George F. Hoar | |
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![]() Hoar c. 1870s | |
United States Senator from Massachusetts | |
In office March 4, 1877 –September 30, 1904 | |
Preceded by | George S. Boutwell |
Succeeded by | Winthrop M. Crane |
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts | |
In office March 4, 1869 –March 3, 1877 | |
Preceded by | John Denison Baldwin |
Succeeded by | William W. Rice |
Constituency | 8th district (1869–73) 9th district (1873–77) |
Member of the Massachusetts Senate from the Worcester district | |
In office January 7,1857 –January 5,1858 | |
Preceded by | Francis H. Dewey Jabez Fisher Artemas Lee Salem Towne |
Succeeded by | John M. Earle (redistricting) [lower-alpha 1] |
Member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from the Worcester district | |
In office January 7,1852 –January 4,1853 | |
Personal details | |
Born | Concord,Massachusetts,U.S. | August 29,1826
Died | September 30,1904 78) Worcester,Massachusetts,U.S. | (aged
Political party | Republican (after 1855) |
Other political affiliations | Free Soil (before 1855) |
Alma mater | Harvard University Harvard Law School |
Profession | Lawyer |
Signature | ![]() |
George Frisbie Hoar (August 29,1826 –September 30,1904) was an American attorney and politician who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1877 until his death in 1904. He belonged to an extended family that became politically prominent in 18th- and 19th-century New England.
An abolitionist and Radical Republican, [1] Hoar recognized the immorality of slavery [2] and was raised in a household which actively opposed racial bigotry and often defied laws they deemed unjust. [3] Hoar strongly opposed and assailed the Democratic Party,which he viewed as the party of the saloon keeper,ballot box stuffer,and Klansman.
Hoar was referred to by his middle name "Frisbie" among friends. [2]
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. [4] 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,of which he became the leader,he joined the Republican Party shortly after its founding. [5]
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. [6] For one term during his House service,from 1873 to 1875,his brother Ebenezer Rockood Hoar served alongside him. He was a Republican,but generally avoided heavy partisanship,and did not hesitate to criticize other members of the party whose actions or policies he believed were in error.
Between 1856 and 1857 Hoar was active as a Kansas Free-Stater,supported the Freedmen's Bureau,and took a leading part in reconstruction legislation. He took part in the investigation of the Crédit Mobilier scandal and the impeachment of William W. Belknap,President Grant's secretary of war. [5]
In 1880 Hoar 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." [7]
An economic nationalist,Hoar believed in capitalism as progress for civilization in accordance to the plans by God. [2] He supported measures which aimed at protecting American industries from foreign competition.
In Congress,Hoar established a reputation as a conservative on economic issues. [1] He opposed monetary inflation,post-war greenbacks without the backing of gold,and free coinage of silver. In addition to viewing silver as an "inferior metal," Hoar favored protectionist tariffs,a common position within the Republican Party. [1] He served as a member,and at times chairman,of the important Senate Judiciary Committee. [5]
In 1874,a dying Charles Sumner lay on his deathbed,and among his last visitors were Rep. Hoar. [1] Sumner told the representative to ensure passage of what became known as the Civil Rights Act of 1875:
You must take care of the civil rights bill – my bill, the civil rights bill – don't let it fail!
— Charles Sumner, March 11, 1874
Indeed, Hoar successfully fought in ensuring the bill's passage, [8] although it became law in a weakened form. [1]
Hoar was long noted as a fighter against political corruption. He campaigned for the rights of African Americans and Native Americans, which included the reusing of tribal lands for individual settlement of Native Americans. He was a strong advocate of the Dawes Act and allotment schemes which allocated communal tribal lands to individuals. He explained these views by comparing federal Indian relations to that of "a father to his son, or by a guardian to an insane ward..." [9] - out of context. He opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, describing it as "nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination" [10] [11] [12] 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.
During the 1884 United States presidential election, Hoar expressed sharp anger at Mugwumps, Republicans who supported Bourbon Democrat Grover Cleveland over GOP nominee James G. Blaine; he asserted to a friend who supported Cleveland: [3]
There was a time when I hoped to meet you in heaven, it is gone.
— Sen. George Frisbie Hoar
Hoar argued in the Senate in favor of women's suffrage as early as 1886. He was one of only seven senators, and one of only two Republican senators (along with Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire), to vote against the Edmunds–Tucker Act of 1887, which abolished women's suffrage in Utah after it had been a territorial right since 1870 (among other stipulations which were mainly aimed at eliminating Mormon polygamy and curbing the institutional power of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints there). [13]
Hoar was a consistent opponent of American imperialism. He did not share his Senate colleagues' enthusiasm for American intervention in Cuba in the late 1890s. In 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. [14]
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 three-hour speech in the Senate, saying: [15] [16]
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.
By this time, one of his strongest opponents on the pro-imperialist side was his fellow Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was a leading advocate for the Treaty of Paris. [17]
Hoar pushed for and served on the Lodge Committee, investigating allegations, later confirmed, of United States war crimes in the Philippine–American War. He also denounced the U.S. intervention in Panama.
