The Green Vol. VIII.
No. 3.
BOSTON.
March, 1896.
WILLIAM M. EVARTS. By A. Oakev Hall. VmLLIAM M. EVARTS is the survivor of all the judges, and of the large assem blage of lawyers whom he faced upon his first argument in the newly established Court of Appeals of the State of New York, and in the first year of its existence. He was then thirty years of age, the model of a " thin, angular, pale-faced New Englander"; and, to paraphrase Shakespeare, with an evi dent " native hue of resolution sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, ready for en terprise of great pith and moment." He then had a general appearance which, while somewhat afterwards modified by time, he never lost. And in his daguerreotypes taken then — in 1848 — may be perfectly traced the face and figure of the photograph of 1893. But while the latter exhibits wrinkles, and while Father Chronos has thinned his flowing locks of the former period, the photograph yet shows the kindling glance of youth and the determined face which at tracted attention while he was a Boston schoolboy, or a first-class at Yale, or in the Cambridge law school, a rapt listener to his professors, Joseph Story and Simon Greenleaf. That first Court of Appeals argument was in the case of Walworth — representing ces tui que trust plaintiffs v. the Farmers' Loan and Trust Co. of New York City; reported in volume first of the Court's reports. When he then arose to make his maiden argument in that court wherein he was des tined to contract a legal fame, in after years, second to no one at the Bar, he must have stood among and been listened to by a
grand array of the State Bar. The court was new, and through an interregnum be tween the destruction by the Constitution of 1 846 of the former Court for the Correction of Errors, and through the establishment of this new appellate tribunal, the calendar of the latter was a remarkably full one, and had throughout its initial year daily attracted a large delegation of advocates. Doubtless among his legal listeners on that occasion were the elder Rufus W. Peckham; Ambrose L. Jordan, master of withering sarcasm; Charles O'Conor, in his prime of defiant attack; Nicholas Hill, Jr., who had just sur rendered office as reporter of the predecessor court; William Kent, whose recent judgeship the new Constitution had taken from him; young Samuel J. Tilden, the philosophic; Francis B. Cutting, whose cross-examina tions and repartees realized his surname; the lovable Henry S. Dodge; the impetuous Hiram Ketchum; the sweet-voiced Ward Hunt, destined for the Federal Court at Washington; the arrogant Sam Stevens; the quaint Marcus T. Reynolds; Ned Sandford, whom attorneys nicknamed the slash er; Sam Sherwood, the acute; Willis Hall, apostle of municipal law; George Wood, the encyclopaedic; the legal preceptor of Mr. Evarts, Daniel Lord, whose junior to his name reminded of divinity which shone re flected in his pure life; George Bowdoin, the life of clubs as of the circuit mess-room, and the lawyer of society; John A. Collier, the Cicero of Western New York; Nathaniel Bowditch Blunt, named after the famous writer on marine navigation, and himself a 93
