Samuel Hoar

Samuel Hoar (May 18, 1778 – November 2, 1856) was an American lawyer, legislator, and prominent anti-slavery politician from Massachusetts. A member of a distinguished New England political family, he was widely regarded as one of the leading lawyers of Massachusetts in the first half of the nineteenth century. Initially aligned with the Federalist Party until its decline after the War of 1812, he later became a leading member of the Massachusetts Whig Party, a founding figure in the Massachusetts Free Soil Party, and a founding member and chair of the committee that organized the convention establishing the Massachusetts Republican Party in 1854. Over the course of his career, he developed a reputation as a forceful opponent of slavery and an influential spokesperson for anti-slavery sentiment in his state.

Hoar was born in Lincoln, Massachusetts, on May 18, 1778, into a family that would become deeply involved in law and public life. As a young man he moved to neighboring Concord, Massachusetts, where he would reside for most of his adult life and become a central figure in the town’s civic and intellectual community. He attended Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1802, and subsequently studied law. In 1805 he was admitted to the bar and began the practice of law, quickly earning recognition for his legal acumen, particularly in matters relating to waterways, canals, and maritime commerce. On October 13, 1812, he married Sarah Sherman (1785–1862) of New Haven, Connecticut, the youngest child of Roger Sherman—signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution—and his second wife, Rebecca Minot Prescott. This marriage linked Hoar to one of the most notable political families of the Revolutionary generation and further anchored his position within the New England elite.

By the 1820s Hoar had emerged as an important figure in Massachusetts public affairs. In 1820 he served as a delegate to the Massachusetts constitutional convention, participating in the revision of the state’s fundamental law at a time of significant political and social change. His standing in the intellectual community was recognized when he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1824. Hoar also entered elective office at the state level, serving in the Massachusetts Senate in 1826, 1832, and 1833. Originally a Federalist, he gravitated toward the emerging Anti-Jacksonian and Whig coalitions as national politics realigned in the 1820s and 1830s, and he became known for his opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson.

Hoar’s national political career began with his election as an Anti-Jacksonian to the Twenty-fourth Congress, where he served as a Representative from Massachusetts from March 4, 1835, to March 3, 1837. During his single term in the U.S. House of Representatives he aligned with the broader Whig opposition to Jacksonian Democracy, though he was not returned to Congress, being an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1836 to the Twenty-fifth Congress. After leaving Congress he continued to play a role in national party politics; in 1839 he served as a Massachusetts delegate to the Whig National Convention, reflecting his growing prominence within the Whig organization. Throughout these years he maintained his law practice and continued to build his reputation as an expert on legal questions involving navigation, commerce, and the regulation of waterways and canals.

Hoar is best known in American history for his role in a major interstate controversy over the status of free African American citizens. In the decades before the Civil War, a constitutional and legal conflict developed between Massachusetts and the slaveholding states of South Carolina and Louisiana over the seizure of free Black seamen who were citizens or residents of Massachusetts. South Carolina had enacted laws prohibiting the emancipation of slaves and barring the entry of free African Americans into the state. Under these laws, free African American sailors arriving in South Carolina ports aboard merchant vessels were arrested; if the sailors or their captains failed to pay fines imposed for their “illegal” entry, the sailors could be sold into slavery to satisfy the penalties. In 1844 the Massachusetts legislature authorized the governor to appoint a commissioner to reside in Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana, to gather information on Massachusetts citizens unlawfully seized under these statutes and to initiate test cases in higher courts to challenge the constitutionality of such laws.

In 1844 Massachusetts Governor George N. Briggs, a Whig, appointed Hoar as commissioner to South Carolina. Upon receiving notice of this appointment, South Carolina Governor James H. Hammond submitted the matter to the South Carolina legislature, which adopted resolutions asserting the state’s right to exclude any persons deemed dangerous, denying that free African Americans were citizens of the United States, and directing that the Massachusetts agent be expelled. The legislature resolved that the governor should “expel from our territory the said agent, after due notice to depart; and that the legislature will sustain the executive authority in any measures that may be adopted for the purpose aforesaid.” When Hoar arrived in Charleston in December 1844, accompanied by his daughter Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, local authorities and citizens warned him to leave. Prevented from appearing before the courts to test the law, he and his daughter were quietly escorted from their hotel to a ship by leading citizens who feared mob violence. Hoar’s mission was thus effectively thwarted. In his report as Massachusetts commissioner he posed a pointed challenge to the constitutional order, asking whether the Constitution of the United States had “the least practical validity or binding force in South Carolina,” and whether other states were “to be regarded as the conquered provinces of South Carolina.” News of his expulsion aroused widespread indignation in Massachusetts, strengthened anti-slavery sentiment, and contributed to the growing movement in the state against slavery and in favor of more assertive resistance to pro-slavery policies.

