29 JAN--This Day in US Military History

1834 – The banks of the Potomac River erupted in violence, as workers on the then-unfinished Chesapeake and Ohio Canal rioted after a planned strike was brutally extinguished.

Never exactly a fast friend of indecision or conciliatory action, President Andrew Jackson swiftly called on Secretary of War Lewis Cass to send Federal troops in to quell the workers. While this was an eventful moment for the nation it marked the first, though hardly the last time Federal troops were deployed to settle a labor “dispute” it was just another roadblock in the troubled history of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.
Originally conceived as a transit and trade friendly route between the Midwest and Atlantic seaports, the canal was periodically delayed by fiscal woes, stiff competition from the Erie Canal, as well as the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. When construction began in 1828, the canal was designed to reach Pittsburgh; by the time the project was abandoned in 1850, the waterway reached Cumberland. Flooding forced the close of the canal in 1924; it was bought by the U.S. government in 1938 and transformed into a national historic park in 1971.

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