The Eloquent Vindicator in the Electric Room
September 09, 2025 at 03:30PM
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Drew Johnson | Longreads | September 9, 2025 | 5,443 words (19 minutes)
On an October afternoon in 1868, James M. Hinds was assassinated by a Klansman on a lonely road in Monroe County, Arkansas, not far from the district Hinds represented in the US House of Representatives. Hinds had been traveling with Joseph Brooks, a fellow Republican. The two men had traveled by steamboat up the White River, on their way to a political gathering. When the steamboat captain learned that he was transporting Republican leaders, he put Hinds and Brooks off at an earlier stop, in land they did not know.
In Indian Bay, they asked a man named George Clark for directions. Clark, who had been heard threatening the lives of any Republicans who would dare to come speak, gave the men directions and then went to retrieve his shotgun. He rode up behind the two men and shot Brooks with one barrel before shooting Hinds with the other, at close range.
As Hinds lay dying, he used a pencil to write a note on his hatband:
My name is James Hinds. I am shot in the body and shall live only a few minutes. My wife is at East Greenwich, N.Y. Wife, take care of my two daughters, Jennie and Annie.
During his lone term, Hinds carried the flag for Reconstruction, the massive effort by the Republican Party to manage just how and whether the former Confederate states and their inhabitants would rejoin the Union while also determining just how and to what extent the formerly enslaved would truly join the Union. Unlike many of his contemporaries, even among Republicans, Hinds moved among the newly freed men and women of his adopted state of Arkansas. He was rumored to work with the Union League to support Black political participation, and helped launch a pro-Reconstruction party in Arkansas, publicly referring to the formerly enslaved as “fellow citizens” and vowing on behalf of the party to “dig deep down to the granite rocks of eternal truth and justice and upon them lay its foundation.” He walked at the head of freedmen marches in Little Rock. He believed in the possibility of a history that we, as a nation, chose not to pursue.
But redistricting erased Hinds’s own district, and he died a lame duck congressman, out canvassing in hostile territory, pursuing the goals of his constituency, party, and country, with no immediate selfish goal in plain view. After his death, Charles Sumner, a US senator from Massachusetts, referred to Hinds as a “vindicator of the rights of men”—praise that is engraved on Hinds’s burial marker. Today, Hinds is a kind of forgotten Keats of American politics: a briefly notable figure, once held up as a martyr but then erased by a change in the tides of history, one whose name, per Keats’s epitaph, truly was writ in water. He has the double distinction of being the first US congressman to be assassinated while in office and being virtually forgotten despite that.
In all likelihood, you have never heard of Hinds. I had never heard of him either. His words aren’t etched into marble monuments across the nation. You can’t read about him in any of the classic sources. Eric Foner doesn’t mention him in his seminal history of Reconstruction, nor does John Hope Franklin or even Heather Cox Richardson. The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture doesn’t know who Hinds was. And let’s not restrict ourselves to the good guys. The old, “Lost Cause” literature of Reconstruction-as-Biblical-Plague School of Southern History leaves Hinds right out, too. Walter Lynwood Fleming’s 1919 “classic,” The Sequel of Appomattox, ignores Hinds. Nor does J. Lesslie Hall’s Half-hours in Southern History include Hinds in its slow drip of the Lost Cause narrative, written in a manner suitable for school-age children. Hinds is hard to find.
I owe my discovery of Hinds to a stack of papers I needed to grade. Between sprints grading undergraduate college writing essays, I’d hop around on the web, often just on Wikipedia, moving from link to link to link. One thread started this way: I learned that Adelbert Ames, a Union general and former governor of Mississippi who was chased from that state by the violent end of Reconstruction, was buried in Lowell, Massachusetts. I’m a Mississippian who teaches in Lowell, and so this minor detail was enough to catch my attention and stoke my curiosity.
There’s no annual commemoration of Adelbert Ames in Lowell, as far as I can tell. But Lowell does celebrate the birthday of Benjamin Butler, Ames’s father-in-law and a Union general of greater fame. Once a year, the Lowell Historical Society opens Hildreth Family Cemetery, Ames’s resting place, to the public for people to gather. The year I made my appearance, Oakes Plimpton was present. Plimpton, like his brother George, the legendary editor of The Paris Review, is a direct descendent of Butler and Adelbert.
