Arguments and speeches of William Maxwell Evarts

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Introduction

It is related of John Bright that when consulted about his biography he would turn the subject aside by saying, "My life is in my speeches." That his life was in his speeches may be said with much truth of Mr. Evarts. His position before the public of his day was, to be sure, in no sense upon a parallel with that of the great tribune of the English people, and the traditional environment, the training and education of the two men were wholly dissimilar. But the chief reminders of Mr. Evarts to-day are his speeches. Through them can best be recalled the man, whether they were the arguments of the advocate, or political speeches, or whether they appear in the form of elaborate orations at important commemorations, or in the lighter vein of occasional addresses.

At the very outset of his career Mr. Evarts leaped, at one bound, into prominence as an advocate in the profession in which his acknowledged supremacy formed, perhaps, the chief title to his fame. Just past twenty-four years old, the duty was by his senior associates assigned to him, as junior counsel for the defendant, of opening to the jury the case of the defense in the trial of the notorious forger, Monroe Edwards. The opportunities offered in this cause celebre for a young man to win his spurs were unusual but manifest. That so important a part in the trial was given him by his elder brethren at the bar, chief among whom was Senator Crittenden of Kentucky, speaks well for the way in which he had acquitted himself in the earlier preparation and conduct of the case, a great part of which had fallen upon his shoulders. Expecting to occupy but a few minutes in his address to the jury, he spoke for an hour and a half, eliciting at the close a ripple of applause from the crowded audience that public interest in the cause had

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brought to the court room. The applause of course was suppressed by the Court. It would have been no more than natural for any young man, however modest, to have felt at least a passing pleasure in so flattering a tribute, but what made a deep impression upon Mr. Evarts was the expression of enthusiastic encouragement that came from his distinguished associate. Many years after, he thus speaks, in conversation with one of Senator Crittenden's daughters, as related in the Life of Crittenden, of their association in this cause: "I shall never forget that trial," said Mr. Evarts, "in connection with your father. I was a young man on the threshold of my professional career, and your father's reputation was firmly and widely established as a lawyer and a statesman. His cordial manner throughout the trial is most gratefully remembered by me, and at its close he asked me to take a walk with him. During the walk he took a slight review of the trial, complimented me upon my course during its progress and the ability he was pleased to think I had manifested, and in conclusion, grasping my hand with warmth, he said, 'Allow me to congratulate and encourage you on the course in life you have adopted. I assure you that the highest honors of the profession are within your grasp, and with perseverance you may expect to attain them.' These words from Mr. Crittenden would have gratified the pride of any young lawyer and given him new strength for the struggles of his profession. I can truly say they have been of the greatest value to me through life. When I came to Washington to take part in the defense of President Johnson, the associations of the Senate Chamber recalled the memory of your father's words and renewed my gratitude for his generous encouragement of my early hopes." When he recalled these words of Senator Crittenden the impeachment trial of the President, in which he had taken a leading part for the defense, had but just closed in a victory for the President. The succeeding ten years held yet in

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store for Mr. Evarts a chief participation in the great Arbitration at Geneva, the Contest for the Presidency before the Electoral Commission, and that cause celebre, which assumed in the imaginations and feeling of the whole country the proportions of a great public cause, — the famous trial of Tilton vs. Beecher. The history of the bar in this country finds no parallel in professional public employments such as these falling to the lot of one man.

In reviewing his own career he was wont to speak of the turn of events in the country's history that presented during his active professional life so many cases of far-reaching public importance and interest. In this sense fortune favored him. It is not for the writer to discuss the performance, by Mr. Evarts, of the tasks thus set for him; but this may be said: that each honorable and responsible employment fell to him as the natural consequence of his adequate discharge of that which had preceded.

If we were to look for the turning point in his career at which he received a general and permanent recognition from the profession and the public as a learned lawyer as well as a brilliant and skilful advocate, we should find it in his appearance before the New York Court of Appeals in 1860, representing the State of New York in the Lemmon Slave Case. His title to knighthood was then established, and the profession looked forward to him as the future leader and champion to take the place of his elders when they were gone. His former chief, Mr. J. Prescott Hall, thus writes: "I have read your 'Lemmon' speech through twice and think it the best you ever made and perhaps the best you ever will make; but you must try to beat yourself."

In the Supreme Court of the United States he was constantly employed in private causes of importance and often retained by the Government in the paramount questions that the exigencies of our Civil War brought for solution before that great tribunal.