Hoar continued to hold public office and to shape anti-slavery politics in Massachusetts in the decade following the Charleston episode. In 1845 he was elected to the Massachusetts Governor’s Council, further cementing his influence in state government. As the national debate over slavery intensified, he became one of the leading figures in the formation of new political organizations opposed to the expansion of slavery. In 1848 he chaired the Massachusetts Free Soil Party convention in Worcester, helping to organize a state-level expression of the broader Free Soil movement that opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. At the age of seventy-two, in 1850, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, underscoring his continued vigor and relevance in public life. He was also a co-founder of the first Concord Academy, established in 1822 and operating until 1863, reflecting his interest in education and local civic improvement.

In 1854 Hoar played a central role in the creation of the Massachusetts Republican Party. That year he chaired a committee that issued a public call summoning leading anti-slavery politicians and citizens to a meeting at the American House in Boston on July 7, 1854, to consider the formation of a new political party and to organize a state convention. Anger over the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the question of slavery in the federal territories were primary motivations behind this effort. The resulting mass convention of approximately 2,500 people, held in the open air on the common in Worcester on September 7, 1854, founded the Massachusetts Republican Party. The new organization drew principally from the Massachusetts Free Soil Party, along with elements of the Whig Party and anti-slavery Democrats. At a subsequent convention in Springfield on October 17, 1854, the Massachusetts Free Soil Party voted to adopt the Republican candidates and to merge into the new Republican organization. In 1855, at the age of seventy-seven, Hoar was appointed chair of a Massachusetts Republican committee to organize a mass assemblage or convention to consider actions that might be taken by Massachusetts citizens in response to pro-slavery violence in the recent Kansas elections—events later known as “Bleeding Kansas”—with the aim of uniting all anti-slavery citizens of Massachusetts in national anti-slavery efforts.

Hoar’s family life was closely intertwined with the intellectual and political currents of New England. Samuel and Sarah Hoar had six children, five of whom survived to adulthood, and several became influential figures. Their daughter Elizabeth Sherman Hoar (July 14, 1814 – April 7, 1878) was engaged to Charles Chauncy Emerson (1808–1836), the youngest brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a young law partner of Samuel Hoar, but Charles died of tuberculosis before their marriage, and she never married. Elizabeth was an intimate of the Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau families; Ralph Waldo Emerson invited her into the Transcendentalist circle, and she assisted in producing their journal, The Dial. Their son Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar (1816–1895), a Harvard graduate of the class of 1835, became an Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and later served as Attorney General of the United States under President Ulysses S. Grant; Grant nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Senate did not confirm the nomination. Ebenezer married Caroline Brooks of Concord. Another daughter, Sarah Sherman Hoar (1817–1907), married Robert Boyd Storer (1796–1870), a Boston importer engaged in trade with Russia and the Russian consul at Boston. A son, Samuel Johnson Hoar (February 4, 1820 – January 10, 1821), died in infancy.

Their son Edward Sherman Hoar (1823–1893), Harvard class of 1844, married his childhood neighbor Elizabeth Hallet Prichard of Concord and was a close friend of Henry David Thoreau; the Thoreau family lived across Main Street from the Hoars in several houses over the years. Edward accompanied Thoreau on various hiking and canoeing excursions and was involved with him in a notable incident on April 30, 1844, when a cooking fire they had set along the Sudbury River near Fairhaven Bay in Concord escaped control and burned more than 100 acres (about 400,000 m²) of forest. Edward later served as a California state district attorney for the fourth judicial district in 1850 before returning to Massachusetts in 1857. His extensive collection of pressed plants, gathered largely in Concord and including many specimens left to him by Thoreau, was donated by his daughter in 1912 to the New England Botanical Club herbarium at Harvard University. Another son, George Frisbie Hoar (1826–1904), Harvard class of 1845, moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, as a young man and became one of the most prominent Republican politicians of his generation, serving as a United States Senator from Massachusetts for twenty-seven years, from 1877 until his death. Through these descendants, the Hoar family became one of the most prominent political families in Massachusetts, with multiple individuals named Samuel Hoar appearing in public life from the eighteenth century onward.

Samuel Hoar remained in Concord during his later years, continuing to be regarded as an elder statesman of the Massachusetts bar and of the anti-slavery cause. He died in Concord on November 2, 1856, at the age of seventy-eight. His life and career, spanning from the early Republic through the sectional crisis of the 1850s, linked the Revolutionary generation of his father-in-law Roger Sherman to the Civil War era leadership of his sons and helped shape the political and moral climate of Massachusetts in the decades leading up to the conflict.