Remembering Pittsburgh

by Len Barcousky

  While the loss of life had been great—at least twenty strikers and bystanders and a half-dozen soldiers—the Gazette sought to end rumors of even higher casualties during the weekend of shooting and arson. One report said that fifteen Philadelphia militiamen had burned to death in the railroad roundhouse where they were under attack by rioters during the night of July 21–22. “It was utterly devoid of truth,” the Gazette reported. “Gen. [Robert M.] Brinton said that when he left the roundhouse he took every man with him. It is pretty well understood, though the General did not say so, that some of his men deserted.”

  An April 11, 1877 illustration from Harper’s Weekly shows that only brick chimneys stood after the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

  The next day’s paper had an update on missing militiamen:

  On Saturday evening, after the firing which so inflamed the people, quite a number of [the soldiers] boarded the first passenger train that went East, and when the conductor put them off, they begged and [pleaded] for permission to remain. They escaped detection when the train was searched by the rioters at Twenty-Eighth Street by taking off their coats and sitting in their shirt sleeves. Among the deserters was an officer, who said that if he ever got to Philadelphia alive, he would never again be caught in such a scrape.

  When it wasn’t shooting down rumors in other publications, the Gazette was not above offering its own thinly sourced story. General Alfred L. Pearson, a Civil War hero and former Allegheny County district attorney, had commanded Pittsburgh militia units that had been replaced by what were believed to be more reliable Philadelphia troops. While it was those out-of-town soldiers who had fired on strikers and bystanders, it was Pearson’s home that became a weekend target of the rioters.

  “Mrs. Gen. Pearson was so terrified by the threats of the mob on Saturday and Sunday nights against her husband that her hair is said to have turned white….They also brought a coffin to her, it is said, and swore they intended to kill her husband and place him in it.”

  While the Gazette described most of the victims in a line or two, a few received more attention. “Lieut. Dorsey Ash, of the Keystone Battery and a teller for the First National Bank of Philadelphia, is still…in a very dangerous condition,” the Gazette reported on July 24. “He is badly wounded in the left leg and knee, and is so low that the surgeons hesitate about amputating the limb for fear that the operation will kill him.”

  The next day’s paper contained bad news: Lieutenant Ash had died that afternoon. “His wife and father arrived just in time to see him breathe his last, getting there about five minutes before his decease…his death is one of the saddest events connected with this saddest of all sad periods in the history of Pittsburgh.”

  1881: GOMPERS HELPS WORKERS OF THE U.S. UNITE

  When Samuel Gompers arrived here in November 1881 for a National Labor Congress, the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette was apprehensive. The newspaper warned that as leader of what it saw as “the Socialistic element,” he might fatally divide the labor movement.

  Gompers, the president of the International Cigar Maker’s Union, was thirty-one years old. A union member since age fourteen, he became president of his local at twenty-five. In its November 16 edition, the Commercial Gazette described Gompers “as one of the smartest men present” for the four-day labor meeting. “It is thought that an attempt will be made to capture the organization for Mr. Gompers,” the newspaper reported. “Whether it succeeds or not, there will likely be some lively work as the delegates opposed to Socialism are determined not to be controlled by it. If the Socialists do not have their own way, they may bolt, as they have always done in the past. If they do bolt, the power of the proposed organization will be seriously crippled,” the newspaper warned.

  The fears proved unfounded.

  In his opening remarks, Gompers told the assembled delegates from twelve states that “he had come to Pittsburgh, not to air his opinions but to work, not to build a bubble, but to lay the foundation for a superstructure that would be solid.”

  Gompers maintained his conciliatory attitude the next day when it came time to elect officers for what would be called the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions—a direct ancestor of the American Federation of Labor. When Gompers’s name was proposed as chairman by the labor convention’s organizing committee, he faced immediate opposition. Two rival candidates, Richard Powers, head of the Lake Seamen’s Union, and John Jarrett, president of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, were nominated from the floor.

