William M. Evarts. West as to write essays, pamphlets and a volume upon their wrongs, with suggestions as to Federal remedies. His mind, however, was stronger than his body, and falling into loss of health, he died in the South while there seeking restoration. But he left es tate enough to provide William with his course at Yale and in the Harvard law school. At Yale the latter measurably followed in some of his father's footprints by found ing, as inheritor of his father's journalistic proclivities, the " Yale Literary Magazine." After receiving the diploma of LL.B., which bore the now greatly valued autographs of Story and Greenleaf, he took in New York, in 184 1, his diploma as practicing attorney, and three years later, under then existing rules, another as counselor. While yet a lawstudent he took relaxation in the Tippe canoe and Tyler campaign of 1840, and attracted much attention from eminent lead ers in the Whig party of the period by his cleverness in putting the political topics centering upon the protective tariff, and the extravagance of the opposition administra tion. Even at that early age he exhibited the consummate raillery which marked so many of his later efforts in oratory. It was observable by both Bench and Bar, during his legal novitiate as advocate, that he possessed in a remarkable degree a presence of mind and a sang froid seldom noticeable in a young lawyer. " This young Bay State boy has come to stay," was a remark attributed to the venerable circuit judge Ogden Edwards, who had listened to a motion for non-suit made by the boy. And Judge Edwards was one of those nonchalant judges who disliked non-suits, and preferred to place responsibilities upon juries and motions for new trials. The Evarts preceptor, Daniel Lord, was pre-eminently what is best known at the British bar as a lawyer of families and estates. Of controversies among these there was an overflow from the Lord office, and
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some of it went to Evarts when he " hung out his shingle." He possessed so youthful an appearance that it is no wonder Judge Edwards referred to him as " this Boston boy." Always smoothly shaven, and with what this generation knows as football hair, also an attenuated but lithe form which scarcely weighed one hundred and twenty pounds, he seemed more juvenile than he was. Athletism had not infected Yale nor Harvard when he was at either, and he had never been called upon to develop muscle. It was intellectual fibre that had been mainly exercised at those historic schools, and at no period of his life did he develop into physical sturdiness. Yet he was never a weakling. Somebody once referred to Daniel Webster as a " steam engine in breeches." I should paraphrase my recol lection of Evarts in 1848, when I came to the Bar, so as to describe him as a tug-boat in a black frock-coat that hung upon him as if it were a Ciceronian toga. The lawyer lingering in any library can readily trace the Bar progress of Mr. Evarts after his debut in the High Court of Appeals through the early reports, of Sandford's Supe rior Court Reports, and Barbour or Howard's Supreme Court Reports, and in them will dis cover that if the briefs of other lawyers are slighted, his and his authorities never were. In 1850 he acquired a national reputation through a speech which he made at the first Union meeting ever held in New York. This was in Castle Garden, at the time when the Clay-Fillmore compromises about ter ritorial slavery were to the fore. There were then mere mutterings about secession in Washington and elsewhere, and these formed the topics of Mr. Evarts' rebukes. Veiled those were in guarded language, for Fate was reserving to the Fremont and Lin coln periods of his after-career opportuni ties for his slashes at Calhounery and slavery. Not even Alexander Hamilton's early revo lutionary public speeches in his younger