I was struck that day, and other days, by how much Southern history drifted in the landscape of the North. Not that the Civil War and civil rights aren’t thoroughly documented in the North, but the official places of memory—lieux de mémoire, as the late French historian Pierre Nora termed them—are oriented so much toward the story the North tells itself about unalloyed heroism. It’s a simple story, drawing on what Robert Penn Warren called the “Treasury of Virtue” and saw as the twin of the Lost Cause, two intertwined historical fairy tales.
Over time, I’ve noticed an archipelago of forgotten graves of figures who’d made their way through various decades of the tortured past, some of whom were buried in the North because they’d fled the South, some because they’d been murdered there. Besides Ames in Lowell and Penn Warren in Vermont, there was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, buried in his hometown of Keene, New Hampshire, an Episcopal priest-in-training who gave his life to save a young woman and fellow civil rights activist during the summer of 1965 in Hayneville, Alabama. There was George Washington Cable, a minor novelist from New Orleans who was insufficiently racist to continue living in the South after the Civil War, who became a long resident of Northampton, Massachusetts, where he is buried.
And, finally, there was Hinds, just across the border in upstate New York.
The bulk of semi-accessible information about Hinds dwells in a single article by William Darrow, published 10 years ago in The Arkansas Historical Quarterly. Darrow painstakingly pieced together the shadowy figure of Hinds from primary sources to the tune of 37 pages and 145 footnotes. Extracts from speeches, letters, and newspaper accounts are lavishly supplied, and context unfolds in a magisterial, deliberate manner. Darrow offers an account of a true believer in Reconstruction, cut down before national doubt and recrimination had fully crept in—before history itself had switched sides.
Hinds was born in upstate New York. He missed the Civil War, out land grabbing in what was to become Minnesota. For years, he supported state militia and the Minnesota Cavalry as the Sioux sought to reclaim their lands, efforts that culminated in the Sioux Uprising of 1862, a brutal conflict between the tribe and the US government sparked by broken treaties and starvation. Hinds fought against the Sioux in a chapter of American history that’s typically deferred until after the Civil War is neatly tied up. But there is nothing neat or tidy about the edges of these conflicts.
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?
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.
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.
In April, I drove along the coast of Massachusetts to meet Darrow. When he retired, he expected to help out on the family farm. Instead, I found him in his breakfast nook, with stacks of history books and a staring curiosity equal to mine. He apologized for burning the stovetop espresso he made me, though that was my fault: I’d called him, lost and needing directions.
If I think Darrow is an odd duck for having an interest in the assassination of James M. Hinds, it’s clear he wondered about me, too. Just asking about Hinds puts me in a very small club. According to JSTOR, the piece has only been cited three times, and two of those were aggregator Arkansas history bibliographies. Before we sit down, Darrow quizzes me about what I do, and what my wife does. A quick vetting, I think, to make sure I’m not someone from his prosecutorial past. There’s also a zoological interest: Who turns up on your doorstep asking about something you’ve written? Authors know how rare that is.
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In the decade since Darrow published his article, he told me, I was the second person to contact him about it. The first? He received a nice letter from someone associated with Arkansas history. The apparent lack of interest in Darrow’s article is remarkable to me, and makes me doubt our country’s purported interest in its own past as well as the whole trust fall of the writer/reader relationship.
“That’s what got me interested in him—there’s nothing,” Darrow says. “I go to Wikipedia and there’s like two sentences.” But that’s not the whole story. Hinds was a distant ancestor—the older brother of Darrow’s great-grandmother. That connection was enough for Darrow to pull Hinds back from oblivion, if only to the brink.
I’d reread Darrow’s piece before our meeting, once again finding it workmanlike, patient in a way I envied, thorough in a manner peculiar to the legal profession. “Overly detailed?” asked Darrow.
“Not that,” I said, “More that the research goes right at it.”
