Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar (21 February 1816 – 31 January 1895) was United States Attorney General from 5 March 1869 to 22 November 1870 (succeeding William M. Evarts and preceding Amos T. Akerman) and a member of the US House of Representatives (R-MA 7) from 4 March 1873 to 3 March 1875 (succeeding Constantine Esty and preceding John Tarbox).
Biography[]
Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar was born in Concord, Massachusetts on 21 February 1816, the son of Samuel Hoar, the brother of George Frisbie Hoar, the cousin of Roger Sherman Baldwin, William M. Evarts, and Sherman Day. He graduated from Harvard at the age of nineteen and, after travelling to Kentucky and hearing Henry Clay speak, he returned to Concord to study law. He became a lawyer in Concord and Boston in 1840, and he became affiliated with the Conscience Whigs before serving in the State Senate in 1846, cofounding the Free Soil Party in Massachusetts in 1848, and serving as a common pleas court judge in Boston from 1849 to 1855. He also served as United States Attorney General under President Ulysses S. Grant; he was a moderate Republican who had opposed Andrew Johnson's impeachment and opposed federal intervention in protecting African-American citizens during Reconstruction, and he was replaced by the Radical Republican Amos T. Akerman in 1870. Hoar went on to serve in the US House of Representatives from 1873 to 1875, and he died in Concord in 1895.