Last updated: February 13, 2025
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The Knights of Labor: Strikes of 1885 and 1886
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In the decades after the Civil War during Reconstruction, the United States began to rapidly industrialize. Beginning in the late 1860s, laborers – many of them Civil War veterans - began to organize labor unions. One of the most prominent unions that emerged during this time was the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 in Philadelphia.
In 1885, members of the Knights of Labor went out on strike against railroad financier Jay Gould and won. Their success helped balloon the organization’s membership from 110,000 in 1885 to 720,000 by July 1886. That year, 200,000 Knights went out on strike, first along the Texas & Pacific Railroad, and then along the whole Southwest system across five states (Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri). The Great Southwest Strike, as it came to be known, would spell the end for the Knights of Labor and a move away from broad-based labor organizing across trades, races, and gender.
Unlike many of the United States’ early labor organizations, the Knights were not craft exclusive. They organized railroaders, garment workers, teamsters, and factory workers, all under the same organization. The Knights also organized across racial and gender lines, something no other labor organization of the 19th century set out to do. The ideology of the Knights supposed that anyone who was a “producer” (i.e. those who lived off their own labor) could join, embracing a broad coalition of wage and non-wage “producers.” Despite this, the Knights still trafficked in nativist sentiment against Italians, Hungarians, and Finns, but especially directed at Chinese workers in the West, who were viewed as tools of the corporations.
The Knights’ 1885 strike along the Wabash line in the Midwest was successful because of the support of the various railroad brotherhoods, representing firemen, brakemen, conductors, and engineers, as well as the support of communities along the railroad. Railroad communities came to identify with the struggle of the railroaders rather than the railroads and their owners, like Jay Gould. The agreements that came out of that strike restored the level of wages to those paid in September 1884 and that the striking employees would be allowed to return to their employment “without prejudice to them on account of said strike.”
At the end of 1885, the Texas & Pacific Railway, owned by Jay Gould, became insolvent and was put into receivership by federal courts in January 1886. Receivership allows a business to operate even after it has become insolvent, under the direction of federal court appointed receivers. Railroads in receivership “claimed the right to abrogate labor agreements and to appeal to the courts for the armed force to combat strikes that resulted.” As Jay Gould would tell national leader of the Knights, Terrence Powderly, any strike against the Texas & Pacific would be a “contest not between your order and me, but between your order and the laws of the land.”
The inciting incident of the Great Southwest Strike was the firing of a Knights member named C.A. Hall in Marshall, Texas on February 18, 1886. Hall was, according to the Knights, fired for attending a meeting of Knights District Assembly (DA) 101 on company time. Martin Irons, chairman of DA 101, met with citizens in Marshall, Texas, to plead his case, saying “the strike was not in the interest of one man, but for a principal involved; that the contract between the employee and the railroad made one year ago had been violated; that the contract was that no man should be discharged without due notice and investigation.” On March 1st, 1886, “the shopmen at Marshall laid down their tools and went out in a body,” inaugurating “the greatest and most memorable railroad strike in the history of the United States.” The strike that began in March of 1886 became known as The Great Southwest Strike of 1886.
Soon the strike spread to the whole of the Southwest System, as Knights attempted to redress grievances that extended beyond just the Texas & Pacific and to other Gould-owned lines. Unlike the strikes of 1885, the Knights did not have the support of the railroad brotherhoods which represented the workers who actually ran the trains. Without their support, the trains could continue to run on time and the Knights on strike could be replaced. In response, Knights began to sabotage train engines and occupy repair buildings, immobilizing trains and bringing Knights into conflict with other railroad unions.
While the Knights did enjoy some amount of sympathy strikes from members of the railroad brotherhoods, that support evaporated in the face of a leadership that saw no reason to strike with the Knights in 1886. As the support of trainmen evaporated, striking Knights resorted to use of force to stop trains from moving, alienating the communities around them. Pitched battles ensued between strikebreakers and armed guards deputized by federal courts against strikers. By the end of March, injunctions were issued by federal courts in Missouri, ordering strikers to vacate railroad property and bringing the full weight of the federal government to bear on the strikers. By April, the strike was doomed.
The Great Southwest strike failed not only in addressing grievances of Knights along the Texas & Pacific, but it also invalidated the agreement that Knights of Labor and the Missouri & Pacific struck in 1885. The governors of Kansas and Missouri (who had encouraged negotiation in 1885) ruled that the strike along the Missouri Pacific did not have any legal basis, as the company had not violated the agreement and that the strike itself had relieved the Missouri Pacific of its 1885 obligations. The Knights of Labor had suffered a massive defeat in the Great Southwest Strike, and the organization began to unravel shortly afterwards.
When the Knights of DA 101 in Marshall, TX decided to strike out in March of 1886, they did not know the fight that was ahead of them. The transfer of ownership of the Texas & Pacific from the Missouri Pacific Railroad to the US courts via receivership brought to bear forces which the Knights simply could not contend with. The use of injunctions to break up the strikes foreshadowed how the federal government would respond to future labor unrest, like in the Pullman Strike of 1894.
References
Missouri Bureau of Labor Statistics and Inspection. The Official History of the Great Strike of 1886 on the Southwestern Railway System. (Jefferson City, MO: Tribune Printing Company, 1886.)
White, Richard. The Oxford History of the United States: The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896. (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2017)