Hoar voted against the Chinese Exclusion Act. [3]
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, [18] and served as vice-president from 1878 to 1884, and then served as president from 1884 to 1887. [19] In 1887 he was among the founders of the American Irish Historical Society. [20] He was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in 1880, an overseer of Harvard University from 1896, [5] 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. [21]
Hoar was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1901. [22] His autobiography, Autobiography of Seventy Years, was published in 1903. It appeared first in serial form in Scribner's magazine.
In 1904, he was one of several high-profile investors who backed the Intercontinental Correspondence University, [23] but the institution folded by 1915. He attended the Unitarian Church of All Souls in Washington, D.C. [24]
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). [25] In 1862, he married Ruth Ann Miller (1830–1903). [26] With his first wife, he was the father of a son, U.S. Representative Rockwood Hoar, and a daughter, Mary (1854–1929). [26] With his second wife he was the father of a daughter, Alice (1863–1864). [26]
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.
Samuel Hoar was a United States lawyer and politician. A member of a prominent political family in Massachusetts, he was a leading 19th century lawyer of that state. He was associated with the Federalist Party until its decline after the War of 1812. Over his career, Hoar developed a reputation as a prominent Massachusetts anti-slavery politician and spokesperson. He became a leading member of the Massachusetts Whig Party, a leading and founding member of the Massachusetts Free Soil Party, and a founding member and chair of the committee that organized the founding convention for the Massachusetts Republican Party in 1854.
Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar was an American politician, lawyer, and jurist from Massachusetts. He served as U.S. Attorney General from 1869 to 1870, and was the first head of the newly created Department of Justice. Hoar assisted President Ulysses S. Grant in appointing two United States Supreme Court justices and was himself nominated to the Court. His nomination was rejected by the United States Senate, in part for his positions on patronage reform. In 1871, Hoar was appointed by Grant to the United States high commission that negotiated the Treaty of Washington between the U.S. and the United Kingdom, helping to settle the Alabama Claims.
Frederick Huntington Gillett was an American politician who served as the 42nd Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1921 to 1925 and as a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts from 1925 to 1931. A Republican, Gillett first began his career in politics when he served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1890 to 1891, and would go on to serve in the House from 1893 to 1925. At the time of his election, he was the oldest individual elected to a first term in the Senate, a record that he would hold until Peter Welch's victory in the 2022 United States Senate election in Vermont 98 years later.
Sherman Hoar, was an American lawyer, member of Congress representing Massachusetts, and U.S. District Attorney for Massachusetts. As a young man he was the model for the head of the John Harvard statue now in the Harvard Yard.
Rockwood Hoar was a Representative from Massachusetts, the son of Massachusetts US Senator George Frisbie Hoar.
Charles Grenfill Washburn was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Massachusetts.
John Denison Baldwin was an American politician, Congregationalist minister, newspaper editor, and popular anthropological writer. He was a member of the Connecticut State House of Representatives and later a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts.
William Whitney Rice was a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts.
The "Half-Breeds" were a political faction of the United States Republican Party in the late 19th century.
Hon. Bezaleel Taft Jr. was born in Uxbridge, Worcester County, Massachusetts on September 8, 1780 and died in Uxbridge, at age 65 on July 16, 1846. He was a State Senator and Massachusetts politician.
The John Spurr House is an historic house on Main Street in Charlton, Massachusetts. The house was built in 1798 and added to the National Historic Register in 1976.
George Franklin Edmunds was an American attorney and Republican politician who represented the state of Vermont in the United States Senate from 1866 to 1891. He was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1880 and 1884 as a leading representative of New England and of the faction favoring civil service reform.
The 1877 United States Senate election in Massachusetts was held in January 1877. Incumbent Republican Senator George S. Boutwell, who had won a special election for the remainder of Henry Wilson's term, was defeated by reformist U.S. Representative George Frisbie Hoar.
The 1883 United States Senate election in Massachusetts was held in January 1883. Incumbent Republican Senator George Frisbie Hoar was re-elected to a second term in office despite a serious challenge from Democrats and members of his own party.
The 1889 United States Senate election in Massachusetts was held in January 1889. Incumbent Republican Senator George Frisbie Hoar was re-elected to a third term in office with no serious opposition.
The 1895 United States Senate election in Massachusetts was held in January 1895. Incumbent Republican Senator George Frisbie Hoar was re-elected to a fourth term in office.
The 1901 United States Senate election in Massachusetts was held in January 1901. Incumbent Republican Senator George Frisbie Hoar was re-elected to a fifth term in office.
Hoar is an English surname, a variant of Hoare, and is derived from the Middle English hor(e) meaning grey- or white-haired. Notable people with the surname include:
The George Frisbie Hoar statue is a public monument in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. Located on the north side of the Worcester City Hall, the monument honors George Frisbie Hoar, a politician from the city. The monument, which consists of a statue designed by Daniel Chester French, was dedicated in 1908.
The 1874 Massachusetts gubernatorial election was held on November 3, 1874. Republican acting Governor Thomas Talbot, who took office after the resignation of William B. Washburn, was defeated by Democrat William Gaston, a former Mayor of Boston.
Taking the ground that the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created free and equal, is the cardinal principle upon which this Government is established, he went on to declare that no question of policy could be made a pretext for setting it aside to make a distinction against any race of men. He said that all the arguments against the negroes used years ago were now applied to the Chinese.