Background
George Frisbie Hoar was born on August 29, 1826 in Concord, Massachussets, United States. He was the son of Sarah (Sherman) and Samuel Hoar and the brother of E. Rockwood Hoar.
George Frisbie Hoar was born on August 29, 1826 in Concord, Massachussets, United States. He was the son of Sarah (Sherman) and Samuel Hoar and the brother of E. Rockwood Hoar.
Hoar was educated in the academy at Concord, Harvard College, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1846, and the Harvard Law School, from which he received a Bachelor of Law degree in 1849.
In 1849 Hoar began the practice of law in Worcester, where he continued to make his home for the rest of his life. His beginning in politics was in folding and directing the call, prepared by his father and brother, for the convention which launched the Free Soil party in Massachusetts.
He presided over the Republican state convention in 1871, 1877, 1882, and 1885. He was a delegate to its national convention from 1876 to 1888, and chairman of the one which nominated Garfield. In 1852 he was elected to the state House of Representatives and five years later he served a term in the Senate.
In 1869, during his absence in England, he was elected as a Republican to Congress, and served in the House till 1877, when he was elected by the legislature to the Senate. Reëlected four times, he continued to represent Massachusetts in the Senate until his death. During his seven years in the House his most congenial work was on the committee on the judiciary. He was one of the managers of the House in the impeachment of William Belknap and presented a vigorous argument for his conviction despite the plea that the Senate had no jurisdiction because the defendant was no longer in office as secretary of war. He was a member of the electoral commission which determined the outcome of the Hayes-Tilden controversy in 1877.
In 1873 he was chairman of the special committee which investigated governmental conditions in Louisiana. In the Senate his most effective work was done upon measures of a professional or an administrative character, rather than upon more popular political measures. In his own opinion his most important service to the country was on the committee on claims, where he exercised great influence in determining the doctrines which guided the Senate's action on Civil War claims of individuals, corporate bodies, and states. For more than twenty-five years he served continuously on the committee on privileges and elections, and his opinions are cited as authoritative.
He was the author of the law of 1887 which repealed the portion of the tenure-of-office act then in force, and of the presidential succession act of 1886, and he had a large part in framing bankruptcy and antitrust legislation. Moral issues won his prompt and tireless support. In the House he opposed the "salary grab" of 1873 and he turned over every penny of back pay which had brought to him to found a scholarship in the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In the Senate he was the chief sponsor for laws to curb lotteries. His contempt for the bigotry of the "A. P. A. " nativist movement led him, against the advice of his friends, to write a scathing letter which helped bury that movement "in the 'cellar' in which it was born. " Reckless of the possible political effect upon his future, he fought most strenuously against the Republican administration's Philippine policy. Although his stand upon this question was disapproved in Massachusetts, yet so great was the admiration for his sincerity that he was reelected in 1901 by a very large majority.
Twice he was offered an appointment to the supreme judicial court of Massachusetts. Hayes and McKinley each offered to send him to represent the United States in England, where his friendships among judges and scholars and statesmen would have made his position exceptionally congenial, but his modest means did not permit him to accept. His counsel was sought in behalf of many educational and literary institutions. For twelve years he was an overseer of Harvard College. He helped establish in his home city the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Clark University and was an influential trustee of both these institutions from their organization until his death. He served as a regent of the Smithsonian Institution and as president of the American Antiquarian Society and of the American Historical Association. He was ever a student, accumulated for himself a choice library in history and in English and classical literature, and took an active interest in the development of the Library of Congress.
Hoar was a liberal Unitarian, scrupulous in the support of his church and tolerant of the views of others.
For twenty years Hoar was a member of the committee on the judiciary and during much of the time its chairman. At the request of this committee he waited upon President McKinley to protest against his practice of appointing senators upon commissions whose work was later to come before the Senate for approval.
Hoar was intimately associated with the planning and the early organization of the Republican party in the state and, for half a century, he gave to it service in many responsible positions without, apparently, appreciating those social and economic developments which had changed the party of Abraham Lincoln to that of Mark Hanna and William McKinley.
Hoar was a formidable debater, quick in repartee and in sustaining his arguments by legal and historical precedents. He was often invited to address literary and historical associations. Though he had neither a pleasing voice nor a graceful presence, he was an effective speaker possessed of a noble and dignified style. The stern puritanism to which he had been accustomed in childhood was mollified in his later years.
Hoar was twice married: to Mary Louisa Spurr in 1853, and to Ruth Ann Miller in 1862. He was survived by the two children of his first wife.