Evans’ ideas quickly won the adherence of the few labor papers then existing.  Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune endorsed the homestead movement as early as 1845.  The next five years witnessed a remarkable spread of the ideas of the free homestead movement in the press of the country.  It was estimated in 1845 that 2000 papers were published in the United States and that in 1850, 600 of these supported land reform.

Petitions and memorials having proved of little avail, the land reformers tried Evans’ pet plan of bargaining votes for the support of their principles.  Tammany was quick to start the bidding.  In May, 1851, a mass-meeting was held at Tammany Hall “of all those in favor of land and other industrial reform, to be made elements in the Presidential contest of 1852.”  A platform was adopted which proclaimed man’s right to the soil and urged that freedom of the public lands be endorsed by the Democratic party.  Senator Isaac A. Walker of Wisconsin was nominated as the candidate of the party for President.

For a while the professional politician triumphed over the too trusting workingman reformer.  But the cause found strong allies in the other classes of the American community.  From the poor whites of the upland region of the South came a similar demand formulated by the Tennessee tailor, Andrew Johnson, later President of the United States, who introduced his first homestead bill in 1845.  From the Western pioneers and settlers came the demand for increased population and development of resources, leading both to homesteads for settlers and land grants for railways.  The opposition came from manufacturers and landowners of the East and from the Southern slave owners.  The West and East finally combined and the policy of the West prevailed, but not before the South had seceded from the Union.

Not the entire reform was accepted.  The Western spirit dominated.  The homestead law, as finally adopted in 1862, granted one hundred and sixty acres as a free gift to every settler.  But the same Congress launched upon a policy of extensive land grants to railways.  The homestead legislation doubtless prevented great estates similar to those which sprang of a different policy of the Australian colonies, but did not carry out the broad principles of inalienability and land limitation of the original Agrarians.

Their principle of homestead exemption, however, is now almost universally adopted.  Thus the homestead agitation begun by Evans and a group of wage earners and farmers in 1844 was carried to victory, though to an incomplete victory.  It contained a fruitful lesson to labor in politics.  The vested interests in the East were seen ultimately to capitulate before a popular movement which at no time aspired toward political power and office, but, concentrating on one issue, endeavored instead to permeate with its ideas the public opinion of the country at large.