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.

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.

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.

He took part in the investigation of the Crédit Mobilier scandal and the impeachment of William W. Belknap, President Grant's secretary of war.

In addition to viewing silver as an "inferior metal," Hoar favored protectionist tariffs, a common position within the Republican Party.

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.

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.Hoar argued in the Senate in favor of women's suffrage as early as 1886.

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.

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.

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.

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.