George Frisbie Hoar

Hoar was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1826. He studied for several months at a boarding school in Waltham, Massachusetts, run by Samuel and Sarah Bradford Ripley.[1] He graduated from Harvard University in 1846 and earned his law degree at Harvard Law School in 1849. He was admitted to the bar and settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he practiced law. Initially a member of the Free Soil Party, he joined the Republican Party shortly after its founding.

Hoar was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1852 and to the Massachusetts Senate in 1857.

He represented Massachusetts as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for four terms from 1869 to 1877 and then served in the U.S. Senate until his death during his fifth term. For one term during his House service, from 1873 to 1875, his brother Ebenezer Rockood Hoar served alongside him. He was a Republican, who generally avoided party partisanship and did not hesitate to criticize other members of his party whose actions or policies he believed were in error. In 1880 he was chairman of the 1880 Republican National Convention. When James Garfield, who eventually won the party's nomination and the presidential election, rose to object that votes were being cast for him without his consent, Hoar disallowed his objection. He later said: "I was terribly afraid that he would say something that would make his nomination impossible."[2]

Hoar was long noted as a fighter against political corruption. He campaigned for the rights of African Americans and Native Americans, though his "campaigning" for Native Americans included the breakup of tribal lands for white settlement. He was a strong advocate of the Dawes Act and allotment schemes which stole millions of acres of Native land. He justified these views by comparing Federal Indian relations to that of "a father to his son, or by a guardian to an insane ward..."[3] He opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, describing it as "nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination"[4][5][6] He was a member of the Congressional Electoral Commission that settled the highly disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election. He authored the Presidential Succession Act of 1886.

He argued in the Senate in favor of women's suffrage as early as 1886.

He was a consistent opponent of American imperialism. He did not share his Senate colleagues' enthusiasm for American intervention in Cuba in the late 1890s. On December 1897, he met with Native Hawaiian leaders opposed to the annexation of their nation. He then presented the Kūʻē Petitions to Congress and helped to defeat President William McKinley's attempt to annex the Republic of Hawaii by treaty, though the islands were eventually annexed by means of joint resolution, called the Newlands Resolution.[7]

George F. Hoar in his later years.

After the Spanish–American War, Hoar became one of the Senate's most outspoken opponents of the imperialism of the McKinley administration. He denounced the Philippine–American War and called for independence for the Philippines in a 3-hour speech in the Senate, saying:[8][9]

You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. Your practical statesmanship which disdains to take George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or the soldiers of the Revolution or of the Civil War as models, has looked in some cases to Spain for your example. I believe—nay, I know—that in general our officers and soldiers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty. Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of the garment of the American and to welcome him as a liberator, who thronged after your men when they landed on those islands with benediction and gratitude, into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries can not eradicate.

Hoar pushed for and served on the Lodge Committee, investigating allegations, later confirmed, of war crimes in the Philippine–American War. He also denounced the U.S. intervention in Panama.

Hoar voted against the Chinese Exclusion Act.[10]

In 1865, Hoar was one of the founders of the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science, now the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Hoar was active in the American Historical Association and the American Antiquarian Society, serving terms as president of both organizations. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1853,[11] and served as vice-president from 1878 to 1884, and then served as president from 1884 to 1887.[12] In 1887 he was among the founders of the American Irish Historical Society.[13] He was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in 1880 and a trustee of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Through his efforts, the lost manuscript of William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (1620–1647), an important founding document of the United States, was returned to Massachusetts, after being discovered in Fulham Palace, London, in 1855.[14]

Hoar was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1901.[15] His autobiography, Autobiography of Seventy Years, was published in 1903. It appeared first in serial form in Scribner's magazine.

He attended the Unitarian Church of All Souls in Washington, D.C.[16]

Hoar enjoyed good health until June 1904. He died in Worcester on September 30 of that year and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord. After his death, a statue of him was erected in front of Worcester's city hall, paid for by public donations.

In 1853, Hoar married Mary Louisa Spurr (1831–1859).[17] In 1862, he married Ruth Ann Miller (1830–1903).[18] With his first wife, he was the father of a son, Rockwood Hoar, and a daughter, Mary (1854–1929).[18] With his second wife he was the father of a daughter, Alice (1863–1864).[18]

Through his mother, Sarah Sherman, G.F. Hoar was a grandson of prominent political figure, Roger Sherman and Sherman's second wife, Rebecca Minot Prescott. Roger Sherman signed the Articles of Confederation, United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

• G.F. Hoar's father, Samuel Hoar, was a prominent lawyer who served on the Massachusetts state senate and the United States House of Representatives.
  • G.F. Hoar's brother Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar was an Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, one of Ulysses S. Grant's Attorneys General, and a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.
  • G.F. Hoar's first cousin Roger Sherman Baldwin was Governor of Connecticut and a U.S. Senator; and William Maxwell Evarts was US Secretary of State, U.S. Attorney General and a U.S. Senator.
  • He was the uncle of U.S. Representative Sherman Hoar, and the great uncle of Massachusetts State Senator and Assistant Attorney General Roger Sherman Hoar.

• List of United States Congress members who died in office (1900–1949)

Additional sources

• United States Congress. "George Frisbie Hoar (id: H000654)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress..
• Gillett, Frederick H. (1934). George Frisbie Hoar. Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Hoar, George F. Autobiography of Seventy Years. 2 vols., New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1903.
• Welch, Richard E., Jr. George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.
• Sherman, Thomas Townsend (1920). Sherman Genealogy Including Families of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, England. T. A. Wright. p. 345.
• George Frisbie Hoar Papers
• Sherman-Hoar family at Political Graveyard
• Baldwin-Greene-Gager family of Connecticut at Political Graveyard
• George Frisbie Hoar, late a representative from Massachusetts, Memorial addresses delivered in the House of Representatives and Senate frontispiece 1905

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Wikisource has the text of a 1892 Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography article about George Frisbie Hoar.

• Works by George Frisbie Hoar at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about George Frisbie Hoar at Internet Archive