“Too many footnotes,” he said. “In law school we were trained to cite everything.” Ibid, ibid, ibid.
For a while, we speculated on a different America: one in which the shotgun that killed Hinds is in a museum, and Hinds’s killer was convicted or, at the very least, apprehended. I mentioned the hatband inscribed with Hinds’ last words.
“Where’s the hatband?” Darrow asked, knowing that we’ll never know. Darrow had been thorough in his research: The image of Hinds that accompanies his article came from a woman Darrow had managed to locate, who had stored the photograph in a shoebox. (Darrow later uploaded the image to Wikipedia; it appears to be the only surviving photograph of Hinds.) But the hatband alone ought to have made Hinds’s story one for the schoolbooks.
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Darrow had hoped his article might move Arkansas to put a monument to Hinds on the lonely road where he was shot.
“If they had,” I told him, “they’d have to replace it or make it bulletproof.” I was thinking of Mississippi, where a bulletproof marker had been installed at the site where Emmett Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. The latest marker is the state’s fourth attempt to write history on the land, even as some of its citizens try to keep another version of history going. But Darrow hadn’t heard of Mississippi’s bulletproof civil rights marker, which made me wonder whether he shared some of his distant ancestor’s naivete.
On the page, Darrow comes across as someone building the assassination from the outside in. He’s working from fragments and details, trying to understand what happened rather than assuming the narrative, even if the narrative is one that might prompt you to say, Well, we can assume that. He told me a story of contacting another distant relative of Hinds, having a phone conversation in which both he and the other man established the family trees that connected them to each other and to Hinds. But when Darrow shared who Hinds was and how he died, the other man denied the connection. “You must be mistaken,” he said to Darrow, and hung up.
Darrow’s story reminds me of one of his footnotes, one that underlines the tendency, almost from the get-go, for Southern political murders to be reported as unsolvable. Clark, Hinds’s killer, was never arrested or criminally charged with Hinds’s murder. Though his identity was known, at least one newspaper account said Hinds had been “shot from the brush,” storytelling that deliberately obscured responsibility and made the murder a de facto act of God.
“The phrase ‘from the brush’ is not uncommon in Reconstruction-era descriptions of political shootings,” Darrow writes. “It conveniently obscured the details and implied that the shooters could not be identified.”
In that one footnote, Darrow has the next hundred years of American history dead to rights. Oh well, no way of knowing who did that! I nod knowingly at what Darrow has made out of evidence.
Maybe that’s the difference, I realized as I talked with Darrow in his breakfast nook about his distant relative. Darrow is a Yankee, and I am not. Darrow has an openness about what could’ve happened that I lack. I envy him, not only for his research skills but also for his blank slate. He knows more about Hinds than I ever will. But when it comes to the whole sweep of the South, I rapidly outpace him. That knowledge feels enervating, as some kinds of knowledge often do. The kinds of knowledge where we nod along to history and believe that understanding alone is a great victory, activism, or political action. Or even virtue itself.
When I told Darrow my own Mississippi school district didn’t integrate until the 1970s, he was shocked—which, in turn, shocked me. Maybe the space between our understandings could be something. Some possibility dwells in that gap between my too-certain understanding and his lack. “How?” he asked. I told him: They just ignored the law.
Like many white Southerners, I grew up believing I had no family ties to slavery. It was a false belief born from that curious old accounting, where you follow just one paternal line and declare that isolated thread untroubled by direct ownership of another human being. Never mind all the other lines of a family tree. Never mind the way money ties everyone to everyone else. Never mind that a slave economy leaves no one untouched.
In our case, it was the sharecropping background of my father’s father that steered me wrong. They were poor, I knew. My grandfather would wake up in winter to snow that had drifted through the roof onto his blanket. This is in the southwestern corner of Virginia, the eave above Tennessee.
Later, though, I learned that his father, my great-grandfather, was married to Susie Ann Greear, the daughter of the landowners for whom he was sharecropping. The Greears had been wealthy, and they had owned slaves. In an 1850 document for the county, I saw that my great-great-great-grandfather Thompson Greear and his father had together owned the most slaves in the county. That knocked me back a step.
