Almost immediately after the Civil War, labor entered politics in a small way on its own account. In 1872, a party known as the "Labor Reformers" held a national convention at Columbus which was attended by delegates from seventeen states. It declared in favor of restricting the sale of public lands to homesteaders, Chinese exclusion, an eight-hour day in government employments, civil service reform, one term for each President, regulation of railway and telegraph rates, and the subjection of the military to the civil authorities. The party nominated Justice Davis, who had been appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by Lincoln and had shown Populist leanings immediately after the War; but Mr. Davis declined to serve, and O'Connor of New York, to whom the place was then tendered, only polled about 29,000 votes. This early labor party was simply a party of mild protest. It originated in Massachusetts, where there had been a number of serious labor disputes and a certain shoe manufacturer had imported a carload of Chinese to operate his machinery. Although Wendell Phillips, who had declared the emancipation of labor to be the next great issue after the emancipation of slaves, was prominently identified with it and stood next to Justice Davis on the first poll in the convention, the party as a whole manifested no tendency to open a distinct class struggle, and the leading planks of its program were shortly accepted by both of the old parties. Standing upon such a temporary platform, and unsupported by any general philosophy of politics, the labor reform party inevitably went to pieces. Its dissolution was facilitated by the rise of an agrarian party, the Greenbackers, who, in their platform of 1880, were more specific and even more extensive in their declaration of labor's rights than the "Reformers" themselves had been. It was not until 1888 that another "labor" group appeared, but since that date there has been one or more parties making a distinct appeal to the working class. In that year, there were two "labor" factions, the Union Labor party and the United Labor party. Both groups came out for the public ownership of the means of transportation and communication and a code of enlightened labor legislation. The former advocated the limitation of land ownership and the latter the application of the single tax. Both agreed in denouncing the "Democratic and Republican parties as hopelessly and shamelessly corrupt, and, by reason of their affiliation with monopolies, equally unworthy of the suffrages of those who do not live upon public plunder." The vote of both groups in the ensuing election was slightly over 150,000.