forced hostile groups to share the same reservation.

The clashes among the western nations and between them and the growing numbers of white settlers ensured that the federal government would bolster the U.S. Army’s presence on the Plains. Between 1860 and 1865, the number of U.S. troops stationed in the West increased from eleven thousand to nearly twenty thousand. The Battle at Apache Pass in 1862 in what is now Arizona and the campaigns against the Mescalero Ndés, Dinés, and Očhéthi Šakówiŋs in 1863 in the New Mexico territory made it clear that not even the Civil War could deter the U.S. government’s plans to conquer the West. In 1864, U.S. soldiers brutally attacked a sleeping village at Sand Creek, Colorado, killing some two hundred Tsitsistas/Suhtais (Cheyennes)—two-thirds of them women and children. As news of the massacre reached other Native nations, confrontations with white settlers escalated.

In the spring of 1865, as the last battles of the Civil War were being fought, the Union Army mounted a new offensive on the Plains. Political leaders in Washington, D.C., now viewed the pacification or elimination of Native peoples as a necessary condition for the development of the West’s economic potential. Army officers sent to quell uprisings included hardened veterans of the Civil War, men like William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan, firm believers in the kind of total war against enemy populations that had proven so successful against the Confederacy. In 1867, Sherman assumed command of the Plains division of the U.S. Army.

Also in 1867, Congress declared a new policy that it claimed would assure peace. Although treaties signed in the 1830s pledged much of the Great Plains to Native peoples, the federal government now withdrew that pledge. The remaining “free” Native people would now be concentrated on two reservations in the Dakota Territory and the Oklahoma Territory. Officials persuaded a number of tribal leaders to accept the new terms, and many Native Americans felt that they had little choice.

This did not mean that Native Americans viewed the new reservations as a benefit. An Ndé man named Daklugie moved as a child to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona Territory in the early 1870s. Interviewed in the 1940s, he recalled San Carlos as a terrible place: “The heat was terrible. The insects were terrible. The water was terrible.” Cacti and mosquitoes thrived on the reservation, and many Ndés died of the “shaking sickness,” malaria. Daklugie concluded that San Carlos was “considered a good place for Apaches—a good place for them to die.”

Still, many Native peoples resisted the drastic reduction of their lands and, even worse, the destruction of their nomadic culture by the boundaries of the reservation system. To give just one example, an Ndé warrior, Victorio, led a group off the San Carlos reservation in the 1870s. He declared, “We prefer to die in our own land under the tall cool pines. We will leave our bones with those of our people. It is better to die fighting than to starve.” Eventually this band of Ndés were chased into Mexico, where Victorio and many of his followers were killed in a two-day battle in Chihuahua. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, these “nontreaty” Native peoples conducted guerrilla warfare against white settlers and U.S. troops. But U.S. soldiers resisted their attempts to circumvent the reservation system.

The battle to subdue Native Americans in the West was fought on many fronts. In 1869, the same year that Sherman was appointed commander of the entire U.S. Army, the Army Navy Journal reported his suggestion for undermining Native poeples' cultures. Sherman remarked that “the quickest way to compel the Indians to settle down to civilized life was to send ten regiments of soldiers to the plains, with orders to shoot buffaloes until they became too scarce to support the redskins.” The bison that roamed the West in giant herds provided the raw material for survival among nomadic nations, and their destruction would be fully as devastating as open warfare. The army regularly staged buffalo “hunts” by soldiers and civilians and applauded soldiers who reported large kills. “Sportsmen,” many outfitted at army posts, also killed many buffalo on the northern plains, as did railroad crews in search of meat. Professional hunters joined the slaughter after a Pennsylvania tannery discovered in 1871 that buffalo hides could be used for commercial leather. By the mid-1880s, buffalo—once numbering over thirteen million—had all but disappeared from the Great Plains.

With the slaughter of the buffalo, the constant movement to either avoid or confront U.S. army troops, the periodic massacres of whole villages, the concentration of more diverse nations in ever-smaller territories, and the disruption of normal patterns of hunting, agriculture, and trade, many Native nations found it impossible to sustain traditional ways of life. Others, whether from the confines of a reservation or amid the hazards of traveling the plains, worked hard to maintain some aspects of their religious ceremonies and kinship ties and their sense of themselves as a sovereign nation.

The pacification of Native Americans was not an easy process, and Native peoples fought back even when they were badly outnumbered and literally outgunned. One of the most notable stands made by Native peoples to fight off the U.S. Army’s control of the West was that of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋs (Sioux) and Tsitsistas (Cheyennes) at the Battle of Little Big Horn, noted earlier in the chapter. The Očhéthi Šakówiŋs had begun openly resisting the reservation system in the mid- 1870s when white miners had rushed into the Black Hills, the site of the Sioux Reservation, after gold was discovered there. In late June 1876, just a week before the nation celebrated its centennial, General George Custer and the U.S. 7th Cavalry were attempting to ferret out rebellious Očhéthi Šakówiŋ warriors (led by Lakota chiefs Tatanka Iyotake [Sitting Bull] and Tashunka Witko [Crazy Horse]) when Custer stumbled into an Očhéthi Šakówiŋs camp. Though taken by surprise, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋs, with the aid of Tsitsistas camped nearby, won a major victory when they cut down Custer’s troops and kept possible reinforcements pinned down on a nearby bluff.

The news of the battle finally reached Philadelphia just as the Centennial Exposition opened in July. Unable to imagine that the fault lay with Custer, many visitors to the Exposition viewed the defeat at Little Big Horn as further evidence of Native Amercans' "savagery." In any event, the victory was short-lived. Facing a shortage of food and supplies and the certainty that the army would send fresh troops to avenge Custer’s loss, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋs (Sioux) and Tsitsistas (Cheyennes) headed north. By fall 1877, U.S. Army troops had captured the renegade leaders and defeated the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ and Tsitsistas warriors, forcing these once powerful nations back onto reservations that continued to shrink in the face of white interest in settling the Dakota Territory.

Another group long-settled in the West—Mexicans and Mexican Americans—also found their ways of life changed by the entrance of large numbers of eastern whites into the region. For instance, people who had once lived in settled villages along the Mexico–U.S. border were forced to migrate ever longer distances to find work. During the 1860s and 1870s, Mexican American villagers established farming communities as far north as southern Colorado. The railroad, which had just begun to extend its reach into the Southwest in this period, offered seasonal wage labor for men in the region. This was new but also beneficial, providing a critical supplement to sheep raising and petty trade. Mexican and Mexican American women, who had traditionally been considered economic partners with their husbands and sons and shared the use of communal pasturelands, continued to do so. Thus, although the expansion of the Anglo frontier in the 1870s transformed Mexican American ways of life, the negative effects of wage labor and private property were not yet widespread.