  “For a time it looked as if the chairmanship would be hotly contested, but Mr. Gompers poured oil on the troubled waters by stating that he was thoroughly devoted to trade unions, and in order to facilitate the work of completing the organization, would withdraw his name,” the Commercial Gazette reported on November 17. “Mr. Powers graciously followed suit, and Mr. Jarrett was unanimously chosen Permanent Chairman.” Gompers and Powers shared the number-two spot.

  Delegates to that first convention, which was held downtown in Turner Hall on Sixth Avenue, passed resolutions that took decades to become law but that now are accepted parts of labor policy. They supported establishment of a standard eight-hour workday, an end to the use of convict labor and a prohibition on factory work for children younger than fourteen.

  One delegate “painted a graphic picture of the misery of the child laborers of the Pacific slope and how they were growing up in ignorance,” the Commercial Gazette reported on November 18. Gompers then described his investigations of young children who spent long days rolling cigars in tenement apartments: “He found little children who were too young to understand any of the questions asked of them, but yet were compelled to work from before daylight until after dark, and [described] how he often found the little ones fast asleep before their work.”

  “Other delegates recounted their experiences…which were pathetic enough to bring tears to most eyes,” the paper said. If those stories “could be published in full, they would form a powerful argument in favor of keeping the little ones out of the work shops and sending them to school where they belong.”

  The convention backed tariffs to protect U.S. manufacturers from goods produced with cheaper foreign labor and regulations to protect U. S. workers from competition from imported foreign contract laborers. Delegates also called for laws that would require employers to care for workers injured in industrial accidents—the idea behind modern workers’ compensation programs. The delegates—perhaps worried about being tarred with a “socialist” brush—voted down a proposal calling for government acquisition and operation of railroads and telegraph companies.

  When the organization formed in Pittsburgh morphed into the American Federation of Labor in 1886, Gompers became its president. He served, except for one year, until his death in 1924.

  He formed an unlikely posthumous connection with one of Pittsburgh’s best-known business figures. The labor leader and Andrew Carnegie both are buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

  1891: DARK, DEADLY DAYS UNDERGROUND

  Some men are just born to suffer bad luck. That’s how the Pittsburgh Press described mine superintendent Fred C. Keighley on its editorial page.

  “This man has been connected…with three serious mine explosions within the last few years,” the newspaper noted on January 30, 1891. “It does not appear that the disasters have occurred through any fault of his, but he has been unfortunate enough to be in charge.”

  The third and most horrific of those calamities took place January 27, 1891, at Henry Clay Frick’s Mammoth Mine in Westmoreland County. “Over 100 miners killed,” the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reported the next day. “Not a Man Is Left Who Can Tell the Cause of the Sudden, Terrific Explosion.”

  Henry Clay Frick, seen in an engraving by J.J. Cade, was the owner of the Mammoth Mine. A total of 107 miners died there in an explosion in 1891. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

&nb
sp; The disaster happened around 9:00 a.m. near Youngwood. The suspected cause was firedamp, the nineteenth-century name for the mixture of methane and other flammable gases that added to the danger of bituminous coal mining. The pocket of gas apparently had been ignited by a worker’s oil lamp. Miners who were not burned to death in the explosion were suffocated by the afterdamp, a deadly mix of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. “Miners, Mules and Cars Packed into a Clotted Mass,” a headline in the January 28 edition of the Gazette said.

  Once the initial fire had been extinguished, about sixty bodies were brought out. Then a new blaze began, and rescue efforts had to be halted for several hours. By noon the next day, 106 bodies had been removed from the mine. The discovery of a final victim raised the death toll to 107.

  Many of the dead miners were buried on January 28 in St. John the Baptist Cemetery in Scottdale. A crowd of about five thousand gathered in the rain for the evening graveside service, according to the Gazette. “This was undoubtedly the saddest day that Scottdale, as well as the entire coke region, has ever witnessed,” the Gazette reported on January 29, the day after the mass burial.

