James M. Hinds
James M. Hinds | |
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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 |
Hebron, New York, U.S. | December 5, 1833
Died |
October 22, 1868 34) Near Indian Bay, Arkansas, U.S. | (aged
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, represented Arkansas in the United States House of Representatives from June 24, 1868 until his death on October 22, 1868. Hinds was the first sitting member of Congress assassinated.
Originally from 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.
During the Civil War, his views realigned to Republican. While touring Arkansas to campaign for the Republican party 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 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. Ultimately, 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] In 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, he relocated to Little Rock in Arkansas, which at the time had not been readmitted to the United States.
Arkansas
Upon reaching Arkansas, Hinds found a state devastated by the Civil War. The impact of fighting between Confederate and Union forces ravaged a state struggling to provide services to its citizens before the war. Population had declined, millions of dollars of property was lost to burning or stealing and the antebellum labor system 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 a precarious situation. As Arkansas struggled with the new status quo, it also struggled to establish a new labor system.
Hinds found himself referred to as a carpetbagger, a pejorative term used by conservative Southerners to describe Northerners who moved south during Reconstruction. 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. Like many northerners, he felt 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, another transplant from the North who represented Arkansas in Congress. Measures to block freedmen from voting and racial violence indicated that many in the state did not accept freedmen's new civil rights.
In mid-1865 in Little Rock, Hinds formed a law practice with Elisha Baxter, one of the state's leading Unionists. During Reconstruction, the reestablished government was almost entirely Republican, and prominent Unionists such as Baxter received important political appointments. Baxter himself had been selected to serve on to the Arkansas Supreme Court by the newly established government, and was later sent to represent Arkansas in Congress, though he would not be seated. 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. 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 Klu 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 killed 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, while campaigning 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] Hines 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
- 1. Logan H. Roots (1841–1893), Republican ...readmitted state, seated June 24, 1868.fd
See also
- Arkansas portal
- Government of the United States portal
- Law portal
- Minnesota portal
Notes
- ↑ Foner, Eric (March 1989). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. HarperCollins. p. 342.
- ↑ http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=4630
- ↑ Darrow 2015, p. 18.
- 1 2 Stevens 1904, p. 188.
- ↑ Witt, Mason (Spring 2009). "St. Paul vs. St. Peter The conflict between the saints". Houston County Historical Society. ISSN 1092-8863.
- ↑ Darrow 2015, p. 19.
- ↑ Minnesota Board of Commissioners (1890). Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars 1861-1865. St. Paul, MN: Pioneer Press. p. 531. ISBN 978-1504202732.
- ↑ Darrow 2015, pp. 20-21.
- ↑ Marion, Nancy E.; Oliver, Willard M. (2014). Killing Congress: Assassinations, Attempted Assassinations and Other Violence Against Members of Congress. Lexington Books. p. 18–27. ISBN 9780739183595.
- ↑ 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
- Darrow, William B. (Spring 2015). "The Killing of Congressman James Hinds". Arkansas Historical Quarterly 74 (1): 18–55.
- Foner, Eric (March 1989). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. HarperCollins. p. 342.
- Stevens, Hiram Fairchild (1904). History of the Bench and Bar of Minnesota 1. Minneapolis and St. Paul Legal Publishing and Engraving Company. pp. 188–190.
- "Hon. James Hinds, The Murdered Arkansas Congressman". The Troy Times (New York, New York: The New York Times). October 30, 1868 [Reprinted from the Troy Times, where it appeared October 23, 1868]. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
Further reading
- Trelease, Allen W.White terror: the Ku Klux Klan conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995 (2nd edition); New York : Harper & Row, c1971 (1st edition).
- U.S. Congress (2006). "Biographical Directory of the United States Congress 1774 - 2005". U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved May 1, 2006.
- Office of the Clerk (2006). "Congressional History". U.S. House of Representatives. Retrieved May 1, 2006.
External links
- James M. Hinds at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
- The Ku Klux Klan first came to national prominence during the 1868 presidential campaign, when its members assassinated Arkansas congressman James M. Hinds, three South Carolina legislators, and other Republican leaders.
- Find-a-Grave entry
United States House of Representatives | ||
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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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