Mexican Americans faced problems, however, from the ongoing efforts by white politicians to establish racial supremacy. The majority of white settlers in the Southwest had migrated from the former Confederacy, and they sought to use the Black Codes developed in the South to restrict the political and economic rights of Mexican Americans. In addition, Mexicans and Mexican Americans had intermarried with various Native American nations during the centuries that they occupied the same region. The Native peoples who had developed kinship ties with Mexican Americans may well have tried to bring members of their families into settled villages as an alternative to reservation life. But Mexican Americans were wary of becoming embroiled in the bitter warfare between the U.S. Army and Native Americans. By the 1870s, forts were scattered across the New Mexico and Arizona territories, from which army units did battle with renegade members of the Numunuu (Comanche), Kiowa, and Ndé peoples. These Native rebels, whose homes were in the Southwest, threatened to bring the fighting into Mexican American villages, increasing the disruptions initiated by white settlement, mining companies, and the railroads.

How does the language used to describe the past change how we understand it, remember it, and learn from it?

Although relations between white Americans and Native Americans or Mexican Americans made clear that the West was no racial utopia, many African Americans rightly viewed the region as providing greater opportunities than the unreconstructed South. Benjamin Singleton, for example, had been born into slavery in 1809 near Nashville, Tennessee, escaped to Detroit, Michigan in the 1850s, and then returned to Nashville to work as a carpenter after the Civil War. Although he had more resources than most newly emancipated Blacks, even his hopes for a peaceful life as a free worker in the South were dashed. As Singleton watched former enslavers force African Americans into wage labor or sharecropping during the late 1860s, he decided that the best hope for southern Blacks was land ownership, preferably outside the South.

In 1871, Singleton founded the Tennessee Real Estate and Homestead Association to recruit African Americans for emigration to Kansas. Kansas held great promise for freedpeople. The state contained vast tracts of undeveloped farmland that, under provisions of the federal Homestead Act, could be obtained in 160-acre lots for .25 per acre. Kansas was well known as a home to ardent abolitionists, and as the site where the first Black soldiers joined the Union Army. The Republican Party dominated the political life of postwar Kansas, and the state legislature had been one of the first to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. In addition, many white Quakers, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists from the Northeast, with a “sense of mission toward the Negro,” had moved to Kansas during the 1860s, ensuring a warm welcome for freedpeople.

But by 1878, when Singleton arrived in Kansas with the first party of two hundred African American emigrants, the railroad companies and speculators had already claimed the best land. The black homesteaders had to settle on less fertile lands, but even that proved difficult when, a year later, the Kansas Freedman’s Relief Association sent four hundred new settlers to the same area to which Singleton and his followers had gone. Because the plots offered to African Americans were too small to sustain families, many of the new settlers ended up working for wages for white ranchers and large farmers, or moving into local towns where most could find only menial employment.

There were still advantages for African Americans who moved West. Western states and territories were less likely to pass Black Codes, and some African Americans gained economic and political rights denied them in the South. Moreover, the mix of Native Americans , Mexican Americans, Chinese immigrants, African American and white settlers assured that no single racial group became the sole focus of racial hostilities. In some cases, other racial groups—like the Chinese in California or the Numunuus (Comanches) and Ndés (Apaches) in New Mexico—bore the brunt of labor exploitation and political oppression. Still, while opportunities for Blacks in the West were greater than in the South, they were still severely restricted.

How did popular images of African Americans leaving the South in the 1870s reinforce and sometimes defy racial stereotypes?

The railroads and mining companies that transformed life in the West also contributed to the acceleration of industrial growth after the Civil War. With this development, ideals of economic independence and self- sufficiency became less and less possible for most Americans to attain, whatever their race and whatever the region in which they lived. In 1860 there had been about as many self-employed people as wage earners. Twenty years later, far more people relied on wages. The number of workers in manufacturing and construction, for instance, leapt from two million in 1860 to more than four million in 1880. The rise of big business in the late nineteenth century was thus accompanied by the emergence of an industrial labor force that included women and men from a wide range of ethnic and racial groups. The very diversity of this new labor force, however, made it difficult for workers to organize in the face of increasing demands and pressures from employers.

The railroads were central to changes in the very fabric of American economic life. Through large subsidies to the railroads, the federal government helped to create powerful corporations, which became America’s first big businesses. The Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation’s largest single business enterprise, employed over twenty thousand workers by the early 1870s. The railroads’ tremendous need for capital led them to adopt and popularize a variety of modern managerial methods. One was the limited-liability corporation, which allowed wealthy men to buy shares in new ventures while limiting their financial responsibilities should the business fail. The number of railroad stockholders expanded exponentially, and large boards of directors—usually including several powerful bankers—replaced old-fashioned individual entrepreneurs. This new separation of ownership and control gave the railroad corporation a permanence and impersonality previously unknown, which made it more difficult for workers to negotiate problems and express their grievances.

The railroads were also the first businesses to face the problem of intense economic competition. This led periodically to disastrous rate wars. In some areas, groups of railroads formed “pools” that tried to end cutthroat competition by setting rates and dividing up traffic. From the standpoint of the railroad managers, pools seemed essential to survival. To others, such practices undermined the “free competition” that some lauded as the key to American prosperity. Critics contrasted the bankruptcy of some companies with the rise of a small group of wealthy entrepreneurs who had built immense personal fortunes through railroad promotion and consolidation. In the eyes of critics, these men—including Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, and Collis P. Huntington, who together became known as the Robber Barons—symbolized all that was wrong with the capitalist system.

The industrial barons rapidly translated their economic might into political power. They hired armies of lobbyists whose activities gained the corporations even more subsidies and land grants and protected them from regulation and taxation. “The galleries and lobbies of every legislature,” observed a Republican leader, “are thronged with men seeking . . . an advantage” for one corporation or another. These developments made many Americans doubt the future of their nation. Having fought a civil war to destroy the power of one ruling class, Americans were now confronted with an even more powerful industrial oligarchy. This new power was emerging in part as a result of the rapid and uncontrolled development of the West, the very region where the dream of a free and open republic should have been fulfilled.

