Evarts attended Boston Latin School, then Yale College. In his college class were Morrison Waite, later Chief Justice of the United States, Samuel J. Tilden, future New York Governor and Democratic presidential nominee and one of the contestants in the electoral commissions controversy in which Evarts acted as counsel for the Republicans, chemist Benjamin Silliman, Jr. and Edwards Pierrepont, later United States Attorney General. While at Yale he became a member of two secret societies, the literary and debate oriented Linonian Society and Skull and Bones; he later extolled the former and much later denounced all such secret societies. Evarts was one of the founders of "Yale Literary Magazine" in 1836. He graduated third in his class in 1837.