Release date is 2025-11-22

Richard Tonsing, Carla Foust, Turgut Dincer, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

"Annals of the great strikes in the United States" by J. A. Dacus is a historical account written in the late 19th century. The work examines the causes, spread, and suppression of the nationwide labor upheavals of 1877, especially the railroad strikes, riots, and official responses. Mixing narrative reportage with commentary on capital–labor relations and radical movements, it aims to record events while arguing for law and order. It will interest readers of American labor history and those curious about how business, workers, and government collided in a national crisis.

The opening of the work frames the 1877 strikes as an epoch-making, largely spontaneous uprising that tested American self-government, then states the author’s aim to compile a reliable, fact-checked record. It launches with an essay on capital and labor, warning that cheap wages imperil social order, urging broader prosperity, and criticizing railroad magnates and “watered stock,” while identifying wage cuts as the immediate spark. The narrative then traces how a 10 percent reduction on the Baltimore and Ohio triggered walkouts at Camden Junction and Martinsburg, where trains were halted, militia proved unreliable, and the governor appealed to the president, who issued a proclamation and sent regular troops under General French. Despite federal protection, crews refused to run trains, the strike spread to other towns, and crowds of sympathizers, canal-boatmen, and tramps swelled the unrest. In Baltimore, rising tension, incendiary meetings by radical groups, and mass gatherings led authorities to keep militia in the city; as troops marched toward Camden Station, mobs stoned them and the soldiers fired volleys, leaving dead and wounded and plunging the city into a night of terror. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Chicago: L.T. Palmer, 1877