  Pine coffins arrived by train and were loaded onto fifteen horse-drawn wagons. “Three coffins were placed on each wagon,” the Pittsburgh Press reported January 29. “It required all the strength of two horses to get a team through the roads, which already covered for several inches with mud, were made muddier still by a fine, drizzling rain which started to fall about 4 o’clock. The passage from the train to the cemetery was a battle between muscle and mud.”

  “When the first coffins reached the burying ground[,] the men were still at work with pick and shovel.” Workers had dug two parallel trenches, each about 150 feet long. Coffins were placed in rows on wooden boards next to the hastily prepared burial sites. “At the head of the graves the Rev. Father A.M. Lambing took his position….The coffins were placed close to each other. Their headboards, containing the name [of the man in] the box, were stuck into the ground. The early winter night closed in with 100 men at work burying their fellow employees.”

  One, and possibly two, of the victims brought to Scottdale was fated not to rest in peace. The body of “Billy Buchell, No. 26” was sent on to Latrobe for burial there. Another of the “coffins may be removed as the remains are said to be those of a Protestant,” the Press reported. “This was discovered at a late hour.”

  The Mammoth Mine disaster happened seven months after a similar explosion killed thirty-one workers at the Hill Farm Mine near Dunbar, Fayette County. “The Dunbar disaster has been repeated and overshadowed,” the Gazette said.

  The year 1891 was a terrible time to be a coal miner in Pennsylvania. Of the 956 workers who died in coal mining accidents that year, more than two-thirds were killed in this state, according to U.S. Department of the Interior statistics. Things got even worse over the next fifteen years, with 1907 ultimately becoming the deadliest year in U.S. mining history. There were 3,242 deaths that year. Almost half—1,507—happened in Pennsylvania’s hard- and soft-coal mines, according to a 1916 government reported compiled by Albert H. Fay.

  Whatever bad luck accompanied Keighley, he did survive both the Mammoth explosion and threats by surviving workers, “rendered insane by grief,” to hang him. It was to the credit of the “men in the coke region… that they were dissuaded from their cowardly design,” the Press opined. “There are enough horrors already…without adding murder to the list.”

  1894: MR. COXEY GOES TO WASHINGTON

  Allegheny City officials kept close watch on the two hundred or so members of Coxey’s Army when the ragtag band arrived on the North Side on April 3, 1894.

  The group’s formal name was the Commonweal of Christ. Led by businessman Jacob Coxey, the army was headed on foot from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, D.C. Coxey’s goal was to seek congressional support for his plan to issue $500 million in interest-free bonds. Proceeds would be used to pay unemployed men to build roads at a time when the country was in a deep economic depression. “Enthusiastic Crowds Greet the Pilgrims of Poverty,” the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reported on April 4.

  The army was encamped in Exposition Park, a baseball field in what was then the independent City of Allegheny. The ballpark was located on the North Shore between modern-day Heinz Field and PNC Park. While recognizing that they couldn’t stop the marchers from entering Allegheny, municipal leaders did their best to limit their movements once they arrived. Coxey’s second in command, Marshal Carl Browne, had announced a public parade; the city banned it, while police barred sympathetic residents from visiting the camp. The management of Allegheny’s Palace Theater invited marchers to attend a performance, but the men were forbidden to leave the ball field.

  “They have not treated us decently and have penned our men up like a lot of cattle,” another of the army’s marshals told a Gazette reporter in a story that appeared April 5. “But the plan of the leaders was to meet each new order with a new submission and defeat the police by sheer force of meekness.”

  While his army was small, Coxey and Browne knew how to draw and keep a crowd. “Laugh and scoff at the Coxey movement, as many do, and more wish that they could, the scene on the [Monongahela] wharf yesterday afternoon was such as to convince any but the thoughtless that these be times of unrest and discontent with prevalent social conditions,” the Gazette reported. “People came and went, but while the speaking was in progress, they mostly came, until the number of auditors at its maximum was estimated at from 15,000 to 20,000 people.”

