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Baltimore's trade-union movement was within the range of what existed in
Northern industrial centers. *

Indeed, Baltimore had long history of trade-union struggle with contours
similar to those of the older industrial centers of the North. Strikes and job actions
by mechanics and carpenters occurred in this city as early as the 1790s and
continued to arise sporadically throughout the early nineteenth century. In the
post-Civil War period, a wave of organizing occurred among garment workers,
shoemakers, cigar makers, can makers, and other skilled workers in growth
industries, resulting in such organizations as the Knights of St. Crispin, the
Germainia Lodge, the Can Makers Mutual Protection Association, and even a
short-lived city-wide Workingmen's Assembly. The post-Civil War wave
culminated in the great railroad strike of 1877, of which Baltimore was a major
center. In the mid-1880s a massive 8-hour day movement grew, with 11,000 city
workers marching for this cause in 1886; that same year the Baltimore membership
in the Knights of a Labor peaked at about 24,000. The Baltimore Knights declined
during in the nation-wide repression following of the Haymarket Bombing in
Chicago, though sporadic struggles occurred in the late 1880s and 1890s. During
these years, the craft locales of the American Federation of Labor, which had
established the Baltimore Labor Council (later called Baltimore Federation of
Labor) in 1883, grew to predominance in the city labor movement. By 1899 there
were 71 craft unions and two weekly labor newspapers in the city.

Then, starting in 1902, the first major wave of labor activity since the 1880s
erupted, involving all the major crafts. By the second decade of the century,
increasing numbers of semi-skilled and unskilled workers, particularly in the