William Maxwell Evarts

A building I pass on my walks around the city has intrigued me since I first noticed it. It’s a medium sized apartment building at the corner of 2^nd Ave. and 14^th St. Red brick with white trim.

It’s fairly ordinary for a hundred-year-old building. It’s not unattractive and could use a cleaning, though it probably won’t ever get one. But it does have, on the 2^nd Avenue side, two attractive porticoes where the building’s entrances are. One is flanked by two columns the other by four. And there is an inscription on the face of each portico, which is what caught my attention.

Over the entrance to 231 is incised: The W.M. EVARTS. Over the entrance to 235 is: THE U.S. SENATE.

They seemed like an odd pair of names to give to two buildings so I did a search for Evarts.

It turned out that William Maxwell Evarts had indeed served one term as a senator from New York, from 1885 to 1891. But it turned out, further, that this was probably the least of his accomplishments.

From the collection of the Library of Congress

First and foremost, he was at the time of his death, considered the greatest advocate not only in New York but in the country.

He was enlisted by Andrew Johnson to defend him in his impeachment trial in 1868 and his three-day argument at the end of the trial is credited with saving the president from what seemed like an inevitable conviction by the Senate.

He helped secure the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes by arguing his case after the disputed election of 1876.

And in an 1875 trial that was the 19^th century equivalent of the OJ Simpson trial, he was persuasive enough defending Henry Ward Beecher on charges of adultery to cause a hung jury when most of the evidence and testimony seemed to point to Beecher’s guilt.

He was a man of many parts, serving in Lincoln’s administration during the Civil War, as Andrew Johnson’s attorney general for a year, as Hayes’s secretary of state, and as the first president of the New York Bar Association.

He also served as head of the committee to raise money to build the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, an effort that was not particularly successful, though not necessarily through any fault of Evarts:

The Life magazine of the time (closer in spirit to today’s New Yorker than to the Henry Luce's photo journal of the same name) used to take occasional potshots at him, but they seemed to take shots at everybody. This is the mildest, from the February 5, 1885 issue as his senate term began, a crack at his habit of speaking in long involved sentences:

Besides the many advantages of having Mr. Evarts in the Senate, there are manifest disadvantages which our legislators failed to take into account when considering his candidacy.

One of the largest of our corporate interests will suffer greatly if the rumor be true that the Western Union Telegraph Company is negotiating for ten miles of extra wire for the Associated Press report of Mr. Evarts’ opening sentence in the Senate. Even with this it is feared that a few yards will lap over at each end of the line unless Mr. Evarts can be induced to cut it down to twenty thousand words.

As for those two apartment house names, I quote from his obituary in the New York Times of March 1, 1901:

William Maxwell Evarts, lawyer and statesman, died yesterday morning at his home, 231 Second Avenue, corner of Fourteenth Street.

I found reference to the house having been sold twice over the next several years and can only assume that within a few years of its being sold, the mansion was torn down in favor of the apartments as the neighborhood began to change. No doubt the builder thought to commemorate such a popular man in the names of the building.

From the collection of the Library of Congress

The photographs of him in the Library of Congress show a rather grim visaged man, but again I quote from his Times obituary:

[The Beecher-Tilton trial] served to make him, too, more of a public favorite than even his brilliant triumph before the Arbitration Commission, because it focused him more clearly in the public eye. The element of personal humor in his composition now first impressed the public, as it had long before impressed his associates at the bar, and finding him, in some sort, a humorist, the people liked him better.

I noticed in Madison Square Park this afternoon a very impressive statue of Roscoe Conkling, one of the 19th century political bosses of New York City and State. It's too bad that the city didn't erect one of Evarts instead, it sounds like he deserved the honor more.