James M. Hinds

James M. Hinds
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Arkansas's 2nd district
In office
June 22, 1868 – October 22, 1868
Preceded by No representation due to Civil War
(Albert Rust prior to March 3, 1861)
Succeeded by James T. Elliott
Representative for Pulaski County at Arkansas Constitutional Convention of 1868
In office
January 7, 1868 – March 13, 1868
District Attorney for Nicollet County, Minnesota
In office
November 1856 – 1860
Preceded by Charles Flandrau
Succeeded by E. P. Davis
District Attorney for Minnesota Territory
Personal details
Born (1833-12-05)December 5, 1833
Hebron, New York, U.S.
Died October 22, 1868(1868-10-22) (aged 34)
Near Indian Bay, Arkansas, U.S.
Political party Democrat, later Republican
Spouse(s) Anna Pratt
Children 3
Alma mater Cincinnati Law School
Profession Lawyer
Politician
Real estate owner
Website house%20website

James M. Hinds (December 5, 1833 – October 22, 1868) of Little Rock, was a Reconstruction politician and lawyer who represented Arkansas in the United States House of Representatives from June 24, 1868 until his death on October 22, 1868. The first sitting member of Congress assassinated, Hinds was murdered for advocating civil rights for former slaves.

Born and raised in a small town in upstate New York, Hinds moved to Minnesota after graduating from Cincinnati Law School in 1856. He was elected district attorney of his county, and began his political career as a Democrat. Looking for a fresh start, Hinds moved to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1865. In 1867, he was elected to represent Pulaski County as a Republican at the Arkansas Constitutional Convention tasked with rewriting the constitution to allow Arkansas's readmission to the Union following the Civil War. At that convention, Hinds successfully advocated for constitutional provisions establishing the right to vote for adult freedmen (former slaves) and public education for both black and white children. In early 1868 he was elected United States Congressman from Arkansas's Second District.

Campaigning for Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 Presidential Election, Hinds was threatened and targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. In October, 1868, while travelling to a political meeting with Joseph Brooks in Monroe County, Hinds was shot to death by a Democrat and member of the Klan in a politically motivated assassination.[1][2]

Early life

Hinds was born in Hebron, New York on December 5, 1833 to Charles and Jane Hinds. The youngest of six children, his brother Henry also became an attorney. Hinds' other siblings were brothers William, John, and Calvin, and his sister, Jane.[3] He attended high school at Washington Academy in Salem, New York, college at the Albany Normal School, and read law at a school in St. Louis, Missouri before graduating from Cincinnati Law School four years after his brother Henry.[4]

Career

Minnesota

In 1856, at age 23, Hinds followed his brother Henry to the Minnesota Territory, settling in St. Peter, the county seat of Nicollet County, Minnesota 40 miles (64 km) west of his brother in Shakopee, Minnesota.[4] During this time, there was discussion of moving the Minnesota Territory capitol from St. Paul, Minnesota to St. Peter. James purchased several lots and opened a law practice. A bill was sent to the governor to make St. Peter the capital of the future state, but an adversary hid the bill until the end of the session. As a result, the capitol became St. Paul.[5] Shortly after opening a law practice, James Hinds was elected district attorney for the county, and began to foster an interest in politics.[6]

Hinds was building a career in St. Peter during a turbulent time in the region due to conflict between settlers and homesteaders and the Dakota Sioux, culminating in the Dakota War of 1862. He enlisted as a private in the First Minnesota Cavalry's Mounted Rangers, Company E[7] during the conflict.[8] By 1865, Hinds realized that St. Peter would not grow to political prominence and would remain a small farming village. Seeking a fresh start and more opportunity, in mid-1865 he relocated with his wife and two young daughters to Little Rock in Arkansas.

Arkansas

Upon reaching Arkansas, Hinds found a state devastated by the Civil War. Arkansas was one of the eleven Southern slave states that in 1861 seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. By 1865, fighting between Confederate and Union forces had ravaged the state: population declined, millions of dollars of property was lost to burning or stealing, and the antebellum labor system (slavery) was gone. Plantations, the source of most state tax revenues, lacked the slave labor which had sustained them, throwing once-powerful planters (plantation owners) into financial uncertainty. As Arkansas struggled with the new status quo, it also struggled to establish a new labor system.