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As a lawyer, Mr. Evarts's extraordinary intellectual gifts enabled him to grasp, with a readiness and power of absorption and assimilation that excited the wonder and admiration of his contemporaries, all the essential and salient points of the most complicated cases upon the first interview with his client or his brother lawyer. Mr. Southmayd,* for many years his partner, himself a very great lawyer of that generation, was wont to speak of this power of ap])rehension, which would mentally anticipate and complete the situation before the narration of the facts was finished. The case had by that time been accurately discriminated and some great principle of law unerringly aj)plied. His other distinguished partner, Mr. Joseph H. Choate, whose name completed the title as it added to the fame of the great firm of Evarts, Southmayd & Choate, has spoken of him as "the quickest witted man I ever met on either side the water."

The writer has heard Mr. Evarts speak of how he would go into a trial with Mr. Choate when the only opportunity he had had of any acquaintance with the case was in the walk from their office to the court room. In the tremendous pressure of a busy lawyer's laborious life those few moments were all that could be spared to the consideration of ordinary lawsuits, where the detailed preparation for trial had fallen of course into competent hands. But those few moments seem to have suflBced for effective service to his junior at the trial.

He treated all his cases in a very large way; he made luminous the philosophy and science of jurisprudence in its application to the case in hand; he lifted the cause to a very high plane, and notably was this true in the Johnson impeachment and the Beecher trial; by remarkable clearness of statement he disentangled the greatest confusion of facts and brought them into harmony with the fundamental principles upon which the contention of his cause rested; by apt al-

* Charles F. Southmayd, 1824-1911.

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lusion and illustration, by anecdote and often by a play of humor and fancy, his presentation of the driest case interested the Court, as by his forceful eloquence he drove home the principles he advocated; while his unfailing courtesy and consideration, wholly without the taint of assumed superiority, won the admiration and affection of Bench and Bar.

But hand in hand with these gifts went the instinct for thoroughness — thoroughness of preparation, thoroughness of presentation. It was not in his nature to rest content with one cogent, irrefragable point and by reiteration in various forms and from varying points of view place his dependence upon that and that alone; but, regardful of the maxim, "many men, many minds," he sought to convince by every honorable and fair suggestion of reason that might find lodgment and have a persuasive influence with the tribunal he addressed. Mr. O'Conor,* more often opposed to, than associated with, Mr. Evarts, once said to a would-be client, whose retainer he was for some reason unable to accept, "Go to Mr. Evarts; he will bring forward every 'possible point, present every possible argument the case admits of."

Allusion to this trait recalls to the writer a characteristic remark of ]Mr. Evarts while he was preparing to argue in the Com-t of Appeals of New York the case in which he made his last appearance in any court. It was not unusual to see him, towards the close of a busy day of concentrated labor over a brief or an opinion, come from his own room and, going in to see one of his partners or sometimes sitting in the general oflSce, enter mto a conversational discussion of the subject that was on his mind. In the course of such a discussion over this case {Post vs. Weil, now cited as a leading case) Mr. Evarts said, "Well, I have seven points, one for each judge."

* Charles O'Conor, 1804-1884.

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Thus, too, in the trial of cases, some bit of evidence that might seem trifling and wholly negligible, coming unobserved or unheeded into the testimony, was in his final argument turned to great and telling effect. He seized upon it at once and discerned clearly its bearing on the main issue; and in his final presentation its effect was all the more forceful for being skilfully brought from its hiding place in the great mass of testimony and its true character displayed in the bright light of his clear reason.

His oral arguments were as thorough as his preparation of causes. His words of advice to a young lawyer, "Don't be content with a *good enough' argument," illustrate his own rule in the presentation of his causes. Thus in several cases, the subject matter of which has lost all shadow of present day interest, his arguments remain not only as models to emulate, though difficult of attainment, but in themselves of interest and instruction. In making a selection, therefore, of the speeches of Mr. Evarts which it might seem proper to include within the covers of one book, we have not felt that, in the case of his legal arguments, any more restricted rule of choice need apply than that which we have endeavored to follow in those of another character. An inclusion of those of historic interest should not exclude all of those, the interest in which may be confined to the profession.

But Mr. Evarts was more than a lawyer. With what may be regarded as an hereditary instinct for public service he very early manifested a zealous interest in political affairs. He was a devoted admirer and disciple of Mr. Webster, and to the last one of his ablest defenders. In a long forgotten weekly publication called "The New World," under the editorship of Park Benjamin, there appear in the issues of October 2 and October 16, 1841, two political articles from Mr. Evarts's pen entitled respectively, "Mr. Webster's Position " and " Mr. Tyler and The Whig Party." The first was in answer to the attacks upon Mr. Webster from a large

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body of the Whigs because of his remaining as Secretary of State in Tyler's Cabinet, and the second a review of the general political situation and of President Tyler's adequacy to meet it, as it was affected by the breaking apart of the two elements of the party. For this disruption of the party, the elevation to the Presidency of Mr. Tyler, through the death of President William Henry Harrison, was largely responsible.

