HOAR, SAMUEL (1778--1856), American lawyer, was born in Lincoln, Massachusetts, on the 18th of May 1778. He was the son of Samuel Hoar, an officer in the American army during the War of Independence, for many years a member of the Massachusetts General Court, and a member in 1820-1821 of the state Constitutional Convention. The son graduated at Harvard in 1802, was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1805 and began practice at Concord. His success in his profession was immediate, and for a half-century he was one of the leading lawyers of Massachusetts. He was in early life a Federalist and was later an ardent Whig in politics. He was a member of the state senate in 1825, 1832 and 1833, and of the national house of representatives in 1835-1837, during which time he made a notable speech in favour of the constitutional right of congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. In November 1844, having retired from active legal practice some years before, he went to Charleston, S.C., at the request of Governor George Nixon Briggs (1796-1861), to test in the courts of South Carolina the constitutionality of the state law which provided that "it shall not be lawful for any free negro, or person of color, to come into this state on board any vessel, as a cook, steward or mariner, or in any other employment," and that such free negroes should be seized and locked up until the vessels on which they had come were ready for sea, when they should be returned to such vessels. His visit aroused great excitment, he was threatened with personal injury, the state legislature passed resolutions calling for his expulsion, and he was compelled to leave early in December. In 1848 he was prominent in the Free Soil movement in Massachusetts, and subsequently assisted in the organization of the Republican Party. In 1850 he served in the Massachusetts house of representatives. He married a daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut. He died at Concord, Massachusetts, on the 2nd of November 1856. See a memoir by his son G. F. Hoar in _Memorial Biographies of the New England Historic Genealogical Society_, vol. iii. (Boston, 1883); the estimate by R. W. Emerson in _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_ (Boston, 1903); and "Samuel Hoar's Expulsion from Charleston," _Old South Leaflets_, vol. vi. No. 140.