In 1873, on the eve of the financial panic, the national trade unions attempted to reconstruct a national labor federation on a purely trade-union basis in the form of a National Industrial Congress.  But the economic disaster of the panic nipped it in the bud just as it cut off the life of the overwhelming majority of the existing labor organizations.  Another attempt to get together on a national basis was made in the National Labor Congress at Pittsburgh in 1876.  But those who responded were not interested in trade unionism and, mirroring the prevailing labor sentiment during the long years of depressions, had only politics on their mind, greenback or socialist.  As neither greenbacker nor socialist would meet the other half-way, the attempt naturally came to naught.

Greenbackism was popular with the working people during the depressed 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 to prevent their being dispatched to Cumberland, where the strikers were in control.  Order was restored only when Federal troops arrived.