Illinois Central Railroad

Judah P. Benjamin, a founder of the Illinois Central Railroad, a state legislator, and a planter who owned one hundred and forty slaves until he sold his plantation in 1850, has served as a U.S. Senator from Louisiana since 1852.

Born to English Jewish parents in the British West Indies and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, he is one of the first senators to call for Southern secession in the wake of Lincoln's victory.

Speaking in December 1860 of the South's determination to secede, Benjamin says “It is a revolution and it can no more be checked by human effort...than a prairie fire by a gardener's watering pot.”

A bitter antagonism between workers and the leaders of industry had developed in the wake of the Panic of 1873.

By 1877, ten per cent wage cuts, distrust of capitalists and poor working conditions lead to a number of railroad strikes that prevents the trains from moving.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 starts on July 14 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in response to the cutting of wages for the second time in a year by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O).

Striking workers will not allow any of the stock to roll until this second wage cut is revoked.

The governor sends in state militia units to restore train service, but the soldiers refuse to use force against the strikers and the governor calls for federal troops.

The railroad strike meanwhile spreads to Cumberland, Maryland, stopping freight and passenger traffic.

When Governor John Carroll of Maryland directs the 5th and 6th Regiments of the National Guard to put down the strike, ...

...the militia attacks and kills citizens from Baltimore, which results in the strikers and onlookers to retaliate, attacking the troops in turn as they march from their armories towards B&O's Camden Station for the train to Cumberland, causing violent street battles between the striking workers and the Maryland militia.

When the outnumbered troops of the 6th Regiment fire on an attacking crowd, they kill ten and wound twenty-five.

The rioters injures several members of the militia, damage engines and train cars, and burn portions of the train station.

On July 21–22, the President sends federal troops and Marines to Baltimore to restore order.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania becomes the site of the worst violence.

Thomas Alexander Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, often considered one of the first robber barons, suggests that the strikers should be given "a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread."

However, local law enforcement officers refuse to fire on the strikers.

Nonetheless, his request comes to pass on July 21, when militiamen bayonet and fire on rock-throwing strikers, killing twenty people and wounding twenty-nine others.

Rather than quell the uprising however, this action merely infuriates the strikers, who then force the militiamen to take refuge in a railroad roundhouse, and then set fires that raze thirty-nine buildings and destroy one hundred and four locomotives and twelve hundred and forty-five freight and passenger cars.

On July 22, the militiamen mount an assault on the strikers, shooting their way out of the roundhouse and killing twenty more people on their way out of the city.

Philadelphia strikers, three hundred miles to the east, battle local militia and set fire to much of Center City before federal troops intervene and put down the uprising.

Pennsylvania's third major industrial city at this time, Reading, whose forty thousand citizens lie tightly but restively in the economic grip of Franklin B. Gowen, is also hit by the Strike's fury.

The city's commercial pace depends heavily on the movement of Gowen's Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the activity of Gowen's Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company.

The railroad alone employs some fifteen hundred in the city.

On the surface, Reading appears an unlikely place for industrial unrest.

Ninety percent of the residents are native born and almost all the rest are German.

This city is home of the engine works and shops of its namesake Reading Railroad, against which engineers had already been on strike since April 1877.

Sixteen citizens are shot by state militia in the Reading Railroad Massacre.

Preludes to the massacre include: fresh work stoppage all classes of the railroad's local workforce; mass marches; blocking of rail traffic; trainyard arson; and the burning down of the bridge providing this railroad's only link to the west—to prevent local militia from being mustered to Harrisburg or Pittsburgh.

The militia responsible for the shootings had been mobilized by Reading Railroad management, not by local public officials.

One thousand men and boys, many of them coal miners, march to the Reading Railroad Depot in Shamokin, Pennsylvania on July 25, in what becomes known as the 1877 Shamokin Uprising.

They loot the depot when the town announces it will only pay them a dollar a day for emergency public employment.

The mayor, who owns coal mines, forms a vigilante group that is responsible for two out of fourteen civilian shooting casualties.

Edward H. Harriman has gained control of about sixty thousand (ninety-six thousand) miles of track by 1899.

His operations over the past two decades have involved the Illinois Central, the Union Pacific, the Central and Southern Pacific, and the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company.