As did the fact that Thompson Greear fought for the Confederate Army in the Civil War and helped to burn Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Afterward, his unit was captured by Union forces and Greear was eventually sent to Camp Chase in Columbus, Ohio, where he died at age 44, in captivity and far from home. I wonder, in the long months he had to reflect, whether the parallels were entirely lost on him?
I have a photo of my grandfather in about 1919, taken with his own grandfather, James L. Greear (Thompson’s son, Susie’s father), who was born in 1854. James L. Greear holds my grandfather’s ears, so he’ll face the camera. My grandfather has a pair of boxing gloves on his hands; his younger brother—who would die in a coal mining accident—wears another glove like a hat. Intimate contact with the Civil War telescopes into just a few generations, despite the insistence of some that the past was long ago.
Once, I drove through the tiny town my grandfather had left. I parked in the mostly empty main street with no purpose or destination. Just the inclination to take it all in. A ghostly old man, leaning on the back of a truck, noticed my Massachusetts plates and said, “You’re not from around here.”
“No.”
“What brings you into town?” Like he was following a script.
“My grandfather’s people were Johnsons and Greears, so I wanted to swing through. Never have been.”
“Well,” he replied, “my wife’s people were Johnsons and Greears, so you better come talk to her.” He was so frail that I gave him my arm and we walked down the street, toward one of the few open storefronts where his wife worked. He told me the story of the operation that had left him in this reduced state. “Sounds like it has been a year,” I said, in sympathy.
“Oh my, yes,” he replied.
His wife ran a rummage sale posing as an antique store. She and I spoke for just a few minutes but couldn’t figure out just what variety of cousins we were. Then, unbidden, she began to talk about the moment when emancipation and the end of the war freed the people enslaved by the Greears. The family, she said, told the people they had owned that they were no longer bound to them or to the land they had known. Some stayed, some left. That was all she told me, but her voice was sepia-toned, possessed by nostalgia for something she’d never known. Anemoia. A word all Americans ought to know.
Dominant narratives can erase pockets of resistance. The capacity of a single policy shift to turn a master into a strange neighbor cannot be overstated, unless we are the ones overstating, for our own reasons.
White accounts of emancipation are often fundamentally twisted, skewed by rank sentimentalism, rendering slaveholders and the enslaved as something closer to coworkers. But to say only that leaves us in a negative space. The people in those rooms were people, individuals. The rooms themselves were electric, full of possibility. Even if that possibility was to be crushed by something—the weight of history or narrative itself—does not mean that we should walk right past them, empower chronology so completely that we erase the might-have-beens and the sometimes-weres. Dominant narratives can erase pockets of resistance. And the capacity of a single policy shift to turn a master into a strange neighbor cannot be overstated, unless we are the ones overstating, for our own reasons. Which is why I want us to linger in these electric rooms, to think about their possibility.
We are sometimes, I believe, a little afraid of entering electric rooms. Of lacking certainty, or, worse, being seen by others as lacking certainty. Not seeming wild-eyed, but being caught moving away from certainty. Those of us who prize words and thinking cannot shake off the shibboleth of clarity in an unclear world. Definition closes around us so absurdly fast that we should recognize it for what it is: a closing off of possibilities, a shutting down. Certainty is something we make for ourselves for small reasons.
A few years ago, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I encountered Winslow Homer’s A Visit from the Old Mistress. Homer’s post-pastoral, post-traumatic, fully enigmatic scene was completed in 1876, the year that Reconstruction would effectively end, dooming African Americans to all that overtook them in the next era, centennial to bicentennial. The painting depicts three African American women plus a child, who are gathered near a hearth, and an older white woman, who stands in a doorway through which she has either been invited or intruded. One of the African American women is seated, which seems like a large choice, given the presence of the old mistress. In my read, there is no notion that she will be asked to sit.