Railroads, which led in the development of big business, were vital in the opening up of the West. They developed the rapid, reliable shipping needed to create a truly national market. This development, in turn, encouraged manufacturers to produce in larger quantities and to experiment with low-cost mass-production methods. Small producers that had once dominated local markets now faced competition from products made in distant factories and hauled by railroads to every corner of the United States. By the late nineteenth century, carriages, wagons, furniture, and other wood products, as well as shoes, textiles, and cereals, were all mass-produced.

The most dynamic industries, such as oil refining, were those involved in processing the natural resources of the rapidly developing West. In 1859, Edwin Drake drilled America’s first oil well in Pennsylvania. The lucrative business of refining crude oil grew up in the cities of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, leading to a period of intense competition similar to that which plagued the railroads. John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil Company dominated the Cleveland petroleum business by 1871, saw this competition as the main problem facing the industry. Rather than support price-fixing pools like those used by railroad companies, Rockefeller brought pressure on smaller refiners to sell out to him. By the late 1870s, Standard Oil was a virtual monopoly, controlling about nine-tenths of the nation’s oil-refining capacity.

As industries grew, so did the need for workers. Many workers were still laboring in their homes under the old outwork system. Sewing women in particular still produced clothing the old-fashioned way in the tenements of New York, Boston, and Chicago. Women outworkers also made paper flowers, cigars, and buttons, and many male tailors worked at home as well. Still, increased demand for such products did not improve the lives of these workers. For instance, between 1860 and 1880, textile manufacturers insisted that women homeworkers buy or rent newly invented sewing machines to speed up their work. Contractors then lowered the prices paid to the women for each piece of work completed, arguing that it was now easier to produce more. “I have worked from dawn to sundown, not stopping to get one mouthful of food, for twenty-five cents,” reported a woman tailor in 1868.

Yet, it was the factory, not the outwork system, that represented the wave of the future. The history of shoemaking in Lynn, Massachusetts is typical. As the national market expanded along with transportation and population, the outwork system seemed less efficient. The idea of concentrating workers in shoe- making factories was made possible with the invention of the McKay stitcher (an adaptation of the sewing machine) in 1862. The McKay stitcher allowed manufacturers to employ more machine operators, centralize production, and thus end outwork. Discipline became tighter and work was performed more steadily. “The men and boys are working as if for life,” observed a visitor to one Lynn factory. So were the women and girls.

During this period, factory cities like Lynn were extremely dynamic. A similar city—Paterson, New Jersey—grew from a market town of eleven thousand people in 1850 into a sprawling city of over thirty- three thousand by 1873. Many of its residents labored in the new locomotive, iron, machinery, and textile industries. In the late 1860s, industry grew faster in smaller cities like Lynn and Paterson than in large cities like New York and Boston. Industrial centers began to emerge in the South as well. In Augusta, Georgia, for instance, textile factories provided work for growing numbers of families—especially widows and their daughters—in the aftermath of the Civil War. By the 1870s, textile factories were opening across the South. Between the mid-1870s and the mid-1880s, six new mills opened in Augusta alone, and the work force jumped from seven hundred to three thousand workers.

Cities in the Midwest and Far West grew impressively as well. Chicago, which had thirty thousand people in 1850, became the sixth-largest city in the world a mere forty years later, with a population of over one million. Linked by the spreading railroad network, cities like St. Louis, Cleveland, and San Francisco also grew tremendously. The modern American city emerged in the first decade after the Civil War. During these years, city governments began to deliver services to their citizens, including public transportation, professional fire and police protection, and rudimentary sanitation and health facilities.

Large cities, with their expanding services and job opportunities, also attracted the most immigrants. Immigration had slowed during the Civil War. Now it picked up again—and this time on an even more massive scale. About five million people entered the United States between 1815 and 1860, but more than double that figure came between 1860 and 1890. As before, most immigrants came from northern and western Europe, where agricultural crises prompted them to leave home. Tens of thousands of farm people, including many Irish families, emigrated to the New World in the decade following the Civil War. Not all immigrants in this period were from the countryside, however; coal miners from Scotland and Wales and iron puddlers from England’s Black Country brought crucial skills to the most dynamic sectors of the American economy. German immigrants worked as laborers and artisans in more traditional trades, such as baking, brewing, and upholstering. They made up the majority of skilled craftsmen in St. Louis, Chicago, and other large cities.

Most immigrants, however, ended up working in the least-skilled sectors of the workforce: hauling and loading and unloading goods on the docks and in warehouses, building roads and streetcar lines, and laboring at building sites. Most important, it was overwhelmingly immigrants who built America’s railroad network—especially the Irish in the East and the Chinese in the West.

Chinese immigration to the Pacific Coast had surged in the 1850s, when famine in China had triggered an exodus to California. By 1860, nearly one Californian in ten was Chinese. When the Central Pacific began to build the western end of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, it recruited laborers directly from China. Its agents paid a person’s outfitting and passage in return for a promissory note, the debt to be repaid within seven months of beginning work on the railroad. However, new debts—for food, housing and other necessities—generally replaced old ones. Thus for most immigrants, their chances for financial independence receded into the distance right along with the railroad tracks. Despite the hardships, over ten thousand Chinese laborers found their way to the grading camps and construction crews of the Central Pacific.

As the United States extended its reach into the Pacific—purchasing Alaska from the Russians and annexing the Midway Islands in 1867—the Chinese continued to migrate eastward. By 1870, more than one in four people living in the Idaho Territory was Chinese. In mining towns, the Chinese had established their own communities and built businesses, particularly laundries. This allowed some to work for themselves rather than for American employers. Virginia City, Nevada, for instance, was home to about a thousand Chinese immigrants and twenty Chinese laundries in the mid-1870s. Whether working in mining towns or on the railroads, Chinese men, isolated from their families, struggled to survive the most brutal work conditions then known in the United States. In the winter of 1866, heavy snows covered the Chinese encampments in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The laborers had to dig chimneys and air shafts through the snow and live by lantern light. Yet, under orders from Charles Crocker, who directed labor for the Central Pacific, construction continued. On Christmas Day, 1866, a local newspaper reported that “a gang of Chinamen employed by the railroad were covered up by a snow slide and four or five died before they could be exhumed.” Even when not facing such dangers, the Chinese labored for ten grueling hours a day at roughly two-thirds the wages paid to whites. The experience of the Chinese in America at this time was harsher than that of other immigrant groups—partly because they were “contract laborers” and were recruited on a basis much like that of the indentured servants of the colonial period.