These articles, among the earliest of the young lawj'^er's essays at political discussion and interesting solely on this account, may appropriately find a place in this collection. Their style reminds one of the Letters of Junius, and one may safely conjecture a conscious or unconscious imitation, as a model, of this unknown writer. His own comments on these early efforts throw an interesting side light on their production and their effect so far as it concerned him. "I have sent you a copy," he writes to his friend, Richard H. Dana, Jr., under date of October 2, 1841, "of this week's 'New World ' as containing for its ' leader ' an article by me — I am tired of hearing ' Mr. Webster's Position' spoken of in the tone used in Whig circles here, and have written the paper con amore. It is as long as sixteen pages of common pamphleteering and was written after 8 o'clock one evening and in the printer's hands next morning at 7, so that it can hardly be deemed an elaborate production. As I am proposing soon to make my pen venal, I am writing now for practice and facility and am not altogether displeased with this first attempt. If your own judgment should be favorable, suppose you do me the honor to submit it to your father's indulgent opinion."

Again, on October 12, 1841, he writes, "I am obliged to your father for his friendly criticism on my fugitive article. . . . This week I have promised an article on Tyler, but as it must be ready early to-morrow morning and is as yet unwritten I am doubtful whether it appears." Whatever xvi SPEECHES OF ^VILLIA^I MAXWELL EVARTS

may have been the judgment of the elder Dana, we may well suppose it to have been for the most part literary. How this young man's efforts impressed others, he with modest pride discloses to his friend Dana, when in January, 1842, he writes: "Professional business has claimed so nuich of my attention that my '})olitical pen' (which Professor Felton wrote Benjamin was one of 'the most powerful ones in the country') has been idle. During my late visit to Washington, I had the honor of an interview (at his desire) with his Excellency the Secretary of State, who, as Mr, Choate informed me, was delighted with my article. I am more amused than seriously gratified at the results of my aimless and casual efforts." "His Excellency the Secretary of State" was of course Daniel Webster and Mr. Choate was Rufus Choate, then occupying ]Mr. Webster's seat in the Senate.

Mr. Evarts's "political pen" remained idle for the rest of his life; but in every discussion of public aft'airs his voice was heard where it might affect the course of public opinion.

During the period following the Comj)romise Measures of 1850 and up to the election of Lincoln there was one dominant subject of either public or private discussion. We refer, of course, to the subject of slavery, its existence in the Southern States, the supremacy of its advocates in the councils of the Government, and their efforts to extend the institution throughout the whole country as a part of the national policy.

. At the time of the passage of the Compromise measures, Mr. Evarts, then thirty-two years old, had attained such prominence that, at the great Union meeting at Castle Garden in New York, he was one of the speakers. The meeting was called together to sustain before the people the policy of the Government in the Compromise measures, and Mr. Evarts spoke in maintenance of the Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law and in earnest appeal for obedience to its provisions by the people of the Northern States. This

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** Castle Garden" speech, his first recorded public utterance, was, in a narrower sphere, as much a subject of discussion, as it bore upon his attitude towards the burning question of the day, as that much debated seventh of March speech of his great exemplar in the Senate. In the years that followed, the Castle Garden speech was brought forward against Mr. Evarts as evidence of a leaning in favor of slavery not to be expected and much to be deplored in one of his antecedents.

The public mind could not reconcile an abhorrence of slavery as an institution with adherence to the Constitution and the Law, that recognized the institution as a necessary evil and supported the rights, under the Constitution, of slave owners, in the localities where the system of slavery prevailed. No man was ever more hostile to slavery than Mr. Evarts, throughout his life, and it perhaps was fortunate for a final estimate that the Castle Garden speech, unlike the seventh of March speech, was at the beginning and not at the end of a career. In the heated state of the public mind and conscience over this all-absorbing question of slavery it was perhaps natural that everyone who stood for the preservation of the Union and the Constitution and the sanctity of law should be, though illogically and unjustly, suspected of a friendly complacency towards the institution of slavery or at least of indifference to its evils. But any doubt or confused notion of Mr. Evarts's attitude towards slavery was set at rest when he gave one fourth of his property to the Emigrant Aid Company in the "Kansas Crusade," when he spoke at the Broadway Tabernacle in 1856, and when he made his argument in the Lemmon Slave Case.

