766 GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR. 



short-lived run in the newspapers, became to him a permanent weapon. 

 To the latest day of his life he applied it to all who took part in that out- 

 break, and seemed to regard it as in itself a sutRcient condemnation. 



This was also true, though not so largely, of his relation to all Demo- 

 crats. It was the general testimony of General Butler's friends, for 

 instance, that he was helped and not hindered in his [)olitical efforts by 

 tlie unmerciful and undiscriminating manner in which both Senator Hoar 

 and his brother Judge Hoar attacked him in conventions ; and one has 

 only to read the long chapter on this subject in Senator Hoar's autobiog- 

 raphy to see how largely this was a matter of temperament and an 

 advocate's argument, not a judge's summing up. He does some slight 

 justice to the real services of Butler's prompt adhesion to the war side, 

 carrying the Democratic Party with him in Massachusetts ; and, on the 

 other hand, while brinfjins out, as was fair enough, the general tone of 

 trickiness which spoiled that demagogue's course, he reserves his chief 

 and overwhelming condemnation for Butler's retreat from his first attack 

 on Petersburg, though a little wider inquiry would have satisfied him 

 that this was one of the few occasions where that general was probably 

 right. I know that Col. William Lamb, who commanded Fort Fisher 

 until its fall, always testified that Butler himself was entirely justified in 

 this, that the resources in his hands — especially the naval forces — were 

 wholly inadequate to success, and that the general who followed him 

 was more fortunate simply because he was better provided. Should 

 General Butler ever attain to a statue in the Boston State House, it will 

 be owing largely to the unfairness of a class of bitter opponents of which 

 the Hoar brothers were the leaders. 



These were the perils that belonged to Mr. Hoar's temperament. His 

 long and honorable course of independence is nowhere so well exhibited 

 as in an article by Mr. Talcott Williams of Philadelphia, one of the very 

 ablest of American writers, in the " American Monthly Review of Re- 

 views " for November, 1904. Mr. Williams, the first writer to place 

 Mr. Hoar's claims at the highest, is also the first to speak with perfect 

 frankness of his personal faults. He says, " He had many faults. 

 Quick-tempered, he had the impatience over slower and more pliable' 

 men frequent in those of high intellectual powers. In his early years of 

 service, he had his share of egotism, not unnatural. He was not at his 

 best in making it easy for his colleagues to get on with him, and he 

 lacked in tact, affronting men by a lofty superiority, to himself uncon- 

 scious, and to other men sometimes seeming to be self-conscious. He 

 displayed, in short, and particularly before he had reached the full stat- 