The dramatic increase in immigrants and wage laborers and the enormous expansion of industry and wealth raised fundamental questions about the survival of traditional American ideals and values. Business leaders and their intellectual supporters tried to create a rationale for these vast changes in American economic and social life by combining two concepts: “laissez-faire” and “Social Darwinism.” The theory of laissez-faire (roughly, “leave it alone” in French) rested on a belief that economic growth could result only from the free and unregulated development of a market that was governed entirely by laws of supply and demand and kept free from any interference by government or unions. Social Darwinism applied British scientist Charles Darwin’s ideas about animal evolution to social relations. Its proponents used Darwin’s concept of “the survival of the fittest” to explain the economic success of a few capitalists (“the strong”) and the increasing impoverishment of many workers (“the weak”). They argued that this “natural” process resulted in society’s continuing improvement.

Not all Americans agreed, however. Even the generally conservative New York Times expressed concern in 1869 that the increasingly rapid descent of the independent mechanic to the level of a dependent wage earner was producing “a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed [in] the South.” In the North, the Times noted, “capitalists threaten to become the masters, and it is the white laborers who are to be slaves.” More than any other single fact, the development of industrial capitalism and the attendant deterioration of working conditions lay behind the rapid growth of the American labor movement in the years after the Civil War.

The period from 1866 to 1873 marked a new stage in the development of the American labor movement. A greater proportion of industrial workers joined trade unions during these years than in any other period in the nineteenth century, and more of them than ever belonged to unions that were national rather than local in scope. By 1872, there were thirty national trade unions in the United States and hundreds of local ones, with a total membership of over three hundred thousand workers.

The efforts to create more and larger unions was limited, however, by the refusal of many white working men to organize alongside African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and women. Then in 1873, a devastating panic swept the nation, shattering the hopes of workers and unions. Still, before the country had fully recovered from the Panic of 1873, workers in one key industry—railroads—managed to launch a massive strike. Although the Great Uprising of 1877 failed to achieve workers’ demands, the strike suggested the power of collective, national action to gain leverage for labor against the giants of industrial capitalism.

Trade unions emerged in the 1860s out of a series of intense local struggles with employers over wages, hours, and working conditions. The struggle to limit the length of the workday to eight hours was especially important, and it triggered union organization in a number of trades. Workers’ ideological traditions also helped to spark the labor upsurge. Native-born workers, white and Black, drew on the egalitarian ideals and republican traditions of the American Revolution and the early years of Reconstruction in building both individual unions and the labor movement as a whole. German, Irish, and British immigrants carried with them from their home countries new, often radical, ideas about collective action and forms of struggle and organization, including socialism and anarchism. The melding of these traditions shaped the politics and ideology of the post–Civil War American labor movement.

The National Molders’ Union, founded in 1859, became one of the most important of the new unions. The power of the iron molders lay in their possession of valuable skills in a rapidly expanding industry. Led by president William H. Sylvis, they were also deeply committed to an egalitarian legacy. “We assume to belong to the order of men who know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain them,” proclaimed a Troy, New York, molder. They had organized locals during the inflation-ridden Civil War, most notably among Chicago’s giant McCormick reaper workers. Through a series of successful strikes, the union managed to maintain its members’ real wages and even obtain wage increases for the unskilled workers in the plant. By 1867, the molders’ union stood at the head of efforts to shorten the workday to eight hours.

Manufacturers were unified in their opposition to labor’s demand for a shorter work day. “As long as the present order of things exists, there will be poor men and women who will be obliged to work,” noted one employer who wanted to maintain a ten-hour workday, “and the majority of them will not do any more than necessity compels them to do.” Concerned with the effect of a shortened workday on their profits, factory owners vowed to fight the eight-hour day.

The Illinois legislature presented a major test of employers’ resolve. The Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law declaring eight hours to be “the legal workday in the State,” and the governor signed it into law in March 1867. Employers were required to conform to the new legislation beginning May 1. Chicago workers, elated with the seeming victory, took to the streets on May first in a spectacular parade that featured six thousand marchers, elaborate floats, and exuberant brass bands.

Chicago employers, however, encouraged by the legislature’s failure to institute a penalty for noncompliance, simply refused to comply. Workers once again took to the streets, this time in a massive citywide work stoppage, to demand that the new law be enforced. The iron molders led the way, followed by German and native-born machinists, and Irish workers from the packinghouses and rolling mills. On May 6, a crowd of strikers estimated at five thousand, many of them armed, marched through the city’s industrial areas, closing factories and battling police.

But the strike was badly weakened by hostility from the same politicians who had passed the law. Calling for the liberation of Chicago from “the riot element,” Illinois Republicans united behind the mayor when he called out the Dearborn Light Artillery on May 7 to suppress the strikers. Chicago workers bitterly denounced Republican politicians, but by the middle of June most workers, including the molders, had gone back to work on a ten-hour-day basis.

Coal miners also built powerful unions in this period. In 1868, miners organized an effective trade union, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA) under the leadership of Irish-born John Siney. A year later, the organization had a membership of over thirty thousand, including skilled and unskilled workers throughout the entire industry. By 1873, the Miners’ National Association was formed, with Siney as its president, to organize all American mine workers into one great industrial union.

A third group, shoemakers, also built upon traditions of struggle going back to the early 1800s. Forced into factories, they found themselves working under a new order, subjected to the control of manufacturers and machines. In 1867, the shoe-factory workers organized the Knights of St. Crispin, named after the patron saint of shoemakers. Through a series of successful strikes, the organization grew rapidly, and by 1870 it had a membership of nearly fifty thousand—making it the largest labor union in the nation. Women shoe workers organized the Daughters of St. Crispin to fight what they called “the unjust encroachments upon our rights.” Defying the wave of anti-Asian feeling sweeping the nation, the Crispins also organized a local of Chinese workers who had been brought to Massachusetts to break a shoemakers’ strike in 1870.

Despite the Chinese local, however, a number of racial and ethnic groups organized into separate unions. Ethnic concentrations in particular industries or workplaces, as well as language and cultural differences, proved difficult obstacles for unions to overcome, assuming they were even willing to make the effort. Many foreign-born workers chose to join associations organized by their countrymen. German immigrants, for instance, created separate craft unions, trades councils, and political organizations. In 1868, Adolph Douai and Friedrich Sorge established a section of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) in New York, and by 1872, there were twenty sections in the city.

Founded by the German revolutionary Karl Marx in London in 1864, the IWA held that “the final object” of the labor movement was “the abolition of all class rule.” Members sought the abolition of private ownership of production and its replacement by a socialist system in which workers would hold political power. They would then run the nation’s industries in a democratic fashion, allowing workers to participate in setting production quotas, wages, hours, and working conditions. German-American socialists also played a leading role in the great eight-hour-day strikes. Despite the strong opposition of employers and politicians, the eight-hour strikes were partially successful, and organized socialism continued to grow.

