III. SOME KEY CONCORD ABOLITIONISTS
III.E. The Hoar Family:
Concord-born, Harvard-educated lawyer and judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar was the second of six children of Squire Samuel Hoar and Sarah Sherman Hoar, who lived on Main Street, near the Brookses, the Whitings, and the Thoreaus. The Hoars and the Brookses were allied in 1840, when Rockwood married Caroline Downes Brooks, daughter of Concord lawyer Nathan Brooks and step-daughter of abolitionist Mary Merrick Brooks. (The young couple subsequently built a house of their own on Main Street.) There were personal connections between the Hoars and Emersons, as well. Rockwood Hoar was one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's good friends. Moreover, his sister Elizabeth Hoar—fiancée of Emerson's brother Charles, who died in 1836—was close to all of the Emersons.
Patriarch Samuel Hoar addressed slavery through the law and politics. Asked in 1844 by George Briggs, Governor of Massachusetts, to protest a South Carolina law under which free black Massachusetts sailors entering Charleston aboard northern ships were seized, imprisoned, and sometimes sold into slavery, he traveled south with his daughter Elizabeth to meet with James Hammond, Governor of South Carolina, regarding the constitutionality of the law. Governor Hammond refused to speak with him. Threatened with mob violence, Hoar left South Carolina against his will. The episode outraged the antislavery community in Massachusetts.
In 1854, Sam Hoar chaired a local committee appointed to call a meeting of prominent public figures at the American House in Boston in order to form a new political party and to call a state convention. Precipitated by antislavery anger over the Kansas-Nebraska Act (by which the territories of Kansas and Nebraska would decide for themselves whether to be slave or free states), the convention in Worcester in September of 1854 resulted in the formation of the Republican Party of Massachusetts out of the Free Soil Party.
Like his father, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar—a judge of the Court of Common Pleas from 1849 to 1855, a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1859 to 1869, and United States Attorney General in the cabinet of President Ulysses S. Grant from 1869 to 1870—was inclined to attack slavery through the legal and political system in which he, too, was an insider. He was in succession a Whig, a Free Soiler, and a Republican. Steeped in the law though he was, however, he was also willing to use his authority to protect those whose abolitionism took more radical forms. In 1859, when United States marshal's deputies attempted to arrest Frank Sanborn in connection with his role in John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Hoar issued the writ of habeas corpus that prevented them from doing so.
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