He briefly attended Randolph-Macon College before receiving an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point from John C. Calhoun.

He was made a Colonel in July and commanded a small brigade at the First Battle of Bull Run, where he was the first Confederate field commander to perceive the Union intent to attack the Confederate left flank at dawn, after receiving flags signals by Captain Edward Alexander, who had spotted the Union columns threatening Evans' position through his spyglass.

In July 1862, he was given command of a newly formed brigade of South Carolina troops and led it to Richmond to join Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

Evans' Brigade participated in the battles of Second Manassas, South Mountain and Antietam in 1862 and was then assigned to Eastern North Carolina to oppose a major Union raid on Kinston and Goldsboro.

He was finally reinstated to command in the spring of 1864, but was severely injured in a buggy accident in Charleston as he was preparing to take his brigade north to the Petersburg Campaign.

Evans' Brigade, renamed for its new commander, Brigadier General Stephen Elliott, Jr., would soon find itself in the Petersburg trenches directly above the Union mine and suffer heavy casualties at the Battle of the Crater.

After the war, Evans became a high school principal in Cokesbury and then in Midway, Alabama, where he died in 1868, probably from the effects of his previous Charleston accident.

General William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, son of Robert E. Lee, once wrote of Evans: "Shanks" Evans, as he was so called, was a graduate of the military academy, a native South Carolinian, served in the respected old Second Dragoons, and was a good example of the rip-roaring, scorn all-care element which so largely abounded in that regiment.