Shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, Hinds made his way to Arkansas, where he reentered the consuming national struggle over slavery with a curious, idealistic naivete. He was elected in 1868 in classic “carpetbagger” mode, after the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 placed the former Confederate states under military rule and barred many ex-Confederates from voting or holding office. Unable to vote their own in, many white Southerners turned to groups like the original Ku Klux Klan to prevent newly freed African Americans from gaining a toehold in the post-war era.
Hinds’s critics at the time would have suggested that he was an opportunist who knew nothing about Arkansas. But knowing nothing can sometimes enable a person to know other things, and say them. “We are told that the negro would be protected in his rights, even were he not allowed the ballot,” Hinds told the Committee on the Elective Franchise, which he chaired. “Yes, indeed! But it would be such protection as is given to the lamb when in the jaws of the wolf!” He continued:
The protection which he gets will be that given which the ballot gives him. The rich man, the man of influence in society, can well get along without the power which the ballot gives. But, sir, it is the only protection of the weak, and it should be given to him as an instrument for his self-protection. It is indispensable, to the safety of the rights and interests of these people, formerly enslaved but now made free, that they should be clothed with this power.
I read and reread Darrow’s article but didn’t truly get to know it until later, as one gets to know a city with repeated visits. Somewhere along the way, I noticed that Darrow was not a historian by trade, but a federal prosecutor from Vermont, and that this was one of only two pieces he’d published.
At first, I simply used Darrow’s essay about Hinds to spice up my lectures to first-year college students about research, about the unexpected, about not making assumptions about who an author was or what perspective or framework they brought to the table. But the longer I engaged with the essay and the forgotten figure at its heart, the more I needed to understand Darrow’s motivations. What had he wanted to accomplish by writing about Hinds?
There are the things many Americans know about Reconstruction, even if only in the broadest of strokes. It was the federal government’s post-war effort to reintegrate the 11 former Confederate states, rebuild the Southern economy and civil society, and redefine citizenship by abolishing slavery and guaranteeing legal quality and voting rights to formerly enslaved people through a trio of constitutional amendments. It established agencies like the Freedmen’s Bureau to help support the independence of the formerly enslaved, and enforced military-backed Reconstruction Acts to protect Black political participation.
We also know that it failed; if we know no other specifics, we know that. Southern whites resisted Reconstruction through Black Codes, white supremacist terror, and legal evasion. Northern commitment to Reconstruction waned, the last federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877, and Jim Crow laws began to take hold.
The failure of Reconstruction feels like the origin story for much of American life as we know it now. And it’s a story we’ve told, time and again, without Hinds. What would it mean to add him back in? I needed to find out for myself.