A bill passed in 1851, to which no objection was made, vested the election of this body in the Legislature. But after a few years' trial, that was abandoned, and the members of the Overseers are now chosen by the Alumni of the College.
I shall speak in a later chapter of the foundation of the Free Soil Party. The call for the Convention held at Worcester on the 28th of June, 1848, addressed to all persons opposed to the election of Cass and Taylor, written by his son, E. R. Hoar, was headed by Mr. Hoar. He presided over the meeting, and delegates were elected to a National Convention to be held at Buffalo, which nominated Van Buren and Adams for President and Vice-President. This was the origin of the Republican party.
After 1848, Mr. Hoar did not relax his efforts to bring about a union of all parties in the North, in opposition to further encroachments of the slave power. In accomplishing this end, his age, the regard in which he was held by all classes of people, his known disinterestedness and independence, fitted him to exert a large influence. The Free Soil movement had led to the formation of a party in Massachusetts, small in numbers, but zealous, active, in earnest, containing many able leaders, eloquent orators, and vigorous writers. They had sent Charles Allen to the lower House of Congress, and Sumner and Rantoul to the Senate. But they had apparently made little impression on the national strength of either of the old parties.
In 1854, the passage of the measure known as the Kansas- Nebraska Bill afforded a new opportunity. A meeting of citizens of Concord appointed a committee, of which Mr. Hoar was Chairman, and A. G. Fay, Secretary, who called a meeting of prominent persons from different parts of the State to meet at the American House in Boston, to take measures for forming a new party and calling a State Convention. This Convention was held at Worcester on the 7th of September, and formed a party under the name of Republican, and nominated candidates for State offices. Its meeting has been claimed to be the foundation of the Republican party of Massachusetts, and its twenty- fifth anniversary was celebrated accordingly in 1879. But it effected little more than to change the name of the Free Soil party. Few Whigs or Democrats united to the movement. A secret organization called Americans, or Know-Nothings, swept the Commonwealth like a wave, electing all the State officers, and, with scarcely an exception, the entire Legislature.
The candidate for Governor nominated by the Republicans at Worcester, himself joined the Know-Nothings, and labored to defeat his own election.
The next year the attempt was more successful. On the 10th of August, 1855, a meeting without distinction of party was held at Chapman Hall, in Boston, which was addressed by Mr. Hoar, George Bliss, Franklin Dexter, William Brigham, Lyman Beecher, Richard H. Dana, Jr., Charles F. Adams, Henry Wilson, Stephen C. Phillips, and others. On the 30th of the same month, a meeting of conference committees was held, representing the American or Know-Nothing party, the Know-Somethings, an antislavery organization which had held a National Convention at Cleveland in June, and the Chapman Hall Convention. This conference appointed a committee of twenty-six to call a State Convention, at the head of which they placed Mr. Hoar. This State Convention was held at Worcester, nominated Julius Rockwell for Governor, and the organization which it created has constituted the Republican party of Massachusetts to the present day.
The part taken in calling this Convention, and in promoting the union which gave it birth, was Mr. Hoar's last important public service. His failing health prevented his taking an active share in the Presidential campaign of 1856.
I prefer, in putting on record this brief estimate of a character which has been to me the principal object of reverence and honor in my life, to use the language of others, and not my own. From many tributes to my father's character, from persons more impartial than I can be, I have selected two or three.
I cannot quote at length Ralph Waldo Emerson's sketches of Mr. Hoar, who was his near neighbor and intimate personal friend for many years. They are noble and faithful as portraits of Van Dyke or Titian. One of them is a speech made in Concord town-meeting on the third day of November, 1856, the day after Mr. Hoar's death. The other was contributed to the Unitarian Monthly Religious Magazine, then edited by Rev. Dr. Huntington, afterward Bishop of New York. Mr. Emerson says in one of them: "His head, with singular grace in its lines, had a resemblance to the bust of Dante. He retained to the last the erectness of his tall but slender form, and not less the full strength of his mind. Such was, in old age, the beauty of his person and carriage, as if his mind radiated, and made the same impression of probity on all beholders."
He ends with this quatrain: