The 1877 Railroad Strike: The First Time the Army Broke a Strike

Camden Station stood at the edge of Baltimore's industrial district in July of eighteen seventy-seven, and on a Tuesday evening it became the center of the worst domestic violence the republic had seen since the Civil War ended twelve years before.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad workers had been living with wage cuts for two years. The company cut pay in eighteen seventy-six, then cut it again in July of eighteen seventy-seven, a ten-percent reduction on a wage that was already barely enough. Workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, stopped the trains on July sixteenth. The walkout spread to Baltimore within two days. On July twenty-sixth, when the Maryland state militia was ordered to clear the tracks at Camden Station, a crowd that contemporary newspapers estimated at fifteen thousand people gathered in the street outside. They were not only railroad workers. They were bakers, iron workers, day laborers, and neighbors. The militia moved into the crowd and opened fire. Contemporary sources recorded deaths in the range of nine to twelve people. Dozens more were wounded.

Governor Carroll requested federal intervention. President Rutherford Hayes ordered the United States Army into Baltimore, the first time in the nation's history that the federal military had been sent to suppress a domestic labor strike. The soldiers arrived within days and the trains moved. The strike collapsed within weeks.

What did not collapse was the question the strike had raised. Twelve years after the Civil War, the nation had established that one man could not own another. It had not yet established what a company could demand of its workers. That question would stay open, and bloody, for another seventy years. The legal and political template for federal strike suppression was built here, at this station, in the summer of eighteen seventy-seven.