The only effective function that the militia has ever carried out has been to shoot workers on behalf of employers.
I did not know when I bought my house in Maryland that my front door is less than a thousand feet from the site where the first combination of militia firepower and modern technology was used to rob and imprison workers.
The Old Main Line of the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road (today CSX) runs along the north bank of the south branch of the Patapsco River. My house is at the top of that ridge. This was the first efficient railroad in the New World.
In spring of 1831, the line was just reaching Sykes Mill (today's Sykesville, although the town was moved to the north side of the river after a flood washed the village away in 1868) about 25 miles from Baltimore. The contractor absconded owing his workers about $11,000; that is, for the entire winter's work. The workers demanded that the company make them whole or they would tear up the work they had done.
The B&O's agent paid over $2,000 in order to get back to Baltimore, where he got a warrant to raise a posse. Only one man (Jerome Bonaparte's ex-father-in-law, as it happened, a director of the railroad) responded. This delegation approached the 135 workers to "negotiate."
Not to pay the men for the work they had done for the railroad. When the men declined to work for free. . . , I will let Edward Hungerford carry the story from there. It's in volume one of his official history "The Story of the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road 1827-1927:
"The time had come for government to show its strong hand. To Brig. Gen. Steuart the sheriff now turned over his warrant, and at 10 o'clock that very evening more than 100 volunteers from the militia boarded a special train bound for Sykes Mill. (This undoubtedly was the first troop movement by train not only on the Baltimore & Ohio but anywhere.) Despite many delays the soldiers reached Sykes Mill at early dawn, found the rioters wholly unprepared for their coming, arrested 50 of them, including Reily, and the trouble was over . . . . A new contractor came in finish Lyon's job. Whether his workmen were ever fully paid is not in the record."
We can be confident and saying that they were not.
Hungerford also does not say that the militia were drunk but you can but they were. The workers, Irish immigrants, were hotheaded but not daft enough to fight it out with hammers against the hundred drunken soldiers armed with bayonets and muskets.
 |
| A riot on the B&O, not the one in 1831, which was not the first and certainly not the last |
Pretty interesting, Harry.
ReplyDeleteBack then, workes were hired with no contract at all? How would it play if they sued in court to get the wages not paid? Or even that concept was alien?
I am not certain what happened in this case. There were elaborate labor contracts associated with, say, apprenticeships, but for casual unskilled labor, I suspect it was then like it was in my youth:
ReplyDeleteSouthern towns had a 'labor bench' where men wanting work would gather. There were no contacts, it was day labor, paid in cash. In the 1830s, where there was a serious shortage of cash, workers likely worked fr subsistence or rations and a promise of a cash payout at the end. (That's how it worked for sailors.)
Small claims courts were not available everywhere (or perhaps anywhere). In America, the law was then and is now only for the rich. Small claims courts are almost useless. That's why the Consumer Products Safety Commission was set pp, and destroyed by the plutocrats.
For wages, the Department of Labor supposedly has power to recover unpaid wages but it does not do much.