For several days armed bands of angry Irish workers had been attacking each other in an effort to drive away labor competition, leaving five killed, scores injured, and canal contractors in fear of a general insurrection. It was the first time — but hardly the last — in American history that federal troops were used to quell a labor dispute. It also brought to light forms of labor protest that originated in the Irish countryside.
Construction on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal began on July 4, 1828. None other than President John Quincy Adams attended the opening ceremonies and turned the first shovel of dirt. As this fanfare suggests, there were high hopes for this massive project that would one day link Washington, D.C., with the Ohio River. Ever since the 373-mile Erie Canal opened in 1825, nearly every state in the Union launched canal projects big and small. The reason was simple: since water transit was (still is today) the fastest and cheapest way to move cargo, a state with an effective canal system reaching the American hinterland would reap enormous economic benefits.
Like most of the antebellum canal, road, and railroad projects, the C&O was built by a predominantly Irish workforce. Most were unskilled workers set to all manner of backbreaking labor. In the days before steam engines, men did all the digging and hauling of rock and earth to excavate the great canal trenches. Typically, this work lasted from sunup to sundown in blistering heat or harsh cold. Cave-ins, explosions, and scaffold collapses were regular affairs that claimed the limbs and lives of countless workers. Most deaths, however, were due to epidemics that swept through the squalid canal camps in the summers. Little wonder, then, that it was often said that the banks of America’s canals were lined with the bones of stricken Irishmen. Not surprisingly, worker unrest was a near constant fact of life along the canal construction line. Indeed, the C&O counted 10 major disturbances from 1834-40.
Because the C&O, like most canal project of this era, was in constant financial distress, these hardened workers had to endure late payment of their meager wages and live in constant fear that the contractor who employed them (more often than not, an Irishman himself) would disappear before paying them months of back wages. When this occurred, or when a contractor went bankrupt, the C&O company denied any responsibility for the back wages and simply brought in a new contractor and work crew. As a result, bitter resentment developed among these competing work crews.
Added to this dynamic was the fact that many contractors hired Irish laborers who hailed from the same parts of Ireland. Two of the most prominent groups called themselves the Corkonians and Fardowners, representing, roughly speaking, Irishmen from the south and north of Ireland, respectively. Despite their common origins, Corkonians and Fardowners came to see each other as competition for their daily bread.
This was the setting for the violence that erupted in early 1834. Many crews had not been paid in months and rumors of fleeing contractors and replacement crews brought passions to the breaking point. One night in late January, two groups of Fardowners and Corkonians attacked each other in an attempt to drive the other off. It was, in the words of one local newspaper, like “guerilla warfare” with armed bands attacking in hit and run style and staging ambushes. In all, five workers were killed and scores more injured.
The source of this Irish-on-Irish violence was the secret society tradition of rural Ireland. Irish tenant farmers had for centuries used extralegal tactics of intimidation, vandalism, and murder to protest landlord abuses (i.e., rent increases and evictions). These were usually carried out by loosely organized groups with names like the Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, or Molly Maguires. They disappeared during times of peace and good harvests, sometimes for decades at a time, but quickly mobilized when injustice loomed. Irish immigrants carried these deep-rooted traditions of extralegal or vigilante justice to the canal zones of America (and later to the coal fields of Pennsylvania under the name Molly Maguires). Because unskilled workers lacked unions and any legal recourse, notes historian Peter Way, they adopted tactics “borrowed from an Irish peasant tradition of secret societies, [that] more often took the shape of physical attacks and riot than union organization and strikes.” In the case of the C&O canal project, Irish workers sought to protect the jobs and back wages by driving off any and all competitors, even if they were fellow Irish immigrants. In such a desperate setting, basic economic considerations trumped any sense of ethnic loyalty.
Recognizing the potentially explosive nature of the conflict, the C&O appealed to both the state of Maryland and Washington, D.C., for help. Immediately the state militia was dispatched to quell the violence. They arrested 35 rioters and restored the peace. President Andrew Jackson, keenly aware of the significance of the C&O canal project, likewise responded by sending federal troops that were stationed along the line to keep the peace. In so doing, Jackson became the first president to use the U. S. Army to suppress labor unrest. It was a sign of things to come as the emerging industrial revolution produced increasingly fractious relations between employers and workers. When the resulting violence reached a critical level, it often resulted in the dispatch of federal troops.
The situation eventually quieted down, largely as a result of the C&O company paying contractors overdue money that in turn allowed the contactors to pay their disgruntled men. But violence would continue to erupt along the canal for years to come, largely at the instigation of the Irish secret societies and always over the same issues of late pay, job competition, and abusive bosses. They stopped work to protest late payment of wages and on occasion destroyed their work in order to punish the company. They also doled out death threats and midnight beatings to abusive bosses and torched company property. Charles Fisk, the chief engineer of the C&O project, complained bitterly of a “tyrannical, secret, party organization, which for the past two years has been entirely beyond the reach of all law, all authority.” Some contractors tried to bring in German laborers to replace the Irish, but this brought a predictable response.
Finally, in August of 1839, after a band of Irish workers attacked a camp of Germans, Fisk had seen enough. The state militia was called out and it swooped down on the canal, arresting scores of suspected rioters and destroying dozens of Irish workers’ housing in an attempt to drive them off. In the ensuing trials (aided by an Irishman James Finney, hired by Fisk to spy on the workers) 36 workers were convicted and sent to jail for terms as long as 18 years. This time, the peace held. Construction on the C&O canal ceased in 1850 when it reached Cumberland, Md., far short of its original goal of the Ohio River. By that time the railroad was emerging as the superior mode of transportation.
HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK
Jan. 28, 1986: 73 seconds after launch, the space shuttle Challenger explodes, killing seven astronauts, including school teacher Christa Corrigan McAuliffe.
Jan. 30, 1972: Thirteen unarmed civil rights marchers were shot to death by British soldiers in Northern Ireland in the massacre known as “Bloody Sunday.”
HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES
Jan. 28, 1760: journalist and publisher Matthew Carey is born in Dublin.
Jan. 29, 1843: the 25th U.S. president, William McKinley, is born in Niles, Ohio.