If you define civil war loosely enough, the second one started as soon as the first one ended. While Reconstruction was in progress, multiple states were under military occupation, Southern insurgents embraced guerrilla tactics, and the Klan and similar groups carried out a racial terror campaign that killed thousands of African Americans. Yet another civil semi-war followed on that one's heels: In 1877, just as Reconstruction was ending, a great railroad strike broke out in cities across the United States. The ensuing months saw riots, repression, shootings, troop deployments, and dozens of deaths; a socialist group briefly seized power in St. Louis. A striker quoted in The Pittsburgh Leader declared that these clashes "may be the beginning of a great civil war in this country."
The railroad strike was just one of many violent labor battles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from the Bay View Massacre of 1886 to the Paint Creek Mine War of 1912–1913. That episodic class war intersected with another set of episodic hostilities: a decadeslong conflict that the historian Richard Maxwell Brown has called the Western Civil War of Incorporation. In that frontier fighting, he wrote, the "conservative incorporating authority" of large corporate interests and the state battled small ranchers and farmers, discontented wage-workers, and sometimes outright outlaws; the former were often allied with the Republican Party, while the latter were more likely to be Democrats or Populists. These skirmishes stretched from the 1850s through the 1920s, and some of them are legendary: the Mussel Slough War of 1880, immortalized in The Octopus; the Cochise County War of 1881–1882, immortalized in My Darling Clementine; the Johnson County War of 1892, immortalized in Heaven's Gate.
