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By Root 8022 0

Fierce rate wars led to savage losses and repeated attempts to arrange a lasting truce. But invariably some opportunistic free enterpriser pursuing short-term profits—Jay Gould notable among them—would break ranks shortly after a price-fixing accord was reached. On those rare occasions when it seemed that rail executives might actually succeed in collectively hiking their rates, shippers and merchants protested, especially in New York City. In 1874, after forty rail lines agreed to a rateboosting Saratoga Compact, the New York Chamber of Commerce and the Cheap Transportation Association attacked the Erie and the New York Central for their participation, claiming it would harm New York City’s trade. This in turn led to the spectacle of the presidents of the two roads denouncing the “destructive communistic characteristics” of the New York Chamber of Commerce.

The primary alternative to raising prices was cutting wages, and it was a wage reduction that sparked a skirmish at Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 16, 1877, which spread to Baltimore, then Pittsburgh, then to most major cities in the country. The struggle of railroad workers to reverse depression-era losses attracted support from other unionists and from the disaffected urban poor. Heavy-handed military responses provoked counterviolence, which in some cities—especially Pittsburgh—crescendoed to full-scale urban warfare.

The strike spread to the Erie and Central lines. Buffalo railmen went out and were joined by sympathetic factory workers, and the struggle spread east to Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. The governor declared martial law, Albany was ringed with troops, and the great conflict seemed about to roll south into New York City—but it didn’t. Part of the reason was that the metropolis was not really a railroad town; neither rail companies nor rail unions occupied the same commanding position as they did in smaller cities. But there were other reasons for the city’s escape from the national cataclysm: a phenomenal mobilization of military might directed at would-be strikers and supporters, and, in sharp contrast to other urban battlegrounds, a closure of ranks and hearts by the upper and middle classes against the urban working class and its depression-era hardships.

As the strike spread, New York opinion makers had waxed ever shriller in denouncing it. The Tribune saw the strikers as “Communistic and law defying, against all law, order, and civilization,” and if the upheaval spread to New York City, it should be “met by the shooting of every rioter within range of a musketball.” The Congregational journal the Independent was more bloodthirsty still: “If the club of the policeman, knocking out the brains of the rioter, will answer, then well and good; but if it does not promptly meet the exigency, then bullets and bayonets, canister and grape” were the proper remedy: “Napoleon was right when he said the one way to deal with a mob is to exterminate it.”

Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher, still a moral tribune despite his recent contretemps, gave two sermons on the strike in mid-July. Though agreeing that the “oppressed” working class was entitled to organize “for mutual protection against the mutual selfishness of employers and of capital,” he denounced the railroad strikers. Their effort was immoral because it contested the workings of “natural law,” which was “on the side of the largest, always, whether men would have it so or not; and no meddling on their part can interrupt it.” To this Spencerian outburst he added divine benediction, asserting that God “has meant that great shall be great and that little shall be little,” and the poor must “reap the misfortunes of inferiority.” Besides, he told his comfortable Plymouth parishioners, the poor’s misfortunes weren’t all that great. “It is true that a dollar a day is not enough to support a man and five children, if the man insists on smoking and drinking beer. Is not a dollar a day enough to buy bread? Water costs nothing. [Laughter] Man cannot live by bread [alone], it is true; but the man who cannot