As with many Northerners, Hinds likely did not understand the grip of white supremacy, and resentment toward freedmen and Northerners, in the south at the time. He believed that following the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, freedmen in the South should enjoy the same liberties as in the North, and underestimated continuing fierce resistance from conservative whites. These sentiments were later eulogized by Logan H. Roots, a contemporary who represented Arkansas in Congress. Measures to block freedmen from voting and racial violence demonstrated that many in the state did not accept freedmen's new civil rights. Hinds found himself referred to as a carpetbagger, a pejorative term used by conservative Southerners to describe Northerners who moved south during Reconstruction.

In mid-1865 in Little Rock, Hinds formed a law practice with Elisha Baxter, one of the state's leading Unionists. Baxter, who fought with the Union Army during the war, would be selected to serve on to the Arkansas Supreme Court by the newly established government, and was a future Governor of Arkansas. In October, 1867, Hinds was elected to be a delegate at Arkansas's 1868 Constitution Convention. An early proponent of suffrage rights for freedmen, when the convention opened in Little Rock in January, 1868, he was made Chairman of the Committee on the Elective Franchise. The new constitution that emerged that February, ratified in March, provided voting rights for black males over 21, and for the creation of public schools for both black and white children. Elected to Congress early that year, Hinds went to Washington D.C. in April, 1868, where he arranged for Arkansas to be the first state to rejoin the union under the 1867 Reconstruction Acts. In May, 1868, Hinds was a delegate at the 1868 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Returning to Arkansas in August, he campaigned vigorously for Republican presidential candidate Grant, and for civil rights for former slaves. Hinds's views on the latter, particularly voting rights for African Americans, incensed conservative Arkansans and the Ku Klux Klan. He was murdered while traveling to speak at a campaign event near Indian Bay, Arkansas. The killer, George Clark, Secretary of the Monroe County Democratic Committee and suspected Klansman, was never arrested or prosecuted.

Death

Hinds was the first U.S. Congressman assassinated in office. He was murdered on the eve of the 1868 presidential election, which was a contest over civil rights and suffrage for freedmen. Republicans, led by presidential former Union Army General Ulysses S. Grant, favored those measures, while the Democratic Party opposed them. On October 22, 1868, en route to a campaign event for Grant in Monroe County, Arkansas, Hinds was shot. Knocked off his horse by the shotgun blast to his back, he lay on the road until passersby found him. He died within two hours.[9]

Governor Powell Clayton feared that the murder of Hinds was a precursor to a general attack on state officers to seize control of the government and the polls prior to the election, but the insurrection did not take place.[10] Hinds is interred at Evergreen Cemetery in Salem, New York. The Congressional Cemetery in Washington D.C. contains a memorial stone in his honor.

See also

Preceded and followed by in congressional office

40th United States Congress

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Foner, Eric (March 1989). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. HarperCollins. p. 342.
  2. ↑ http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=4630
  3. ↑ Darrow 2015, p. 18.
  4. 1 2 Stevens 1904, p. 188.
  5. ↑ Witt, Mason (Spring 2009). "St. Paul vs. St. Peter The conflict between the saints". Houston County Historical Society. ISSN 1092-8863.
  6. ↑ Darrow 2015, p. 19.
  7. ↑ Minnesota Board of Commissioners (1890). Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars 1861-1865. St. Paul, MN: Pioneer Press. p. 531. ISBN 978-1504202732.
  8. ↑ Darrow 2015, pp. 20-21.
  9. ↑ Marion, Nancy E.; Oliver, Willard M. (2014). Killing Congress: Assassinations, Attempted Assassinations and Other Violence Against Members of Congress. Lexington Books. pp. 18–27. ISBN 9780739183595.
  10. ↑ Connelly, Donald B. (December 8, 2006). John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. p. 210. ISBN 9780807830079.

References

Further reading

United States House of Representatives
Preceded by
District inactive		 Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Arkansas's 2nd congressional district
June 22, 1868 – October 22, 1868 		Succeeded by
James T. Elliott
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