The circumstances of Mr. Evarts's contribution to the cause of the Emigrant Aid Company is thus related by Mr. Eli Thayer in an account of a meeting of gentlemen at a private house in New York in 1855: "After my address, which occupied a little more than an hour, a young man, tall and thin, arose and began to speak as follows: 'Ever xviii SPEECHES OF WILLIAM MAXWELL EVARTS

since my Castle Garden speech, you know I have been called a Hunker Whig. Now, what reason you had to suppose that such a man would care whether slavery were extended or restricted I do not know. Therefore I do not know your reasons for inviting me to attend this meeting. But you did invite me and I have come. I am glad that I am here and I thank you for calling me. I have heard many speeches, on many occasions, upon the slavery question; but never until now have I listened to any practical elucidation of the subject. Like thousands of others I have been waiting for an opportunity to contend successfully against slavery without violating the laws or sacrificing the Constitution and the Union. Such an opportunity is now presented. I rejoice in it and shall embrace it. Now, though I am called a Hunker Whig and though I am poor, for I am not worth four thousand dollars, I joyfully give my cheque to the Emigrant Aid Company for one thousand dollars.' This speaker was William M. Evarts." *

No method of selection should properly exclude these earliest political speeches. They are as important and as interesting in their representative significance as those more elaborate productions when Mr. Evarts was the sole speaker of the evening before a crowded audience in Cooper Union, upon the invitation of prominent citizens of New York to give his views in public on the issues of the day.

Mr. Evarts's repute as a man of public spirit, as a scholar and an orator soon brought to him invitations to deliver addresses, in the language of the day, "orations," at important celebrations. Of these the first was delivered in 1853 at the centenary of the Linonian Society at Yale, the last in 1888 at the dedication at Auburn of the statue of his political friend and leader, William H. Seward.

Present day readers need to be reminded of the fame of the great debating societies at Yale College that flourished

* A History of the Kansas Crusade, by Eli Thayer, p. 203.

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from the latter part of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. They furnished to the youth of those generations who sought their education at Yale College a nursery and training ground for the development of those moral and intellectual faculties that best adapt a man to a position of influence and power in the community in which his lot is thrown. Doubtless, in the fuller and more complex life of our universities to-day there may be found, among the student activities, organizations that take the place and have the influence of these old debating societies. But it was with keen and unfeigned regret at the time that the older graduates of Yale saw the uninterrupted decline and final discontinuance of these institutions, beyond the power of all efforts to revive them. The place they filled in the college life of his day, and the purposes they were calculated to accomplish were thus described by Mr. Evarts, in this oration on "Public Life," in the following passage:

"While, then, we greet the college as the gracious mother of our intellectual life, from whose full breasts we drew the nutriment of learning, it is in this Linonian Society that we, who have met for this centennial commemoration, found the playground and arena, the palestra, the forum, the agora, in which the new born vigor was exercised and trained. It was here that the faculties acquired were first applied, and here had the prelude and preparation for the public labors and conflicts of real life."

These commemorative addresses, six in number, include, besides those mentioned above, the New England Society oration, entitled "The Heritage of the Pilgrims," delivered in 1854 before the New England Society of New York, his Eulogy on Chief Justice Chase delivered upon the invitation of the Alumni of Dartmouth College at the commencement of 1874, his centennial oration delivered at Philadelphia, July 4, 1876, and his oration at Newburgh, New York, in 1883, on the invitation of the joint committee of Congress,

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at the centennial of Washington's Headquarters at Newburgh. Thus the honor was awarded to him of dehvering the oration at the last, as well as at the first, of the series of national centennial celebrations of the Revolutionary period.

These formal addresses were not mere exhibitions of rhetorical phrase making, but scholarly discourses, pregnant with the philosophy of history and of politics, clothed in stately English and inspired with a genuine love of his country and reverence for its institutions.

