[1][2] In 1844, Evans, the trade unionist John Windt, the former Chartist Thomas Devyr and others founded the National 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 the safety valve of the American political and economic order.
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), and Young America (1845–49).