Many native-born workers shared the German immigrants’ distrust of industrial capitalism and the wage system, if not their more militant ideology. Some turned to cooperation as an alternative to capitalist competition. To circumvent the monopolistic power of the railroads, small farmers had organized in the late 1860s local chapters of the Grange, or Patrons of Husbandry, for the cooperative distribution and purchase of agricultural products. Worker-run cooperative stores and factories that mimicked the Granger co-ops appeared all over the nation in the early 1870s, particularly in textile, shoemaking, and mining towns.

Though members of the middle class hailed cooperation as an alternative to strikes, working-class cooperatives reflected a deep dissatisfaction with the unfettered individualism celebrated by industrial capitalism. Cooperation, argued one advocate, would make workers “independent of the capitalist employer,” end “ceaseless degradation,” and establish a new civilization in which “reason directed by moral principle” would prevail and universal brotherhood would flourish. Yet it was not clear whether such a brotherhood could bring together workers of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, different skill levels, and different sexes.

The resurgence of working-class militancy was capped by the formation of a new federation of labor organizations, the National Labor Union (NLU), which covered workers in diverse craft and industrial occupations. It was founded in Baltimore in 1866 and led initially by iron molder William Sylvis. The NLU marked a new stage in labor organization: the emergence of a nationwide institution that linked wage workers together in a broad community of interest. Its vision of this community was limited in crucial respects, however. Reflecting the racism and sexism of most white workingmen, it condemned the Chinese and gave only lip service to the rights of African American and women workers. These very exclusions gave rise to alternative movements that both expanded organization among workers and tested the power of labor unions and the law to create a more democratic society.

Many of the trade unions affiliated with the NLU had policies that excluded Blacks from membership, and in 1867 the NLU ground to a halt on the question of pushing these trade unions to organize African- American workers. NLU head Sylvis took a pragmatic line, arguing that “if the workingmen of the white race do not conciliate the blacks, the black vote will be cast against them.” But a committee assigned to study the question took no action, leaving Black workers to fend for themselves.

African American workers had already set about creating their own labor institutions, calling the exclusion of Blacks from trade unions “an insult to God and injury to us, and disgrace to humanity.” In 1869, a national convention of African Americans created the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU). Led by the onetime Baltimore caulker Isaac Myers, the new organization attracted the backing of Frederick Douglass and other prominent African Americans. The CNLU, like Douglass, also actively supported the Republicans, the party of Lincoln and Radical Reconstruction.

The NLU, hoping to create a working-class party, could not understand the political stance of African- American workers. White labor leaders refused to recognize that the discrimination practiced by their unions had a far greater effect than did partisan differences in hindering class solidarity. At the same time, the NLU had good reasons for doubting the efficacy of labor’s alliance with the Republican Party. Focusing attention on the central demand of white workers, the NLU attempted to obtain a national eight-hour-day law for industrial workers. It ran up against intense opposition not only from employers, but also from Republicans.

Ira Steward, a self-educated Boston machinist and a leader in the eight-hour movement, met this opposition head-on. He maintained that the system of wage labor undermined freedom and civilization. Steward, a veteran of the antislavery movement, likened northern industrial capitalism to southern slavery. Just as the motive for “making a man a slave was to get his labor, or its results, for nothing,” Steward argued, so “the motive for employing wage-labor is to secure some of its results for nothing. . . .” The eight-hour day, he said, would totally transform this system. As hours were shortened and wages rose, profits would decline, leading to the gradual elimination of the capitalist “as we understand him.” Cooperation would replace the wage system, and “a republicanization of labor, as well as a republicanization of government” would occur.

Steward had taken a long step toward adapting the antislavery and republican traditions of thought to the new industrial age. White working people quickly took up his argument, stressing the comparison between southern racial slavery and northern “wage slavery.” Only an eight-hour day would allow the worker to feel “full of life and enjoyment,” asserted a Massachusetts boot maker, because “the man is no longer a slave, but a man.”

Drawing this parallel to slavery, however, did not necessarily put white workers on the side of Black workers. Although some farsighted leaders, like William Sylvis, recognized the potential power of interracial coalitions, those who viewed unionization as a right for whites only drowned out calls for unity. Discrimination against Chinese workers was especially intense. Almost every important native-born labor leader opposed Chinese immigration, and advocated, instead, their absolute exclusion. The primary argument was that employers would use “docile” Chinese labor to lower the standard of living of U.S. workers and take away the jobs of native-born Americans.

The “docility” of the Chinese, like the penchant for strikebreaking among Blacks, was largely mythical. In the spring of 1867, for example, thousands of Chinese railroad workers in the Sierras went on strike, demanding higher wages and an eight-hour day. Management condemned the strike as a “conspiracy,” and it considered the possibility of transporting ten thousand southern Blacks to replace the Chinese. But Charles Crocker, who managed labor for the Central Pacific Railroad, developed a more powerful strategy, similar to Sherman’s policy of slaughtering the buffalo to defeat Native Americans. Crocker decided to starve the workers into submission. “I stopped the provisions on them, stopped the butchers from butchering, and used [other] such coercive measures,” Crocker bragged. The strike was broken within a week.

Most white workers argued for the exclusion of the Chinese from jobs on the same grounds that they argued against African Americans—economic competition. In most cases, the issue of competition was largely illusory, since Chinese immigrants generally occupied the lowest-paying jobs at the bottom of the employment ladder—the jobs largely abandoned by whites. This fact mattered little, however, since the underlying hostility toward the Chinese had as its basis the same deep belief in racial supremacy that shaped white attitudes toward African Americans. Labor editor John Swinton, a humane working-class leader in other ways, spoke for many workers when he argued that the “Mongolian type of humanity is an inferior type—inferior in organic structure, in vital force or physical energy, and in the constitutional conditions of development.” Such racial classification schemes were pervasive in the postwar period, when educated middle-class Americans used Social Darwinism and other pseudoscientific theories to justify their belief in the inevitability of their social and political dominance. Anti-Chinese sentiment was equally pervasive among white working-class labor leaders.

Labor leaders also strongly opposed the organization of working women—even white, native-born workingwomen. Nonetheless, wage-earning women, who formed nearly one-quarter of the total non-farm labor force in 1870, used a variety of tactics to defend and improve their conditions and wages during this period. In 1869, for example, sewing women in Boston petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to provide them with public housing. Although the legislature ignored the request, the petition broke new ground in demanding state intervention to remedy oppressive working conditions.

