The Law

I think Benares is one of the most wonderful places I have ever seen. It struck me that a westerner feels in Benares very much as an Oriental must feel when he is planted down in the middle of London. Everything is so strange, so utterly unlike the whole of one’s previous experience. We went to see a recluse, a man who is worshipped for his holiness from one end of India to the other. On the way we saw various images of this saint, and when I saw him coming out of his hut, I at once recognized him . . . He is a divinity. He hasn’t a rag on his back, but he has perfect manners, a ready wit, and a turn for conversation through an interpreter. We traded autographs, I said I had heard of him, and he said he had heard of me. Gods lie sometimes, I expect. . . This face is a strongly legal one, is it not? You have heard of William M. Evarts, formerly Secretary of State, and one of the greatest minds America has ever produced. Well, this face at first reminded me strongly of Evarts.

-Mark Twain

Jeremiah Evarts died in 1831, leaving little money behind, so Billy had to withdraw from the Latin School. Fortunately he was able to finish his schooling elsewhere in Boston, and then with help from his uncles was able to travel “two hundred and forty miles by stage coach from Boston to New Haven to avoid going to Harvard University, which was across the bridge", continuing the Evarts family aversion to “Hell and Harvard”.



At Yale, Billy became Bill Evarts, and he made friends easily and quickly. He frequented the off-limits tavern “The Barons”, was elected a class “Bully”, joined the debating society, and kept a journal where he recorded reading over twenty thousand pages of history, poetry, novels and essays, over and above the prescribed course materials in his sophomore and junior years. Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans delighted him, and like his father, he became indignant over the treatment of Native Americans. In his junior year he got into a fracas in the dining hall which earned him a “second warning” and a letter from the college president to his uncle. He helped organize and edit the Yale Literary Review, the longest ongoing literary review in America. In his senior year (1837) he was elected to Skull and Bones and Phi Beta Kappa, and made a commencement oration which, echoing his father, deplored public acceptance of the corrupt conditions in Washington, calling for a new generation of national leadership.

After Evarts graduated from Yale, he spent a year in Vermont just as his father had thirty-five years previously. He taught school for a year, as his father had, and courted an attractive young woman, Helen Wardner, daughter of a prominent banker and one-time state treasurer of Vermont. He read law, as one still can in Vermont, with Horace Everett.

After Jeremiah Evart’s death in 1831, Bill’s mother Mehetabel moved to Concord, so after his year in Vermont Evarts returned to near-by Cambridge to study law at Harvard. There were fewer than one hundred students at the Law School in those days, but many of its students, including Charles Sumner, John L. Motley, and James Russell Lowell went on to remarkable careers . Evarts formed a particularly close and lasting friendship with Richard Henry Dana, who had just returned from two years as a sailor in the Pacific, and who would chronicle those experiences in his best selling memoir Two Years Before the Mast, before going on to a distinguished legal career. Dana was much impressed by Evarts: “If he does not become distinguished, he will disappoint more persons than any other young man whom I have ever met.”

So in 1840, with a law degree in hand, Bill made his way to New York City to find his fortune. He came with letters of introduction to some of the best families, including one from his law school master Joseph Story describing him as a young man of “very uncommon talents and professional attainments . . . destined to take a very elevated rank in his profession”

Evarts had met the respected lawyer Daniel Lord in New Haven, and had some family and college connections, so he sought him out in hopes of finding employment. “Well, Mr. Evarts,” Lord said, “You have come to commence your studies and be a lawyer in New York.”

“I have come to try” Bill replied.

“Well sir,” Lord shot back “if you have only come to try, you had better go back; if you have come to stay, we shall be glad to receive you.”

Evarts quickly made clear that he had come to be a lawyer.


At a New England Society dinner, Mark Twain had just finished a piquant address, when Evarts arose, shoved both of his hands down into his trousers pockets, as was his habit, and laughingly remarked: "Doesn't it strike this company as a little unusual that a professional humorist should be funny?"

Mark Twain waited until the laughter excited by this sally had subsided, and then drawled out: "Doesn't it strike this company as a little unusual that a lawyer should have his hands in his own pockets?"