Through a rare and very happy combination of faculties the fame of Mr. Evarts as an advocate and an orator was matched by his reputation as a wit. There is hardly a book of contemporaneous biography or reminiscences that does not contain some bright saying, some viot, some witticism of Mr. Evarts, and there were not infrequently attributed to him, as is always the case with such reputations, jests that on their face bore the stamp of counterfeit. With this gift, combined with a merry and spontaneous humor, he always found a welcome at public dinners either as presiding or as one of the principal speakers. Mr. Carter,* himself a great lawyer and orator, in a graceful and appreciative tribute to Mr. Evarts, thus spoke of this feature of his career:

"In another field — and one of no small consequence — he was facile pri?icejps; I mean that of after-dinner speaking. He may be said to have created a revolution in that art. His brilliant wit, his command of language, his large acquaintance with men and things and his keen sense of humor made him a most captivating speaker on such occasions. And this seemed so easy in him that many others thought it was really easy, and he had many imitators, who, however, were not often so successful."

An appreciative editorial in one of the leading journals at the time of Mr. Evarts's death thus speaks of these social gifts :

* James Coolidge Carter, 1827-1905.

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" He was not only a great lawyer, an able statesman and a great character, but he was a unique New Yorker. His was the wit, diamond-pointed, that sparkled without wounding. His was the humor as debonair as dry, and as genial as subtle. His was the power of epigram, antithesis or characterization that gave to thought the light for its entrance into the mind, and to fancy the barb that winged its course to the recesses of the imagination and to the centre of the heart. His was the anecdotal power that united the finality of culture with the simplicity of experience, and which gilded conversation with the sheen of gold, and gave to it the charm that made listening a luxury, enjoyment contagious, imitation a failure, emulation a temerity and admiration spontaneous. And all this concurred with an involution and circumlocution of oratorical style that, whether natural or acquired, was alike the envy and despair of colleagues or of rivals. " *

Of Mr. Evarts's "style" to which allusion is made by this sympathetic writer it may be said that as the printed page diminishes the force of the spoken word as uttered, so it magnifies into a fault a method and form of expression that was most effective as employed by Mr. Evarts. It is the spoken language of the man, aptly and often finely expressive of the thought behind it, that is to be found in the pages that follow. In those productions, which Mr. Evarts was wont to call his "set orations," and which were delivered from manuscript, where there was the opportunity for careful and critical preparation, is to be found the best and truest examples of his "style," which may or may not meet the requirements of the best literary canons. One may find in the quaint words of Fuller where he speaks of Richard Hooker, the '* judicious" Hooker, an apt description of Mr. Evarts's style. The entertaining theologian Fuller writes thus: "His style was long and pithy, driving on a whole flock of several clauses, before he came to the close of a sentence; so

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that when the copiousness of his style met not with proportionable capacity in his auditors, it w^as unjustly censured for ' perplexed, tedious and obscure.'" *

Let us record here also the witty retort of Mr. Evarts to one who in good natured banter had twitted him on his long sentences. In 1879, being then Secretary of State, he presided at the public dinner in New York tendered to Mr. Thomas Bailey Potter, one of the few members of parliament who had been, in England, staunch supporters of the northern side during the Civil War. Mr. Samuel D. Babcock, then president of the New York Chamber of Commerce, in closing his speech at the dinner, had thus expressed himself: "Let us hope, gentlemen, that if differences should arise in the future between Great Britain and the United States, men will be found like Mr. Potter and Secretary Evarts, who^ after a calm and dispassionate discussion, clothed though it be with sentences as long as the English language can supply, will arrive at an amicable settlement."

Mr. Evarts, on rising to introduce the next speaker, began by saying that the English was a language the true efficacy of which the gentleman who last sat down did not seem to appreciate. Not only was it fine in quality but in quantity it was absolutely marvelous. What wonder then that a public servant should try to check the volubility of his countrymen by consuming large portions of it himself. He then added, "I don't wish that our guest should carry away with him a wrong impression in regard to this alleged fault. The only persons in this country who are opposed to long sentences are the criminal classes."

Mr. Evarts's speeches, as we have seen, quite naturally classify themselves under these four divisions: professional arguments, political speeches, commemorative orations and occasional addresses, including in the last his after-dinner speeches. Any effort to make a selection must meet the

* Fuller's Church History, IX, s. vii, 49, 53.

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hazard of omitting or including one or more as to which, for this or that consideration, another's judgment would apply a different rule. Many motives have had their influence upon the result and if the general and principal purpose of the publication is amply met it will suffer no serious abatement by any incidental errors of choice in minor instances. These arguments and speeches are gathered from many scattered sources, from newspapers and pamphlets and from separate publications of more permanent form, and have been thus brought together that they may be readily accessible, that they may serve to preserve the memory of Mr. Evarts and that they may be in a permanent form of preservation themselves. The writer makes here his grateful acknowledgment for valuable aid received in the preparation of this work from Mrs. Graham B. Blaine, a granddaughter of Mr. Evarts.