Alfred Cowles, the future part owner and business manager of the Chicago Tribune, writes to Josiah Sutherland, offering a highly conservative take on the Homestead Bill, in response to Sutherland’s speech against it:

       “… I have received and read with much interest your pamphlet against the Homestead bill. My own views coincide with yours of the obliquity of this measure. It has few friends, except the agrarian class, who propose to throw all human possessions into common stock. Your views are comprehensive and cover the whole ground, If the ease of acquiring the public land is not bounty enough, the destitute should remain so. It is not view’d favorably as a measure at the west, but rather as an instrument of demagogues. Please accept my thanks & be assured that I shall place your speech in a most conspicuous position for public access…”

       The Homestead bill of 1852 was defeated in Congress and was not revived until 1860, but the formidable opposition to free land made it impossible to get a law through both houses. Most southerners were opposed to homestead legislation, mainly because they it would result in the influx of anti-slavery settlers to the territories. Easterners opposed it because they feared the outflow of emigrants from the east would have negative effects upon the economies of eastern and northern states. The new Republican party in 1860 declared that “we demand the passage by Congress of the complete and satisfactory Homestead measure.” The Republican victory and the secession of the southern states left the Republicans free to carry out its program. And on May 20, 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Law, and free land – the goal sought by generations of Westerners since the inception of the public land polity was attained.        

      “Born in Mantua in Portage County, Ohio, Alfred Cowles, Sr. was a clerk, bookkeeper, and business and financial manager. He attended public schools near his birthplace, followed by a prep school. He studied for a time at Michigan University in Ann Arbor, but moved to Cleveland, Ohio before completing his degree. At age nineteen he began working as a clerk and, later, a bookkeeper at the Cleveland Leader. There he met Joseph Medill. In 1855, he and Medill both relocated to Chicago, where, in July, Cowles purchased an interest in the Chicago Tribune and became its financial and business manager. By 1860 he had a personal estate valued at $10,000. That year, he married Sarah F. Hutchinson, and the couple had at least three children together. He died of apoplexy.

A.    T. Andreas, History of Chicago (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1886), 3:696; Franklin William Scott, Newspapers and Periodicals of Illinois, 1814-1879, vol. 6 of Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1910), 59; John Moses and Joseph Kirkland, eds., The History of Chicago Illinois (Chicago: Munsell, 1895), 2:47; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Ward 6, Chicago, Cook County, IL, 572; The Evansville Courier (IN), 21 December 1889, 1:2; Gravestone, Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, IL.”

       https://papersofabrahamlincoln.org/persons/CO14963