George Henry Evans

• George Henry Evans
• Born: March 25, 1805
• Died: February 2, 1856

Labor journalist and land reformer, was born at Bromyard, in Herefordshire, England. His parents, George Evans and Sarah (White) Evans, both came from lower middle-class families. Sarah Evans died when George Henry Evans was seven years old. In 1820, at the age of fifteen, Evans emigrated to the United States with his father and a brother, Frederick William—younger than George Henry by three years—who was to make a similarly strong public impression in a very different career. Upon their arrival Evans soon became a printer’s apprentice in Ithaca, New York, where the family settled. Both sons immediately became active in reading as well as discussing (with the enthusiasm of new converts) the writers, radicals, and freethinkers of the American independence cause and of the new social and political movements; they were particularly enthusiastic about the works of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

Largely as a result of their devotion to Paine’s arguments, the brothers announced themselves atheists in their early twenties. George Evans remained an atheist for the rest of his life; but Frederick Evans, while exploring Utopian and other land-sharing communities, experienced an intense conversion as the result of a visit, in 1830, to the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon, New York. Frederick went on to become an active proselytizer of Shakerism, and for over sixty years he was a Shaker elder, prominent for his writings and leadership of the community.

George Evans, meanwhile, began a career of editing labor newspapers by establishing The Man in Ithaca in 1822. This pioneering journalism brought him into contact with other editors and with a number of social reformers and philanthropists interested in causes associated with workingmen. By 1829 Evans was in New York City, editing The Working Man’s Advocate. This paper, announced by Evans in his first issue as “designed solely to protect and advance the interests of the working man,” was the first important labor journal in America. Evans published it in New York from 1829 to 1837 and again from 1844 to 1856.

In 1829 the Workingman’s party was established in New York, a year after its initial formation in Philadelphia, and Evans was soon active in the party, associating the Advocate with its cause. The first independent labor party in America, the Workingman’s party was organized largely by middle-class humanitarians under the leadership of Robert Owen. In its demands for better working conditions, no imprisonment for debt, and free public education, the party had the advantage of editorial support from leaders such as Evans. The party split, however, over Owen’s agnostic teachings and over its own demands; in its first electoral test, it failed decisively in the local and state elections of 1830.

Largely resulting from the political failure of the Workingman’s party, Evans became convinced more than ever that the solution of the labor question in America should focus on the opening up of cheap, or free, western lands and on the natural expansion of enterprise and opportunity that this would bring, rather than on attempts to regulate the interests of the overcrowded (and wage-depressing) eastern marketplace. Through his writing in the Advocate and in later papers that he edited—The Daily Sentinel and Young America—Evans developed this point of view, which he came to characterize as the “new agrarianism.”

In 1837, when the depression of that year nearly wiped out the labor movement, Evans bought a farm in New Jersey and moved there, taking his printing press with him. While working out his new politics on the farm, he wrote, and in 1840 published, History of the Origin and Progress of the Working Men’s Party; in 1842-43 this publication was reprinted in the Radical and had a considerable effect upon the reform debate then in progress. In the book Evans outlined the party’s mistake of relying on the political system as it was then structured and then moved on to his more open-ended ambitions for the Agrarian League. He urged the league to function as a free-floating pressure group, offering the force of its numbers and its support to men in different political parties so long as they signed a preelection pledge to back the free-land plank.

Evans was among the first eastern advocates of the homestead movement, which for him came directly out of Paine’s and Jefferson’s arguments that the inalienable right to life establishes a right to the materials of nature—land being the primary example. By 1844 Evans was an active leader of this movement; he espoused the issue in the Advocate and helped to create the popular reform interest that caused Horace Greeley to take it up in his New-York Tribune during the 1850s. (The Homestead Act was eventually passed in 1862.)

In 1844 Evans returned to New York and resumed publication of the Advocate, in which he now preached his new agrarianism. Evans’s practical and analytical method of argument, which made him an effective journalist for the labor cause, was manifested by his revised philosophy, which emphasized that capital was a product of labor rather than a gift of nature. This conviction led him to focus on the unsettled lands in the West, rather than the equitable division of lands and businesses already established in the East. Through his writings of the 1840s and 1850s, Evans argued that such provision of homesteads would inevitably force a fall in the value of eastern land and increase the bargaining power of labor, which could be persuaded to remain in the cities, thereby eliminating the need for organized trade unionism—a less popular extension of his homestead argument.

Besides his new agrarianism and the homestead movement, Evans advocated in his papers a wide range of egalitarian and humanitarian policies linked with his commitment to working people and to land reform. Among his recommendations were the abolishing of imprisonment for debt and of all debt collection laws, the abolition of slavery in any form, and equal rights for women. He was against all monopolies and editorialized against the monopoly of the United States Bank; Evans also argued for the transportation of the mails on Sundays. While editor of Young America, he was briefly part of the Young America movement, a political and cultural effort devoted to manifest destiny and nationalism, as espoused most idealistically by Ralph Waldo Emerson and as later taken up by such politicians as Edwin de Leon and George Nicholas Sanders. Evans’s involvement was that of the reform journalist who touched upon most of the labor and reform questions of his day in his writing.

George Henry Evans died at his farm in Granville, New Jersey, when he was fifty years old. His brother, the Shaker elder, with whom he had shared his initiation into the excitement of the political and social ideas in their new country, lived on to the age of eighty-five.

Evans’s publications include the aforementioned History of the Origin and Progress of the Working Men’s Party (1840); editorial writings in The Man (1822), The Working Man’s Advocate (between 1829 and 1845), the Daily Sentinel (1837), as well as Young America (1837 and 1853). For additional biographical information, see The Dictionary of American Biography (1931); Dictionary of American History (rev. ed., 1976); D. D. Egbert and S. Persons, eds., Socialism and American Life, 2 vols. (1952); Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1934); and L. Filler, Dictionary of American Social Reform (1963). See also A. Whitman, Early American Labor Parties (1943).