The entire Strike Committee was then arrested for treason against the state, but no jury would convict them. Strike leaders were charged with murder 160 other strikers were tried for other crimes. Now the state went into action: the governor brought in the militia, armed with the latest rifles and Gatling guns, to protect the import of strikebreakers. For the next several days the strikers were in command of the area. They were attacked from all sides, voted to surrender, and then were beaten by the enraged crowd. ![]() The Pinkertons had to retreat onto the barges. In the gunfire that followed on both sides, seven workers were killed. A striker lay down on the gangplank, and when a Pinkerton man tried to shove him aside, he fired, wounding the detective in the thigh. The crowd warned the Pinkertons not to step off the barge. On the night of July 5, 1892, hundreds of Pinkerton guards boarded barges 5 miles down the river from Homestead and moved toward the plant, where ten thousand strikers and sympathizers waited. A committee of strikers took over the town, and the sheriff was unable to raise a posse among local people against them. The plant was on the Monongahela River, and a thousand pickets began patrolling a 10-mile stretch of the river. The Pinkerton detective agency was hired to protect strikebreakers.Īlthough only 750 of the 3,800 workers at Homestead belonged to the union, three thousand workers met in the Opera House and voted overwhelmingly to strike. When the workers did not accept the pay cut, Frick laid off the entire work force. He built a fence 3 miles long and 12 feet high around the steelworks and topped it with barbed wire, adding peepholes for rifles. Frick decided to reduce the workers’ wages and break their union. ![]() In early 1892, the Carnegie Steel plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh, was being managed by Henry Clay Frick while Carnegie was in Europe. As explained by Howard Zinn in Chapter 11 of A People’s History of the United States: Carnegie Steel was engaged in an all out campaign to break the steelworkers union. On July 6, 1892, there was a major pitched battle during the Homestead Strike between the Pinkerton Detective Agency and the striking steelworkers. The Pinkerton men leaving the barges after the surrender.
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