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Rh against the compromise measures of 1850, the question being then before the United States congress. He was sent with Eli Thayer in 1856 to the convention at Buffalo to aid in the settling of Kansas by Northern Free Soilers. He declined reelection, and devoted himself to the law until he was elected to the state senate in 1857, his nomination having again been made without his solicitation. He was made chairman of the judiciary committee and became the author of the celebrated report which settled and defined the limitations of the executive and the legislative authority in the government of the commonwealth. He worked hard as a legislator, being in his seat every day of the session of 1852 and absent only one day from the session in 1857 (to attend an important law suit). He declined a renomination as state senator. He was city solicitor, 1860, and president of the board of trustees of the Worcester City library for many years. His first appearance in national council was as a representative from the Worcester district of Massachusetts in the forty-first Congress, March 4, 1869, having been elected in 1868 as successor to John Denison Baldwin, who had been a representative from the district in the thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth and fortieth Congresses. Mr. Hoar was placed on the committee on Education and Labor, and on the committee on Revision of the Laws in the forty-first Congress where he prepared the National Education bill. He advocated before that congress the adoption of this measure and also framed a bill to appropriate $60,000 to rebuild the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg, Virginia, and in the same congress he saved the existence of the Bureau of Education as it was then organized, after it had been reported by the House Committee on Appropriations as an unnecessary burden on the treasury and after that committee had advised its abolishment. He also had the important duty of investigating the conduct of the Freedmen's Bureau and other charges against General Oliver O. Howard preferred by Representative Fernando Wood of New York; and Mr. Hoar's presentation of the arguments of the committee and the summing up of the evidence and the report of the majority of the committee, was accepted by the house and vindicated the acts of General Howard. When the scheme of President Grant to purchase and annex the island of Santo Domingo to the United States was before this congress, he vigorously opposed the proposition in debate, and he was recognized by the members of the house as a formidable antagonist to the radical legislation pro-