Walter Evans: The Making of the First Judge of the Western District of Kentucky

40 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Walter Evans The Making of the First Judge of the Western District of Kentucky John G. Heyburn II I n October 1923, when Judge Walter Evans announced his retirement from the federal bench in a “scarcely audible voice,” he had been “the law” throughout the western half of Kentucky for over twenty-four years. Weakened by a prolonged illness, Evans never made it to a well-deserved retirement. Only two months later, at age eighty-one, with his wife Sarah at his side, Evans died in his apartment in the luxurious Weissinger-Gaulbert building in Louisville, just a few blocks from the federal courthouse where he had issued so many important decisions. In an obituary entitled “There were Giants in those Days,” the Republican-leaning Louisville Herald wrote: It is a sturdy and a forthputting personality, a strong character somewhat rigid and rigorous, a man of parts, a lawyer of distinction, an old-fashioned gentleman of the fast vanishing type who has left us and passed beyond.…In considering the career of Judge Walter Evans we are struck most of all by the fact that here was a man who had convictions and who was willing to fight for them.…Many are going to miss the familiar figure, the dignity of carriage, the consciousness of a duty to be performed…and it is precisely because he was a character, a personage, a typical and outstanding representative of Kentucky that is no more, that we pay to his memory and to his career the tribute and the honor which are their due.1 Reading between the lines of this deathbed tribute lies a more complex story. Evans led a remarkable public life. He played an important role during a transitional period in Kentucky’s history. His fifty-five-year career as one of the state’s most prominent political and judicial figures spanned Kentucky’s nineteenth century agrarian culture and political economy, the trauma of the Civil War, and a new century that saw an expanded role for the national government. As a member of the Republican Party, with its history of antislavery and support for African American rights, and its late nineteenth century embrace of big business and the gold standard , he often stood at odds with a Kentucky electorate that in the postwar era favored a Democratic Party dominated by Confederate sympathizers and agrarian interests. Evans’s rise to prominence as a politician and judge was aided by the close relationships he established with a small group of nationally prominent and interconnected Kentucky Republican politicians, including John Marshall Harlan, JOHN G. HEYBURN II WINTER 2012 41 Benjamin Bristow, and Augustus E. Willson. His appointment as commissioner of Internal Revenue, his election as the first Republican congressman from Louisville, and his elevation to federal judge place him among this select group.2 As the only federal judge in the Western District, Evans single-handedly exercised power—to a degree difficult to imagine today—over federal law in much of Kentucky. During his twenty-four years on the bench, he decided a number of cases that received national attention. Evans’s story reveals much about the tensions within American jurisprudence and society during an era in which state power expanded significantly. As a conservative Republican, he jousted defiantly with Progressives, both within and outside of his party, who wanted to increase federal regulation of the economy and private industry. His aversion to governmental power continued during World War I and into Prohibition. Walter Evans (1842-1923). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY WALTER EVANS 42 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Affiliations of a Lifetime: The Union Army and the Republican Party Born in Barren County, Kentucky, on September 18, 1842, the son of farmers , Evans spent his first years on the family farm outside of Glasgow. After the family moved to Buena Vista Springs, northwest of Russellville in nearby Logan County, he began to study under William A. Washington, an educator and cousin of President George Washington. Two years later, in 1853, the family moved to Christian County. In 1859, as tensions between the North and the South escalated, Evans began work as a deputy clerk in the Christian County clerk...