Many workingwomen, however, turned to trade unions rather than the state to gain protection. Female cigar makers, umbrella-sewers, and textile and laundry workers all formed short-lived local unions in these years, but they received little support from white male workers. Of the thirty national unions that existed in the early 1870s, only two—the cigar makers and the printers—admitted women into their ranks, and even then not on an equal basis with men. Most organized workingmen believed that the presence of women in the paid labor force was either a temporary phenomenon or, like the employment of African Americans and Chinese immigrants, part of a strategy of employers to lower wages. Clinging to the myth that “all men support all women,” they kept women out of their unions in an effort to keep them out of their trades.

This opposition came to a head in 1869, when the NLU, which initially welcomed women to its ranks, expelled women’s rights advocate Susan B. Anthony. The conflict behind the expulsion was complex, and stemmed in part from Anthony’s efforts to train female workers to take the jobs of striking New York printers, who at the time excluded women from apprenticeships in their trade. But many workingmen opposed Anthony because her vision of total female equality—including women’s right to vote and equal access to jobs and pay—threatened male domination. In arguing for Anthony’s expulsion, one NLU member noted, “The lady goes in for taking women away from the washtub, and in the name of heaven who is going there if they don’t? I believe in woman doing her work and men marrying them, and supporting them.”

Women’s rights advocates, rebuffed by union leaders, shared the interest of Boston’s sewing workers in using state power to improve the lives of women. They argued that the Reconstruction-era amendments to the U.S. Constitution could be interpreted in broad and inclusive ways that would gain rights for women without limiting the rights of African Americans or of workers. If women gained the right to vote, advocates of woman suffrage argued, then they could influence legislators to improve women’s economic position. The legal strategy they wielded, known as the New Departure, was developed by a husband and wife team of Missouri suffragists, Francis and Virginia Minor, in 1869. The Minors emphasized the new idea of federal power as positive and as supportive of individual rights broadly defined.

Hundreds of women tested the argument for universal suffrage backed up by the power of the national government. Between 1868 and 1872, freedwomen, female antislavery veterans, women taxpayers, and women wage-earners attempted to register and vote in South Carolina coastal communities; in Vineland, New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Washington, D.C.; Santa Cruz, California; and dozens of other cities and towns. These attempts to vote led to a number of arrests, the most famous being that of Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, New York, in 1872. Anthony’s case came to trial in a federal district court at Canandaigua, New York, in the spring of 1873. The judgment—rendered by a judge rather than a jury— repudiated an inclusive interpretation of the Reconstruction amendments.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments were relatively new additions to the U. S. Constitution, and were just starting to be tested. The judge’s narrow interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment in the Anthony case boded ill for their use to broaden political and economic opportunity in the United States. Moreover, this ruling and others like it had important implications for African Americans and workers as well as for women. In 1873, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld both the right of Illinois to bar women from practicing law in the state (Bradwell v. Illinois) and the right of Louisiana to regulate the work of butchers (the Slaughterhouse cases). The two opinions, handed down on the same day, assured that the federal powers granted under the Fourteenth Amendment would not be employed to advance the interests of either women or workers. By 1875, the voting rights accorded under the Fifteenth Amendment would be similarly narrowed, with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing, in a case brought by Virginia Minor (Minor v. Happersett), that the Constitution “does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one.” Shortly afterward, the Court used this logic in United States v. Reese and United States v. Cruikshank to reject the claims of two freedmen who sought protection of their political rights under the Fifteenth Amendment.

The judicial redress that women, workers, and African Americans sought in the early 1870s demonstrated that members of these groups viewed both the federal government and union organization as avenues for improving the lives of their families and communities. The rulings that the courts handed down, reinforced by Congress’s retreat from the egalitarian implications of Reconstruction-era laws, belied these hopes to forge broad alliances in the fight for equal rights. The failure of postwar coalitions across racial, gender, or class lines haunted efforts at collective action for decades to come.

But working people in America faced an even more immediate challenge in the mid-1870s: five years of serious deflation and the longest and most severe depression of the century. An economic crisis of such magnitude not only dealt a heavy blow to labor activism but also delivered a fatal blow to Reconstruction. In the South, the depression drove many Black landowners and renters back into the ranks of laborers, sharply reduced wage levels for African Americans, and helped transform sharecropping into a system of peonage. In the North, the depression encouraged northern businessmen and workers to focus their attention on problems at home and away from divisive racial politics in the South.

The crisis began on September 18, 1873, triggered by the collapse of Jay Cooke and Company, one of the country’s great investment houses. In a matter of days, panic led to runs on a number of banks across the country, and, for the first time, the New York Stock Exchange closed. By 1874, construction of railroads and buildings ground to a halt, and tens of thousands of businesses, large and small, went bankrupt. Two years later, in 1876, half the nation’s railroads had defaulted on their bonds, and half the nation’s iron furnaces were idle. Those businesses that survived did so by engaging in cutthroat competition to keep customers, causing the prices of capital and consumer goods to spiral downward.

The nation had experienced economic downturns before, but this one differed in both kind and degree. Not only was it the longest period of uninterrupted economic contraction in U.S. history—a full sixty-five months—but it also exacted an extraordinary human toll. This was because so many more Americans were now dependent on industry for wage labor for their survival. By 1874 fully a million workers were without jobs. City dwellers were hit hardest. In some cities, unemployment approached 25 percent of the workforce. New York alone counted some 100,000 unemployed workers in the winter of 1873–1874. “The sufferings of the working classes are daily increasing,” wrote one Philadelphia worker the following summer. “Famine has broken into the home of many of us, and is at the door of all.” Workers in small towns could—and did—tend little garden plots or engaged in hunting as a way to survive the hard times. The countryside was flooded, however, with urban men, and a few women, wandering from town to town in search of jobs. The wanderers often used the network of railroads that earlier had linked the nation in a single prosperous market, which led to the birth of the popular image of the rail-riding “tramp.”

The struggle for public relief now became far more pressing than that for the eight-hour day. In mass meetings, workers in cities across the nation demanded jobs. New York labor leaders in the winter of 1873 demanded to know what would be done “to relieve the necessities of the 10,000 unhoused and hungry men and women of our city.” They called on officials to create jobs financed by the sale of government bonds. Their request was denied, and the police brutally suppressed subsequent meetings of the unemployed in New York. In Chicago, St. Louis, and other large cities, many in the West, socialists took a leading role in the protests of the unemployed. It was during this period that socialism moved out of its relative isolation in German neighborhoods and began to build a larger following among native-born workers. In these cities, too, demonstrators demanding relief and jobs were often met with violence from public officials and the police and open hostility from the press.

