George Henry Evans(March 25, 1805 – February 2, 1856) was aradicalreformerwho was in theWorking Men's movement of 1829and the trade union movements of the 1830s. Evans was born in Bromyard, Herefordshire, England, the son of George Evans and Sarah White, and had a younger brother,Frederick William Evans,who became aShakerand served as an elder in theMount Lebanon Shaker Society.[1][2]
In 1844, Evans, thetrade unionistJohn Windt, the formerChartistThomas Devyr and others founded theNational Reform Association,[3]which lobbied Congress and sought political supporters with the slogan "Vote Yourself a Farm." Between 1844 and 1862, Congress received petitions signed by 55,000 Americans calling for free public lands for homesteaders.
Free land was depicted as a means of attracting the excessive eastern population westward, and, as a result, bringing about higher wages and better working conditions for the laboring man in the eastern industrial areas.[citation needed]For many years the public domain had been regarded as thesafety valveof the American political and economic order.[4] The efforts of Evans and his allies—notablyHorace Greeley—led to theHomestead Actof 1862.[5]Evans, thus, deserves the title of "Father of the Homestead Act."
Evans was a publisher, and the editor of a series of radical newspapers including:Workingman's Advocate(1829–36, 1844–45),[6]New York Daily Sentinel(1830),The Man(1834),The Radical(1841–43),The People's Rights(1844), andYoung America(1845–49). He also spent the period 1837–41, and the period after 1848, on his farm in New Jersey.[7]George Henry Evans died in 1855, at Granville (now known as Keansburg), New Jersey.
References
edit- ^Guarneri, C (2002)."Evans, George Henry (1805-1856)".American National Biography.doi:10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1500210.ISBN978-0-19-860669-7.Retrieved10 September2020.
- ^Murray, John (April 1996)."Henry George and the Shakers: Evolution of Communal Attitudes Towards Land Ownership".The American Journal of Economics and Sociology.55(2): 245–256.doi:10.1111/j.1536-7150.1996.tb03205.x.JSTOR3487086.Retrieved10 September2020.
- ^Fure-Slocum, Eric (1995)."Urban Poverty and" The Right to Cultivate the Earth ": American Land Reformers in the 1840s".Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies.1995(14): 120–132.doi:10.17077/2168-569X.1211.
- ^Bronstein, Jamie (1999).Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States.Stanford UniversityPress.
- ^Pilz, Jeffrey (2001).Life, Work, and Times of George Henry Evans, Newspaperman, Activist and Reformer (1829-1849).Edwin Mellen Press.ISBN978-0-7734-7580-9.
- ^McFarland, CK; Thistlethwaite, Robert (1 March 1983)."20 Years of a Successful Labor Paper: The Working Man's Advocate, 1829–49".Journalism Quarterly.60(1): 35–40.doi:10.1177/107769908306000106.S2CID143519354.Retrieved10 September2020.
- ^Lause, Mark (2005).Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community.University of IllinoisPress.