Labor Violence and a Peace Agreement

The B&O assigned company managers to supervise each section of the railroad’s Second Division. The cuts through these ridges would be made by hand using hundreds of workers doing the hard labor with their picks and shovels. These unskilled labor jobs were difficult and usually didn’t pay well and the competition for jobs was fierce. Due to the timing some of the work on these cuts had to be done at the same time and the groups of workers – most of them Irish - in the different sections didn’t always like one another, or the managers. The workers were housed in shanties within camps and the managers and their assistants, called supervisors, lived among them to ensure productivity and peace.

Labor conflicts grew in the 1830s with the need for a lot of unskilled laborers to build the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to Ohio. Irish Catholic immigrants who came to the US from Ireland to escape their lower-class status, by law and practice in their homeland, were a primary labor source. They were used to fighting for the few jobs available to them to support their families and sometimes those fights were violent and those tendencies transferred to their new homeland.

Corkonians and Fardowners

Conflicts between two Irish Catholic factions were common – the “Corkonians” from southern Ireland (centered around Cork County) and the “Fardowners” (sometimes called Connaught men or Fardowns) from the middle of Ireland. The origin of the term Fardowns has yet to be settled but was discussed at length by Perry as well as the complications of these conflicts (2013). This violence was between two groups of immigrants from the same country but different geographies, and it was for employment and wages, not religious or political differences. The topic of Irish immigrant labor and the causes for violence is a topic that has been well-researched and documented.

The Irish immigrant workers on the B&O were generally unskilled and not qualified for the more technical jobs and competed for labor jobs building the canals and railroads. The competition grew fierce as it meant providing for themselves and their families and violence broke out all too often over employment disputes. The worst of the violence on the railroads occurred in the camps here in Howard County.

In June 1834, the Corkonians and Fardowners under the supervision of Jonathan Jessop and John Watson had violent disputes among one another that erupted on Sunday June 15th. The newspapers wrote about the “Riot on the Washington Rail Road” where 4 rioters were killed, several injured along with some of the worker’s shanties destroyed. Among the first on the scene to quell the violence was a group of workers from the Savage Factory under the command of Horace Capron, manager of the Savage Cotton Mills, followed by Major Finely, under the command of General Charles S. Ridgely, with infantry and riflemen. The violence was limited to within the Irish laborers with the exception of a worker who fired his weapon at General Ridgely and was promptly killed.

Peace Agreement

It was reported that an “treaty of peace” through an agreement was reached among the parties on June 24th by fourteen of the men working for Watson (4th and 5th Sections of 2ndDivision) and thirteen men working for Jessop (sometimes called then the 8thSection of 1st Division but later B&O documents have it as the 1 Section of the 2nd Division). These 17 men represented all of the workers. This peace seemed to last but one more bout of violence would occur in November of that year in Watson’s Section.