hia attempted to restore order and killed
about twenty rioters, they were besieged in a roundhouse by a furious
mob. In the battle the railway yards were set on fire. Damages amounting
to about $5,000,000 were caused. The besieged militia men finally gained
egress and retreated fighting rear-guard actions. At last order was
restored by patrols of citizens. The strike spread also to the Erie
railway and caused disturbances in several places, but not nearly of the
same serious nature as on the Baltimore & Ohio and the Pennsylvania. The
other places to which the strike spread were Toledo, Louisville,
Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

The strikes failed in every case but their moral effect was enormous.
The general public still retained a fresh memory of the Commune of Paris
of 1871 and feared for the foundations of the established order. The
wage earners, on the other hand, felt that the strikers had not been
fairly dealt with. It was on this intense labor discontent that the
greenback agitation fed and grew.

Whereas in 1876 the greenback labor vote was negligible, notwithstanding
the exhortations by many of the former trade union leaders who turned
greenback agitators, now, following the great strikes, greenbackism
became primarily a labor movement. Local Greenback-Labor parties were
being organized everywhere and a national Greenback-Labor party was not
far behind in forming. The continued industrial depression was a
decisive factor, the winter of 1877-1878 marking perhaps the point of
its greatest intensity. Naturally the greenback movement was growing
apace. One of the notable successes in the spring of 1878 was the
election of Terence V. Powderly, later Grand Master Workman of the
Knights of Labor, as mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The Congressional election in the autumn of 1878 marked the zenith of
the movement. The aggregate greenback vote cast in the election exceeded
a million, and fourteen Representatives were sent to Congress. In New
England the movement was strong enough to poll almost a third of the
total vote in Maine, over 8 percent of the total vote in both
Connecticut and New Hampshire, and from 4 to 6 percent, in the other
States. In Maine the greenbackers elected 32 members of the upper house
and 151 members of the lower house and one Congressman, Thompson Murch
of Rochland, who was secretary of the National Granite Cutters' Union.
However, the bulk of the vote in that State was obviously ag