Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

black workers to take the place of strikers. Th
  e more far-seeing and 
enlightened labor organizers had urged that blacks be welcomed 
and organized, too, but it took time for formal recognition to be 
translated into practical action.
133
Th
  e new president, Rutherford B. Hayes, noted in his diary that 
the 1877 strike had been suppressed “by force.” Grant, the man he 
replaced, was vacationing in Europe—he found these proceedings 
“a little queer.” During his own administration, Grant noted, the 
entire Democratic Party and “the morbidly honest and ‘reforma-
tory’ portion of the Republicans had thought it ‘horrible’ to employ 
Federal troops ‘to protect the lives of negroes.’ Now, however, there 
is no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the govern-
ment to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger 
threatened.”
134
By the 1880s there were 30,000 Pinkerton men, making them 
a larger force than the Army of the Republic. Th
  e latter’s strength 
had dropped to less than 27,000, with those soldiers not in the 
West reduced to strikebreaking roles. By 1877 the Democrats were 
calling for Army strength to be further reduced to no more than 
20,000. Th
  e robber barons of the North and West and the planters 
of the South had found brutally eff ective ways to cow the direct 
producers. Both distrusted the Army and both hated the Federal 
taxing power. Th
  e steep reductions in the Federal military establish-
ment refl ected both an economy drive and the conviction of some 
that an Army that stemmed from the Civil War and Reconstruction 
was not well adapted to enforcing labor discipline. 
An unsavory alliance of politicos and robber barons had beaten 
the rail workers into submission, but this was just the start of two 
decades of large-scale clashes. From actions by the Illinois and 
Pennsylvania dockers, lumbermen, miners, and steelworkers of the 
1880s to the Pullman and Homestead strikes of the 1890s, the 
United States was shaken by epic and desperate industrial strug-
gles. Th
  ese battles involved tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands 
of workers and had no equal in Europe. In the great battles of 
the 1880s and 1890s, hundreds of strikers were killed, thousands 
133 Gutman, 
Work, Culture and Society, pp. 131–208.
134  Quoted in Foner’s Reconstruction, p. 586.
82  an unfinished revolution

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imprisoned, and tens of thousands blacklisted. Th
 ese grueling labor 
battles sometimes seemed like a civilian echo of the Civil War, with 
the strikers cast as copperheads, or even rebels, and the army, police, 
and deputy marshals as the loyalists. Th
  e Republicans, encouraged 
by Unionist veterans organizations like the GAR, sought to retain 
the support of their followers by voting pensions for veterans. Black 
veterans also qualifi ed. Th
  anks to this, by 1914 the US provision 
for public pensions was larger than Germany’s, but it was destined 
steadily to diminish as the old soldiers died. Th
  is was a sectional 
welfare state; the Southern authorities did not have the resources to 
match it on behalf of Confederate veterans.
135
 
Stephen Skowronek describes the closing decades of the nine-
teenth century as the epoch of the “patchwork state” and emphasizes 
the role of labor struggles in shaping its peculiar formation.
136
 Th
 e 
antebellum regime had defended plantations without regulating 
them; the postbellum regime did similar service for the new corpo-
rations. It is sometimes believed that the Civil War, whatever else it 
did—or did not do—at least modernized and strengthened the US 
Federal state. But the authority of the state remained very uneven, 
the civilian administration was in hock to party placemen, and the 
legislatures were in league with the money power. Th
 ese features 
had survived the war and been intensifi ed by Reconstruction and 
its overturning. Th
  e frustration of “bourgeois” revolution brought 
no gain to Northern workers or Southern freedmen.
DEFEAT AND TRIUMPH FOR 
AMERICAN WORKERS 
Th
  e double defeat of Reconstruction had suppressed black rights 
in the South and curtailed labor rights in the North. Jim Crow in 
the South and the widespread use of Pinkerton’s men and other 
goons in the North were both victories for privatized violence and 
a minimal view of the state. Th
  ey were a defeat for the republican 
135 Th
 eda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: the Political Origins of 
Social Security, Cambridge, MA, 1992.
136 Stephen 
Skowronek, 
Building a New American State: the Expansion of 
National Administrative Capacities, Cambridge 1982, pp. 38–84.
introduction  83

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ideal of a unifi ed and responsible federal authority. It was most par-
ticularly a defeat for Lincoln’s idea that the rule of law should be the 
“political religion” of all Americans. 
Th
  ere was orchestrated violence in the North, but it was put into 
the shade by Jim Crow. During the years 1884–1899, between 107 
and 241 African Americans were murdered each year by lynch 
mobs, with total victims numbering more than 3,000. Lynchings 
were concentrated in the South and a great majority of the vic-
tims were black, but they were not unknown elsewhere and they 
sometimes targeted white labor organizers, Chinese, and Mexicans. 
Along the Mexican border dozens of Hispanics were lynched dur-
ing these years. And there were also lynchings of whites in other 
parts of the Union, especially the “wild” West.
137
 Th
 e intensifi cation 
of Jim Crow in the South was accompanied by the spread of oner-
ous, if less extreme, practices of racial exclusion in other sections, 
aff ecting residence, employment, and education.
138
 
Th
  e freed people of the South and the labor organizers of the 
North not only faced physical threats but also found their attempts 
to organize and negotiate assaulted in the name of the same con-
servative strain in free labor ideology—that which construed 
any regulation or combination as a violation of “freedom of con-
tract.” Th
  e Republicans and Democrats deferred to this doctrine 
and the Supreme Court codifi ed  it. Th
  ese rulings pulverized the 
workers and sharecroppers, leaving them to negotiate only as 
individuals.
Without a political order capable of regulating the employers, the 
case for a social democratic party was more diffi
  cult to make, and to 
some a syndicalist perspective seemed more realistic. Another obsta-
cle to proposals for a labor party was the fact that the federal state 
was fi scally hamstrung, rendering impractical projects for a welfare 
state. Th
  e Union’s vast Civil War outlays had been met in part, as 
137 Joel Williamson, Th e Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the 
American South Since Emancipation, Oxford 1984, pp. 117–8, 185–9; Ida B. 
Wells-Barnet,  On Lynchings, with an introduction by Patricia Hill Collins, 
New York 2002 (fi rst ed. 1892), pp. 201–2.
138  Desmond King and Stephen Tuck, “De-Centering the South: America’s 
Nationwide White Supremacist Order After Reconstruction,” Past and Present, 
February 2007, pp. 213–53.
84  an unfinished revolution

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