Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

Somebody who met Mr. Evarts just after he had been at a dinner at the White House asked him how it went off. "Excellently," was the reply, "the water flowed like champagne."

CHAPTER III CABINET OF PRESIDENT HAYES

There has hardly been a stronger Cabinet since Washington than that of President Hayes. Its members worked together in great harmony. All of them, I believe, were thoroughly devoted to the success of the Administration.

The Secretary of State was William M. Evarts. He was my near kinsman and intimate friend. His father died in his early youth. My father was Mr. Evarts's executor, and the son, after his mother broke up housekeeping, came to my father's house in his college vacations as to a home. He studied law at the Harvard Law School, and with Daniel Lord, a very eminent lawyer in New York. One of his early triumphs was his opening of the celebrated Monroe-Edwards case. The eminent counsel to whom the duty had been assigned being prevented from attendance by some accident, Evarts was unexpectedly called upon to take his place. He opened the case with so much eloquence that the audience in the crowded court-room gave him three cheers when he got through.

He rose rapidly to a distinguished place in his profession, and before he died was, I suppose, the foremost advocate in the world, whether in his country or Europe. He was counsel for President Johnson on his impeachment, counsel for the Republican side in support of the title of President Hayes before the Electoral Commission; counsel for the United States against Great Britain before the Tribunal at Geneva. He was counsel in the celebrated Lemon case, where the case was settled as to the rights of slave owners to bring their slaves into the free States, and hold them in transitu. In all these he was successful. He was counsel also in another trial of almost equal interest and celebrity, the Tilton divorce suit— in which Henry Ward Beecher was charged with adultery. In this the jury disagreed. But the substantial victory was with Evarts's client.

Mr. Evarts was a man of unfailing equanimity and good nature, never thrown off his balance by any exigency in diplomacy, in political affairs, or in the trial of causes. Any person who has occasion to follow him in his diplomatic discussions will be impressed with the far-sighted wisdom and caution with which he took his positions.

He was always a delightful orator. He rose sometimes to a very lofty eloquence, as witness especially his argument in defence of President Johnson. He had an unfailing wit. You could never challenge him or provoke him to an encounter without making an abundant and sparkling stream gush forth. He never came off second best in an encounter of wits with any man. He was a man of great generosity, full of sympathy, charity, and kindliness. If his biography shall ever be properly written, it will be as delightful as that of Sheridan or Sidney Smith for its wit, and will be valuable for the narrative of the great public transactions in which he took a part. Especially it will preserve to posterity the portraiture of a great lawyer and advocate of the time before the days of specialists, when the leaders of the American Bar were great lawyers and advocates.

I do not think Evarts's capacity as a diplomatist is known. Perhaps it never will be thoroughly understood. The work of a Secretary of State in dealing with foreign countries is performed in the highest confidence and does not ordinary come to light until interest in the transaction to which it relates has grown cold. Evarts conducted some very delicate negotiations, including that in regard to the Fortune's Bay matter, with much skill. He was careful never, for the sake of present success, to commit the country to any doctrine which might be inconvenient in the remote future.

I think Evarts failed to appreciate his own political strength. He was in the early part of his life devoted to Mr. Webster, for whom he had great reverence, and later to Mr. Seward. He sometimes, I think, failed to take wholly serious views of political conditions, so far as they affected him personally. I do not think he ever knew the hold he had upon the respect of the country, or upon the affection of the men with whom he was brought into intimate association in public life, and at the Bar. He was very fond of his friends, classmates and kindred, and of his college.

After the defeat of the Republican Party in 1884 he was chosen Senator from the State of New York. He had been candidate for the Senate in 1861, to succeed Mr. Seward. His competitor was Horace Greeley. Some of Mr. Evarts's friends thought that the old supporters of Mr. Seward, and perhaps Mr. Seward himself, did not stand by him as the unfailing and powerful support of Seward would have led men to expect. But when he came into public life in 1885, and took his seat as a Senator from the great State of New York, men looked to him to be the great leader in restoring the broken ranks of the Republican Party. I think it would have been easy to make him the Republican candidate, and to elect him to the Presidency in 1888, if he had been willing to take that position himself. But he did not in the Senate, or in the counsels of the party, take or attempt to take the leadership for which he was fitted.