Employers and their supporters, drawing on Social Darwinist theories, viewed the depression as a necessary, if painful, process that would weed out inefficient businesses and allow only the strongest and most creative capitalists (and, by extension, workers) to survive. Business and government leaders were inclined to blame the suffering of working people on “the ignorance, indolence, and immorality” of the poor, and they attacked public-works schemes as a form of imported “communism.” Business leaders and editors spoke scornfully of the “debased bread of charity.” The Nation magazine summed up this attitude when its editor, E. L. Godkin, wrote in its Christmas 1875 issue that “free soup must be prohibited, and all classes must learn that soup of any kind, beef or turtle, can be had only by being paid for.”

The depression nearly destroyed the young labor movement. At the depression’s beginning in 1873, there were almost thirty national trade unions, with three hundred thousand members. By the end of the decade, the numbers had dropped to eight or nine unions, with only about fifty thousand members. Any wage gains won since the Civil War were lost: New York building tradesmen, for example, had earned .50 to .00 for an eight-hour day in 1872; three years later, they were working a ten-hour day for .50 to .00.

Northern white working-class voters, preoccupied by the depression and still unconvinced by arguments for racial equality, turned away from their own earlier radicalism and that of Reconstruction. Capitalizing on this weariness, Democrats scored important victories in the North in the elections of 1874 and subsequently took control of the House of Representatives.

For African Americans in the South, the depression coincided with the end of Reconstruction. The political leverage of Black workers collapsed, and they had no alternative now but to accept white rule and white control of the economy. One of the most significant effects of the depression in the South was, ironically, the consolidation of a capitalist economy in that region. After 1873, merchants unwilling to accept the financial risks of extending credit to poor farmers and farm laborers—Black or white—instead charged goods to the accounts of large planters. The planters then resold the goods to workers, usually at inflated prices. Lien laws ensured that any debts owed to planters and merchants would be paid before small farmers could take profits for themselves. This meant that in a season of bad harvests or low prices, both of which were frequent in the 1870s, Black farm families who had slowly and painfully accumulated a little capital, or even a piece of land, were likely to lose everything.

At the same time, southern manufacturers increased their holdings as falling cotton prices and a growing supply of unskilled wage labor created the possibilities for industrial profits. The Bibb Manufacturing Company in Macon, Georgia, for instance, opened a massive cotton mill in the midst of the depression. Between 1870 and 1880, the number of Macon’s African American household heads who worked as artisans or professionals fell precipitously. Among their white neighbors, many men left the skilled trades as well. Some moved into clerical, professional, or proprietary positions. Others joined white women and children in the cotton mills, which flourished despite the economic crisis.

The dual transformation of Black landowners, renters, and sharecroppers into day laborers and of poor whites into industrial wage earners created a southern workforce that mirrored, more closely than ever before, that of the North and West. This same transformation ensured that, even in the midst of hard times, activism among some southern workers—white and Black; rural and urban—would continue. The Readjuster movement in Virginia in the late 1870s and early 1880s typified such interracial cooperation, bringing together Black and white small farmers and urban workers in a political coalition to change the state’s economic policies. Such activism was largely local and short-lived, but its very persistence suggested the potential for a new labor and political insurgency that could respond to the needs of working people throughout the country. Particularly as industrial development moved south and growing numbers of southern workers moved north and west, the preconditions were developed for the creation of a national working class and a national labor movement.

Though insurgencies that crossed lines of region or race were still rare, railroad workers launched a wave of strikes across the nation between November 1873 and July 1874. Engineers, brakemen, and machinists on eighteen railroads walked off their jobs—mainly in response to wage cuts. The workers effectively disrupted railroad traffic through a variety of actions: removing coupling pins from freight cars, tearing up sections of track, and cutting telegraph lines. Railroad companies in turn convinced a number of state governors to send in the militia, and nearly all of the strikes were eventually defeated. Despite those defeats, the strikes indicated the determination of rank-and-file workers to resist attacks on their livelihood.

More characteristic in the mid-1870s were regional labor protests, like the dramatic Long Strike in the eastern Pennsylvania coalfields. Franklin Gowen, president of the Reading Railroad, had bought up small mines in the area and by 1874 had become the largest coal operator in eastern Pennsylvania. In a plan to break labor’s power, he stockpiled coal and then, in the winter of 1874–1875, he shut down his mines. The bitter struggle that followed lasted five months, caused tremendous hardships for the miners and their families, and was marked by violence on both sides. “Coal and Iron Police” hired by Gowen shot indiscriminately into crowds of workers, while members of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), the union that represented the miners, attacked strikebreakers with clubs and stones.

Gowen also hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to infiltrate the miners’ organization, providing further ammunition against the workers. Allan Pinkerton had formed a detective agency and private security company in Cook County, Illinois in the 1850s after consulting with several midwestern railroad companies. Initially, his agents provided security for private businesses since city police forces were generally small and underfunded. They also hired out their services to army contractors and tracked western outlaws like Jesse James and his gang. In 1860, Pinkerton had gained national fame when he foiled a plot to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln. By the 1870s, railroads and other corporations regularly hired Pinkerton agents to infiltrate labor unions and guard company property against strikers, like the Pennsylvania miners. Despite their courage and determination, the miners of the WBA could not overcome the combined power of the Reading Railroad Company and the Pinkertons. They finally had to concede defeat, and reluctantly accept a twenty percent wage cut.

In the winter of 1876, Pennsylvania coal miners were again confronted by the anger of mine owners, now cloaked in the robes of law. James McParlan, a Pinkerton Agency operative who had lived among the Irish miners of eastern Pennsylvania for several years, stepped forward and became a leading witness in a series of sensational murder trials. McParlan testified that the murders of a mine boss and a miner were the result of a conspiracy by the Molly Maguires, a shadowy organization of Irish immigrant workers reputed to be willing to redress their grievances through violence. He also claimed that the “Mollies” dominated the WBA. Despite questions about the validity of McParlan’s testimony, twenty miners were found guilty and sentenced to death in the spring of 1876. A year later, ten were hanged. Because of widespread press coverage, these trials helped link in the public mind trade unionism and terrorism. The perception destroyed unionism in eastern Pennsylvania mining for twenty years.

