seventies because it now meant to them primarily currency inflation and
a rise of prices and, consequently, industrial prosperity--not the
phantastic scheme of the National Labor Union. Yet in the Presidential
election of 1876 the Greenback party candidate, Peter Cooper, the well
known manufacturer and philanthropist, drew only a poor 100,000, which
came practically from the rural districts only. It was not until the
great strikes of 1877 had brought in their train a political labor
upheaval that the greenback movement assumed a formidable form.

The strikes of 1877, which on account of the wide area affected, the
degree of violence displayed, and the amount of life and property lost,
impressed contemporaries as being nothing short of social revolution,
were precipitated by a general ten percent reduction in wages on the
three trunk lines running West, the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore & Ohio,
and the New York Central, in June and July 1877. This reduction came on
top of an earlier ten percent reduction after the panic. The railway men
were practically unorganized so that the steadying influence of previous
organization was totally lacking in the critical situation of unrest
which the newly announced wage reduction created. One must take also
into account that in the four terrible years which elapsed since the
panic, America had developed a new type of a man--the tramp--who
naturally gravitated towards places where trouble was expected.

The first outbreak occurred at Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 17,
the day after the ten percent reduction had gone into effect. The
strike spread like wildfire over the adjacent sections of the Baltimore
& Ohio road, the strikers assuming absolute control at many points. The
militia was either unwilling or powerless to cope with the violence. In
Baltimore, where in the interest of public safety all the freight trains
had stopped running, two companies of militia were beleaguered by a mob