Armed confrontations between state militias and infuriated railroad workers and their legions of sympathizers broke out in cities and towns across the country. The Great Railroad Strike, as it came to be known, was an upheaval of extraordinary violence sparked by an astonishing act of collusion and callousness: a 10 percent wage cut announced the previous year–amid the century’s worst depression–and endorsed in concert by the four trunk lines. Six months later, the greatest social insurrection of the nineteenth century paralyzed the operations of Vanderbilt’s New York Central Railroad (by then overseen by his son William) along with the other three trunk lines connecting the East Coast to Chicago and points farther west. Cornelius Vanderbilt died in January 1877.
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