  If Allegheny police were hostile, many North Side and Pittsburgh residents gave both attention and supplies to the movement. “Just before the army was ready to move, Marshal Browne announced that a Pittsburgh firm had presented the commonweal with 500 pairs of shoes,” the Gazette reported on April 6. “This was hailed with delight by the almost shoeless marchers.” Volunteers at the front of the army carried a banner on which were written the nineteenth-century equivalent of sound bites: “Pittsburgh and Allegheny…Laws for Americans…More Money, Less Misery…Good Roads…Non-interest Bearing Bonds.”

  “The army could hardly work its way through the crowd around the baseball grounds….When the army arrived at the Point it found the heads of the Pittsburgh police department there to meet it….They were given three cheers and the commonweal moved on.”

  Along Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue, “the crowd…was never grander. All business had been suspended and everybody was out to see the army….The crowd on Smithfield Street was even greater….On the south side the ovation was the same.”

  The army marched in a slight rain to Homestead, a working-class community still demoralized following an unsuccessful strike against Carnegie Steel Co. in 1892. Residents perked up for the arrival of Coxey’s Army. It was met at the edge of town by a cornet band and a welcoming committee of four hundred men. “One of the foremost of the leaders of the escort was William Foy, the second man to be wounded in the battle of the barges on July 6, 1892,” the Gazette reported. That fight was between strikers and Pinkerton detectives, who had arrived at the Homestead Works by barge in the middle of the night.

  It turned out that the army’s warm reception in Pittsburgh and the Monongahela valley was one of the campaign’s high points. The Commonweal of Christ soon splintered following internal battles among its leaders. The march on Washington ended with a whimper on May Day when police prevented Coxey from making a speech on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. The next day he was arrested, charged with trespassing on the grass around the building.

  CHAPTER 6

  CITY WITH A CONSCIENCE

  1859: SPLIT DECISION ON SLAVERY

  Few acts of Congress have so bitterly divided the country as did the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The controversial act strengthened the power of slave owners to recover their “property”—escaped slaves—from free states.

  Federal support for the “peculiar institution” gained additional legal backing from the U.S. Supreme Court’s
decision in the 1857 Dred Scott case. In that ruling, a majority of the justices said that neither Dred Scott, whose master brought him into a state where slavery was outlawed, nor any other black person could be a citizen and, therefore, could not file a lawsuit to challenge enslavement.

  In April 1859, readers of the Daily Pittsburgh Gazette could follow two slavery-related court disputes.

  In the first case, a man faced trial for the second time in Allegheny County, charged with abducting a longtime Pittsburgh resident named G.W. Ferris. G. Shaw—no first name is given in the newspaper—had been convicted a year earlier of having “kidnapped and sold into slavery in Alabama, a man whom everybody assumed to be white,” the Gazette reported on April 7. His conviction was overturned on appeal, because the jury that found him guilty had only eleven members.

  Among the witnesses at Shaw’s retrial was Ferris’s wife. “She is a very respectable looking white woman, and her child is a little cherub,” the Gazette’s reporter wrote. The writer’s descriptions of the Ferris family emphasized their fair skins. Ferris’s four-year-old child had “golden yellow” hair, “hanging in ringlets about its neck.” Mrs. Ferris “testified that she married Ferris in this city, six years ago, and never knew he was a mulatto [of mixed race] until she saw it stated in the newspapers.” At the time of the retrial, she had not seen her husband for two years.

  Shaw’s defense attorney, Marshall Swartzwelder, argued that neither Ferris’s appearance nor his many years of living in freedom in Pittsburgh was relevant. What was important was that he had been born a slave. His most effective witness was Miles Owen, a slave owner from Memphis, Tennessee. Owen told the jury he had owned both Ferris and his mother and later sold him to an Alabama man named George O. Ragland.