But these occurrences fade into insignificance when compared with the destructive effects of the strike on the Pennsylvania in and around Pittsburgh.  The situation there was aggravated by a hatred of the Pennsylvania railway corporation shared by nearly all residents on the ground of an alleged rate discrimination against the city.  The Pittsburgh militia fraternized with the strikers, and when 600 troops which arrived from Philadelphia attempted to restore order and killed about twenty rioters, they were besieged in a roundhouse by a furious mob.  In the battle the railway yards were set on fire.  Damages amounting to about $5,000,000 were caused.  The besieged militia men finally gained egress and retreated fighting rear-guard actions.  At last order was restored by patrols of citizens.  The strike spread also to the Erie railway and caused disturbances in several places, but not nearly of the same serious nature as on the Baltimore & Ohio and the Pennsylvania.  The other places to which the strike spread were Toledo, Louisville, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

The strikes failed in every case but their moral effect was enormous.  The general public still retained a fresh memory of the Commune of Paris of 1871 and feared for the foundations of the established order.  The wage earners, on the other hand, felt that the strikers had not been fairly dealt with.  It was on this intense labor discontent that the greenback agitation fed and grew.

Whereas in 1876 the greenback labor vote was negligible, notwithstanding the exhortations by many of the former trade union leaders who turned greenback agitators, now, following the great strikes, greenbackism became primarily a labor movement.  Local Greenback-Labor parties were being organized everywhere and a national Greenback-Labor party was not far behind in forming.  The continued industrial depression was a decisive factor, the winter of 1877-1878 marking perhaps the point of its greatest intensity.  Naturally the greenback movement was growing apace.  One of the notable successes in the spring of 1878 was the election of Terence V. Powderly, later Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, as mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The Congressional election in the autumn of 1878 marked the zenith of the movement.  The aggregate greenback vote cast in the election exceeded a million, and fourteen Representatives were sent to Congress.  In New England the movement was strong enough to poll almost a third of the total vote in Maine, over 8 percent of the total vote in both Connecticut and New Hampshire, and from 4 to 6 percent, in the other States.  In Maine the greenbackers elected 32 members of the upper house and 151 members of the lower house and one Congressman, Thompson Murch of Rochland, who was secretary of the National Granite Cutters’ Union.  However, the bulk of the vote in that State was obviously agricultural.  In Massachusetts, the situation was dominated by General Benjamin F. Butler, lifelong Republican politician, who had succeeded in getting the Democratic nomination for governor and was endorsed by the Greenback convention.  He received a large vote but was defeated for office.