At Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 16, 1877, angry laborers struck the B & O Railroad because of a 10 percent wage cut. Spontaneous strikes soon choked railroad service from Baltimore to St. Louis and from Buffalo to Louisville. The violent wave of discontent developed into the country's first national labor crisis. The use of federal troops to restore order was only one of many decisions--sometimes blundering or biased, sometimes enlightened--the government would make during the next twenty years in coping with railway strikes. Not until the defeat of the Pullman Strike in 1894 did...