Lemuel Dale Evans

Lemuel Dale Evans (January 8, 1810 – July 1, 1877) was a nineteenth-century American lawyer, jurist, and politician who represented Texas in the United States House of Representatives and later served as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Born in Tennessee, he read law in the customary manner of the period, was admitted to the bar, and began a legal career that would span several decades and intersect with some of the most turbulent political events in Texas and national history.

After his admission to the bar, Evans moved to the Republic of Texas and settled in Marshall, Harrison County, in 1843. There he engaged in the practice of law and quickly became a prominent figure in the local bar and in public affairs. His standing in the community led to his selection as a member of the Texas state convention of 1845, which drafted the state constitution and approved the annexation of Texas to the United States. Through this role he participated directly in the transition of Texas from an independent republic to statehood within the Union.

Evans’s growing reputation as a lawyer and public man in East Texas coincided with the rise of new political alignments in the 1850s. Aligning himself with the American Party, commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party, he was elected as its candidate to the Thirty-fourth Congress, serving from March 4, 1855, to March 3, 1857. During his term in the U.S. House of Representatives, he represented a large and developing Texas district at a time of intense sectional conflict over slavery and the expansion of the Union. He sought reelection in 1856 to the Thirty-fifth Congress but was unsuccessful, and he returned to his legal practice in Texas after leaving Congress.

As the secession crisis deepened and the Civil War began, Evans emerged as a notable Unionist in East Texas, sharing the Unionist views of Governor Sam Houston and resisting the movement to take Texas out of the United States. In 1860, reflecting his commitment to preserving the Union through compromise, he served as one of the four Texas delegates to the Constitutional Union Party convention, which nominated John Bell for the presidency on a platform of upholding the Constitution and the Union. Although Texas ultimately seceded and joined the Confederacy, Evans’s identification with Unionist politics marked him as part of a minority current in Texas political life during the war years.

Following the Civil War, Evans became active in the Reconstruction-era reorganization of Texas’s civil and judicial institutions under federal authority. In 1867 he was appointed collector of internal revenue, a federal post that placed him at the center of efforts to restore and regulate the fiscal structure of the state in the aftermath of the conflict. He served as a member of the Texas Reconstruction Convention in 1868, which revised the state constitution to conform to the requirements of congressional Reconstruction and to provide for the readmission of Texas to representation in Congress.

Evans’s legal and political experience led to his elevation to the state’s highest court. In 1870 he was appointed chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, serving in that capacity in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction administration of Governor Edmund J. Davis. He continued on the court as an associate justice and presiding judge from 1872 to 1873, participating in decisions that helped define the legal framework of postwar Texas. He resigned from the bench in 1873, as political control in the state shifted away from the Reconstruction government.

In the later phase of his public career, Evans returned to federal service. In 1875 he was appointed United States marshal for the eastern judicial district of Texas, a position that involved responsibility for federal law enforcement and the administration of federal courts in a region still adjusting to the legal and social changes brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction. He held this office while continuing to be identified with the Unionist and Reconstructionist legacy that had shaped his public life.

Lemuel Dale Evans died in Washington, D.C., on July 1, 1877, while still associated with federal service. His remains were interred in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, a burial ground for many members of Congress and federal officials, reflecting the national scope of a career that began in the frontier bar of East Texas and extended to the halls of Congress and the highest court of his adopted state.