Paul C. Burke: When you vote, remember this American hero

This month marks the anniversary of the first assassination of a member of Congress. On October 22, 1868, while campaigning in rural Arkansas for both civil rights and presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant, Congressman James Hinds was murdered.

Hinds was a casualty of a battle that continues to this day between Americans committed to the ideals of the U.S. Constitution and those who believe this country should be a White Christian nation. Hinds was killed because of his advocacy for the Constitutional principle of equality under the law for all.

James Hinds was a lawyer. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Law, he served as the elected district attorney in Nicollet County, Minnesota, before moving to Little Rock, Arkansas after the Civil War. Hinds became a delegate to Arkansas’s 1868 Constitutional Convention and he chaired the Committee on Elective Franchise. He championed provisions to guarantee voting rights for Black men and to create public schools for Black as well as white children.

Hinds was elected in early 1868 to represent Arkansas’s 2nd Congressional District. Once in Washington, he helped Arkansas become the first state from the Confederacy to be readmitted to the United States under the 1867 Reconstruction Acts.

Meanwhile, conservative whites back in Arkansas and across the South organized the Klu Klux Klan. White people across the South deployed ruthless violence and adopted discriminatory state laws to deprive Blacks of their right to vote.

Hinds was derided as a carpetbagger by his insurrectionist enemies. His congressional district was gerrymandered as part of the push to eviscerate the voting power of freed slaves. So Hinds declined to seek re-election to instead focus on campaigning for Grant and defending the civil rights of freed slaves.

While riding horseback to a campaign event near Indian Bay, Arkansas, Hinds was shot in the back by a prominent local white man. Mortally wounded and thrown from his horse, Hinds identified his assailant and wrote a note inside the lining of his hat to identify his body and plead for the care of his wife and daughter. He died within hours.

His assassin was well known but never spent a minute under arrest.

Hinds has been a mostly forgotten American martyr. As an authoritative account of his assassination concludes, “Despite the fact that Congressman James Hinds died for a noble cause, working to ensure that Southern Blacks had the right to vote, his name and the circumstances of his assassination have been largely lost to history.”

It matters whose memory we honor as well as whose actions we condemn.

More than a thousand public monuments and memorials remain across the country to the insurrectionists of Hinds’ day. There is but one for the slain congressman, even though he was killed for his fidelity to the Constitution.

Hinds should be celebrated as a champion of the U.S. Constitution. His moral courage, bravery, public service and involuntary sacrifice should be heralded. His example should inspire all of us to defend the U.S. Constitution from the threats it faces today, both foreign and domestic.

As ballots are cast, Congressman Hinds deserves to be remembered by Utahns and honored with votes to keep the country he envisioned from being lost.

Paul C. Burke is a member of the Utah State Bar who took an oath to support, obey and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Utah.