1834: Andrew Jackson, Strikebreaker

Andrew Jackson, U.S. President from 1829-1837.

In 1828, construction was begun on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, a canal proposed to bring coal from the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania to the capitol at Washington, D.C. The C&O Canal company was the builder and faced both engineering and human challenges in constructing the canal. The work involved digging, excavating and building in wet conditions for hours, days and months on end, enduring miserable living conditions both on and off the job. A cholera outbreak in 1832 drove workers away by hundreds. With such conditions, few workers with other options wanted to do the miserable work, and recent Irish immigrants became the bulk of the workers.

In late January 1834, as rumors spread that the C&O Canal company was going bankrupt and might halt work, groups of Irish workers organized to protest, and then fought with each other, each hoping to drive the other away from the work and monopolize it for themselves. On two separate occasions small scale battles between the workers ensued that temporarily stopped work. Local sheriffs organized militias to address what they called riots, but when more bouts of fighting erupted, the C&O Canal company and the Maryland legislature requested that the federal government send troops to quell the disorders.

In response to this request, on January 29, President Andrew Jackson became the first U.S. President to directly use federal troops to help stifle labor agitation, or, as he called it, “the riotous assembly.” He sent two companies of troops, just short of 100 men, to the site of construction to deter further conflict. Although they did not use violence directly to achieve their ends, they remained camped at the construction area throughout the spring to ensure that work continued with no further disruptions, in effect suppressing worker unrest and deterring any further worker rebelliousness.

Although conflicts between Irish workers and workers of other ethnic groups, as well as conflicts between different groups of Irish workers themselves were real and often led to serious violence, these were not the primary causes of Jackson’s 1834 action. In fact, the mostly Irish workers were struggling to make sure they were paid regularly for their work, and were at the same time struggling to maintain their version of a closed shop in which they could demand livable wages and dignified treatment. They worked to do so by organizing in what have often been called secret societies, often brought over with them from Ireland. These organizations did often undergo conflicts with other Irish and other workers, but their activities must be viewed within the context of a larger conflict with the bosses, in this case the owners of the C&O Canal. In this situation, thousands of poor workers felt compelled to compete with each other for crumbs offered to them by the owners, and violence was often turned toward other workers rather than the people above who exploited them all. Their attempts to either fight off other ethnic groups or discipline their fellow workers into collectively standing up for their rights can be likened to an informal form of union activity designed to protect their very economic survival.

The capitalists in the regions wher these organizations operated were well aware of both their potential for violence and lawbreaking, but also their effectiveness in helping workers. One engineer on the canal project wrote that these organizations had been effective “in keeping up the high price of labor on our canal…” and in maintaining “an inferior quality of workmen.” In other words, they had protected workers at least to some degree, and forced employers to pay higher wages than they would have otherwise. “Riotous” violence aside, the bosses wanted them controlled or gone for purely economic reasons.  

In order to counter these worker organizations, bosses did everything possible to encourage rivalry between different ethnic groups and between different groupings of workers, even if most were Irish. Sometimes they brought in workers of another ethnic group just to threaten workers already employed, sometimes they played groups off of one another directly by stimulating competitions to see who could get the most work done or work most efficiently, and sometimes they directly instigated violence between competing groups of workers. And when those tactics weren’t enough, they called on local and state officials for help. When local and state militias weren’t enough, they then called for federal support from Jackson.

By sending federal troops to suppress workers, Jackson set the precedent of bringing federal military might to bear not on behalf of the workers, who he always claimed to represent, but on behalf of the bosses. That is because, despite his rhetoric, Jackson himself was one of those bosses whose profit and place in society were built on the backs of slaves and workers. Although he claimed to be a man of the people, he was of course a major slaveholder, whose plantation slaves produced commodities for profit, in this case cotton. He and those like him were integral members of the capitalist economy of the time, and their wealth and power came through exploitation of immigrant and native born workers, the slaves they owned, and their violent suppression of all of them.

Jackson was also influenced by one of his closest friends and chief advisors, John Eaton, who was also the president of C&O Canal company! In a letter to the directors of his company, Eaton was crystal clear in his rationale for why federal troops were needed to advance their goals. He admitted that the company “cannot meet our fiscal engagements,” and that it may need to terminate construction, laying off the workers. He then wrote, in a textbook statement of how capitalists use the government in their battle against their workers, that,

The turning off from the works of any large number of hands, must necessarily bring about riotous feeling; and even more riotous action. While the U.S. troops are in the neighborhood, a dismissal may be made without these apprehensions. Consider then, if prudence should not prompt to the discharge of every one who has been engaged in this recent riot: the tendency may be, and no doubt will be, to restrain all such lawless conduct in the future.

In other words, get federal troops on site, fire workers and force the rest to work at gunpoint, knowing that the message has been sent that federal troops will back the company up with force if necessary. In this way, Jackson’s action on January 29, 1834 is the first example of a U.S. president directly intervening to suppress a strike of working people.

It would of course not be the last. Presidents ordered federal troops to intervene in and crush nationwide railroad strikes in both 1877 and 1894; in 1921 thousands of troops were used to crush a coal miners strike in West Virginia; in 1981 President Ronald Reagan crushed a strike of air traffic controllers by firing nearly 13,000; and in 2022 President Joe Biden and Congress passed a resolution preemptively banning railway workers from striking. This list doesn’t include many smaller interventions, or those conducted against workers by state governments using National Guards from those states to end strikes.

As we look to the near future, we should note that it is no coincidence that Donald Trump had a painting of Andrew Jackson hung in the oval office during his first term as president. He too is a boss who has maintained his wealth and status through exploitation of workers. Although Trump, like Jackson, will pretend that he cares about or supports “American workers,” we can also expect that, when push comes to shove, he too will do everything possible to stifle the potential power of workers before they can ever threaten the wealth and power that he and his fellow billionaires have taken from our hard work. Just as Andrew Jackson did in 1834.

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