Is the painting sentimental, like the story I was told in the antique store? Who has the upper hand? Do we know? Do the subjects of the painting know? Women are visited by a woman who claimed ownership of their entire being. They stand there together. What happens next? Do we know, or do we only think we know? Despite the various readings over the years, Homer has left most of the questions the painting might ask unanswered. If we answer them too easily ourselves, we push past the possibility of what we might uncover. Rather than freeing us, analysis buries us again.
Homer’s work is an electric room, a space charged with how little we can say with confidence about what is happening without resorting to our overdetermined understandings, our fatalistic readings. We can only know what might have been in this room at the broadest of strokes, the most general level. In the clarity we cannot have rests the odd and necessary individuality of the crucial and known figures of every era, but the unknown individuals this painting is meant to suggest. And James M. Hinds, too.
Homer’s painting has been read in so many ways: limited, of its time, racist, empowering, you name it. I admire its resistance to all these readings. The figures in it are legible but unknowable, like people themselves.
Before he was murdered, Hinds was a presence, however ephemeral, in those rooms. His fate and that of Reconstruction were still open to possibility. He was, as his grave says, “an eloquent vindicator of the rights of men.” Yet his forgotten state leaves him outside of history. Darrow’s essay, an odd portrait, enables us to turn Hinds over and over in our mind.
“People . . . are always doing similar things,” the novelist Henry Green once wrote, “but never for similar reasons.” I don’t know if I believe that to be true. But it helps me acknowledge the unknowability of every crook and crevice of the painted minds in the Homer painting, not to mention every ephemeral, electric room that ever existed, undocumented in any way.
Hinds was not buried in Arkansas. Neither is he buried in Washington, DC, as you will sometimes read, although there is a cenotaph for him there, perhaps the cause of the confusion.
Not long after my meeting with Darrow, I drove up and out of Massachusetts into Salem, New York, through gray rain desperately needed during a long drought. I threaded my car past, rather than over, the Berkshires, through a little corner of Vermont, passing a sign for indian massacre rd and into Hoosick and Hoosick Falls, where the man who was the model for Natty Bumppo, aka Hawkeye, James Fenimore Cooper’s prototype of the American frontiersman badass, lies buried. Old frontiers fascinate me: rivers and pathways and old ramparts no longer guarded, the literal slaughter over—or at least on pause.
I’ve already slipped by Mount Greylock, aka Moby-Dick, the mountain that Melville looked upon as he wrote his epic. The woods of the Berkshires are also the woods from which the titular creature of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn left, going questing. Both books concern a supernatural white beast.
I’m questing too. I drive past a flurry of sites and former homes associated with Susan B. Anthony, the suffragist, and through the small Vermont town where both James Garfield and Chester Arthur, an assassinated president and his successor, taught school at different times. Garfield, who lingered through a summer with a bullet in his belly, with no formal emergency articles of succession, no one in charge, no one minding the store.
We tell so many stories, and many of those stories are told not even for their own sake, but to lead us back to what we already believe about what is possible. Recursive stories to run out the clock.
No stream of historical association can take us closer to Hinds. His disconnectedness is something I’ve decided I don’t want to lose. I want him freestanding in Darrow’s lonely article, and I want us to read that one article instead of weaving him into the various histories and understandings that have decidedly not led where we would wish them to. I have become suspicious of those sorts of histories and that sort of understanding. Understanding can supersede possibility to the point of being mistaken for possibility. I have come to see finer gradations of analysis as stasis, not the better and ever better tools they are purported to be.
What do I want from the unknowability of Hinds? From the way he resists understanding? When we reduce history to a one-to-one scale model, we start saying that what everyone did is the only thing they could have done. And whether we do this from an essentially small “c” conservative place or a revisionist place, the result is the same: The fixed and unchangeable lives of the past matter more than our lives in this electric, fluid present. We sacrifice possibility to the false idol of accuracy.
I’m a storyteller increasingly suspicious of stories, the many stories that so often seem like one story, the story that we’re all constantly telling and in a thousand forums. Pierre Nora, the French historian, tried to understand storytelling in terms of time but especially place. “Memory,” he wrote, “is always a phenomenon of the present, a bond tying us to the eternal present,” a line that has haunted me while thinking and writing about Hinds. And there’s a growing body of writing out there, from The Crisis of Narration to Seduced by Story, that’s openly critical of the role that storytelling plays in our fragmentation and enervation.
