But I persisted in my refusal.
I supposed then that my political career was ended. My home
and my profession and my library had an infinite attraction
for me. I had become thoroughly sick of Washington and politics
and public life.
But the Republican Party in Massachusetts was having a death
struggle with General Butler. That very able, adroit and
ambitious man was attempting to organize the political forces
of the State into a Butler party, and to make them the instrument
of his ambitions. He had in some mysterious way got the ear
of General Grant and the control of the political patronage
of the State, so far as the United States offices were concerned.
I had denounced him and his methods with all my might in a
letter I had written to the people of Massachusetts, from
which I have already made extracts. I had incurred his bitter
personal enmity, and was regarded with perhaps one exception,
that of my older brother Judge Hoar, as his most unrelenting
opponent.
The people of Massachusetts were never an office-seeking
people. There is no State in the Union whose representatives
at the seat of Government have less trouble in that way, or
that gives less trouble to the Executive Departments or to
the President.
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