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Title: Autograph Letter Signed - 1877 National Guard’s secret plans to suppress Union strikes Author: Coy, Inus(?) Place: Union Stock Yards, Chicago Publisher: Date: August 22, 1877 Description: 3 pp. To Illinois Governor Shelby Cullom, forwarded by Adjutant General Hilliard to Colonel S.B. Shaw, commanding the 1st Illinois Cavalry, “for his information and action”; General Head-quarters, Illinois National Guards. Manuscript copy of Special Order No. 73. Springfield, Oct. 5, 1877, accepting Colonel Shaw’s resignation as Commander of the 1st Illinois Light Cavalry and appointing him Chief of Cavalry on the staff of the Governor and Commander in Chief of the National Guard; H. Hilliard. “Confidential” Autograph Letter Signed, as Adjutant General of Illinois. Springfield, June 20, 1879. 1 page. To General S.B. Shaw, Chicago. A decade of labor “turbulence” after the Civil War culminated in the nation-wide General Railroad Strike of 1877 that crippled rail lines from the East coast to Illinois and let to rioting in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Chicago, which was paralyzed by angry mobs of the unemployed, suppressed by thousands of federal troops, National Guardsmen and vigilantes. The first letter, written weeks after the Chicago turmoil, proposed a businessman’s “Battalion of Cavalry” to guard “the vast amount of property” in “unprotected” packing houses of the Union Stock Yards from future strikers. Hiram Hilliard, the Illinois Adjutant General with the rank of Major General (though he had ended the Civil War as a Union Army Major) referred the matter to Colonel Shaw, a Cavalry officer who was soon promoted to General and joined the Governor’s staff, probably to plan future military counter-measures to future strikes; this he apparently did, two years later, when Hilliard advised him that the labor situation had grown “serious”. There were, however, no further serious outbreaks of violence until seven years later, when a general strike at the Chicago packing-houses led to the Haymarket bombing and confrontation between police and Communist-Anarchist radicals. Lot Amendments Condition: Light yellowing; very good. Item number: 238368