Driving through upstate New York, I think about Darrow’s desire for Arkansas to erect a monument where Hinds fell. I worry that, merely by drawing attention to the lonely gravestone of James M. Hinds, I will bring about its destruction.
There’s a caretaker’s house at the gate and a sign that describes the struggle to maintain monuments without steady funding. The cemetery’s paths are just two tire marks through the grass. Newer graves with their hearts and laser-etched dogs neighbor the nineteenth-century mausoleums, with their busted stone angels stacked in pieces. Hinds is located near, but not actually with, a cluster of Civil War graves, anchored by the familiar soldier statue of a thousand village greens and courthouses.
The monument marking the grave of James M. Hinds is not large, but it is finely made, detailed, and, if you happen to notice it adrift in a sea of slope-shouldered markers, distinctive. Although the monument is all one solid piece, the design depicts a scroll, shroud, and laurels all resting on a stone beneath these vestments. The monument wears the scroll on which all the writing appears, both Sumner’s words eulogizing Hinds as an “eloquent vindicator” as well as Hinds’s own words from his hatband.
There’s something unintentionally provisional about this, I think as I stand there. That the writing meant to last forever pretends to be a scroll, a proclamation, a provisional history that was, after all, rewritten by Hinds’s former allies and his enemies. The monument accidentally captures the means by which he will be forgotten.
I’ve been here four times. I don’t know quite how to speak about the actual grave without realizing that I like it better in its semi-forgotten state. Each time, I’m struck by how singular the grave is, and how fitting that it’s lonely. Even if Darrow could have conjured his Arkansas monument, Hinds means more to history—or, at the very least, to me—this way. That’s the strange realization I reach at this gravesite: not the woulda, coulda, shoulda, but the need to stop reaching for the past as a cure-all for the present. After all, the sacrifice Hinds made was discarded when the grave was still new. And that sacrifice wasn’t a cure-all for his present, much less ours.
Senator Sumner said that, like Lincoln and Lovejoy, Hinds left us through the gate of sacrifice. But in just a few years Sumner had abandoned the course of Reconstruction. What was injustice in 1868 would be, by 1872, inconvenient.
By then, the kind of alliance Hinds had ventured with the freedmen was rarer and rarer, a misapprehension of the possible. A “Dear John” letter about freedom. A we-are-terribly-sorry-to-inform-you. By then, a former abolitionist like Horace Greeley, who ran against Grant in 1872, would essentially defend the Ku Klux Klan. In the same election, Charles Sumner would try to convince Black voters to abandon Grant entirely.
In 1868, the year Hinds was assassinated, the bloodied but victorious Union still believed it was living one history—a history that, as it turned out, didn’t happen. For a moment, let’s imagine that it did. The 14th Amendment? Enacted as written, right down the line. And if there had been growing pangs, like the assassination of an idealistic young congressman, then the long speeches given at the end of the funeral procession for Hinds in Washington, DC? Schoolchildren would have memorized them. That’s something that could’ve happened. But it didn’t.
To plunge back into a moment of possibility: What is it, precisely, that we need? The ability to read Darrow’s reconstruction of the life and death of Hinds and not nod knowingly as it plays out how we knew it would?
What does this mean in our eternal present, when both the past and the future are invoked constantly for us so that we might do everything, or do nothing, or give five dollars right now? Is our learned helplessness, in part, a product of endless retelling? Perhaps we ought to admit that. Wonder less about the granular nature of history and more about an exit. What is Hinds for? We tell so many stories, and many of those stories are told not even for their own sake, but to lead us back to what we already believe about what is possible. Recursive stories to run out the clock.
Let’s say that forgotten Hinds is different, then. You are free to remember James M. Hinds or forget him, but not to do both. We finally ought to get around to choosing.
Drew Johnson’s stories have appeared in Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, VQR, and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in The Florida Review. His essays and other writing have appeared at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Guernica, among others. He earned his MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/09/09/congressman-james-hinds-assassination/
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