The lack of responsiveness to workers’ needs on the part of the two existing political parties also increased working-class dissatisfaction with traditional politics during the depression years. With the growing disfranchisement of African Americans in the South and the disaffection of northern workingmen, the Republican Party increasingly emphasized business development and looked to businessmen as its most important social base. Politicians of both parties were accepting bribes from big business to guarantee the politicians’ support on critical issues. Consequently, the two major parties, which had been diametrically opposed a mere decade earlier, now seemed indistinguishable.

As working-class activists grew increasingly dissatisfied with both parties, they looked for other, more independent roads to political influence. What they found was the Greenback Party, organized on a national level by farmers in 1875. The new party stood for governmental action to expand the currency with paper “greenbacks” that were not tied to the nation’s gold reserves—a reform that was intended to inflate prices, thus benefiting debtors and providing capital needed for economic growth. Despite the protests of eight- hour advocates like Ira Steward, many labor leaders—including Richard Trevellick, A. C. Cameron, and John Siney—rallied to the Greenback cause, marking their final rejection of the Republican Party.

Other workers, mainly from the cities and including a large core of immigrants, based their hopes on the Workingmen’s Party of the United States. The Socialists who founded this party in 1876 put aside their differences and took a major step toward bringing immigrant and native-born workers together in the same political organization.

The Prohibition Party, inspired by grassroots campaigns against saloons in Ohio in 1874 and 1875, also began nominating candidates for state and national elections. Neither the Greenback nor the Workingmen’s Party offered any real threat to Republican dominance, however. The Prohibitionists were limited by women’s lack of voting rights, since it was women who had led the attacks on “rum sellers” across the Midwest. Nonetheless, the willingness of workers to experiment with alternative party affiliations suggested a new awareness of their place in national politics.

The very events that crushed the aspirations of many Black and working-class Americans—the “redemption” of southern state governments, the opening of new investment opportunities in the former Confederacy, the tainted victory of the Republican Party in the 1876 presidential election, and the defeat of labor radicalism by the trials of the Molly Maguires—buoyed the hopes of businessmen. Although the country had not yet emerged from the depression, the major problem of cutthroat competition was gradually being eliminated by the emergence of large monopolies in a number of basic industries. And unionism was clearly in retreat. The public hanging of ten Molly Maguires in June 1877 seemed to close the book on a defeated post–Civil War labor movement.

Within a month of the hangings, however, it would be clear that business confidence was profoundly misplaced. In July 1877 a massive railroad strike, the first truly national strike in the country’s history, shook the very foundations of the political and economic order. On July 16, 1877, in Martinsburg, West Virginia, workers on the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) railroad staged a spontaneous strike in response to yet another wage cut imposed by the railroad company. Three days later, as the strike intensified, President Hayes ordered federal troops into West Virginia to protect the B&O and the nation from “insurrection.”

The use of federal troops in a domestic labor dispute incited popular anger across the country. In Baltimore, the Maryland state militia fired on huge crowds of angry workers, leaving eleven dead and forty wounded. Work stoppages rapidly spread north and west along the railroad lines to Pennsylvania, where in Pittsburgh the strike reached its most dramatic climax. Because many Pittsburgh citizens sympathized with the railroad workers, the Pennsylvania Railroad sought help from outside the city. But when the state militia reached Pittsburgh on July 21, a large and angry crowd of strikers and sympathizers met them. Unnerved by their reception, the soldiers suddenly thrust their bayonets at members of the crowd. When rocks were thrown at the troops, they answered with a volley of rifle fire. When the gunfire finally ended, twenty Pittsburgh citizens, including a woman and three small children, lay dead.

News of the killings quickly spread. Pittsburgh residents, including thousands of workers from nearby mills, mines, and factories, converged on the Pennsylvania Railroad yards. By dawn they had set fire to the railroad roundhouse to which the militiamen had retreated. Twenty more Pittsburgh residents and five soldiers were killed in the ensuing gun battle.

In the next few days the strike spread across the Midwest. Workers took over entire towns, shutting down work until employers met their demands. The same railroad and telegraph lines that had unified the nation and laid the groundwork for the full emergence of industrial capitalism also linked and unified workers’ protests. Without any central organization (most national unions were defunct as a result of the 1870s depression), the conflict spawned local committees, many led by anarchists and socialists, that provided unity and direction to the strike. In Chicago, for example, the strike quickly became a citywide general strike that touched off open class warfare. In St. Louis, by contrast, thousands of workers participated in a largely peaceful general strike that shut down virtually all of the city’s industries, while government officials fled. Black workers in St. Louis took an active role in the strike, closing down canneries and docks. When an African American steamboat worker, addressing a crowd of white workers, asked, “Will you stand to us regardless of color?” the crowd responded, “We will! We will! We will!” In other strikes, however, racism prevailed, particularly in the Far West. In San Francisco, a crowd gathered to discuss strike action but ended up rampaging through the city’s Chinese neighborhoods, killing several residents and burning buildings.

But the massive national strike was directed mainly against the railroads and the unchecked corporate power they typified. Most working people in 1877 were seeking not to overthrow capitalism as a whole, but to set limits on the system’s unbridled economic power and to assert workers’ right to an equitable share of the extraordinary economic bounty they helped produce. Despite the nationwide mobilization of workers in the first truly national strike in American history, in the end the strike failed when faced with the massive power of the railroads and their allies in state and national government.

How do news images of events such as a strike or uprising shape viewers’ understanding of what happened?

A nationwide rebellion brought the United States to a standstill in the summer of 1877. Eighty thousand railroad workers walked out, joined by hundreds of thousands of Americans outraged by the excesses of the railroad companies and the misery of a four-year economic depression. View 30-minute video in full or in sections.

To fully engage in successful collective action, workers would have to create a labor movement in the future that would welcome a national and increasingly diverse labor force. Native-born and immigrant workers, men and women, African Americans, Asians, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and whites, skilled and unskilled, industrial, agricultural, and domestic workers would have to find common cause in the same way that planters and industrialists, railroad magnates and coal operators, moderate Republicans and New South Democrats had. And they would have to do so in a nation that now embraced lands from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast and beyond; that was increasingly defined by industrial and urban developments; and that was venturing ever further into international arenas of commerce, labor, and war. Moreover, workers would have to deal with a national—and international—economy marked by periodic panics and depressions.

By 1877, the United States had recovered from the Panic of 1873 and prosperity returned. Still, as the 1877 strike made clear, even prosperity did not promise opportunity or equality for all Americans. Those were goals that generations of workers, from diverse backgrounds, would continue to seek.