Volume 17 — TRIBUTE TO HON. JAMES HINDS, REPRESENTATIVE OF ARKANSAS.

Speech in the Senate, January 23, 1869.

Mr. Hinds, while engaged in canvassing the State of Arkansas on the Republican side, was assassinated. The Senators of Arkansas requested Mr. Sumner to speak on the resolution announcing his death.

MR. PRESIDENT,—It is with hesitation that I add a word on this melancholy occasion, and I do it only in compliance with the suggestion of others.

I did not know Mr. Hinds personally; but I have been interested in his life, and touched by his tragical end. Born in New York, educated in Ohio, a settler in Minnesota, and then a citizen of Arkansas, he carried with him always the energies and principles ripened under our Northern skies. He became a Representative in Congress, and, better still, a vindicator of the Rights of Man. Unhappily, that barbarism which we call Slavery is not yet dead, and it was his fate to fall under its vindictive assault. Pleading for the Equal Rights of All, he became a victim and martyr.

Thus suddenly arrested in life, his death is a special sorrow, not only to family and friends, but to the country which he had begun to serve so well. The void, when a young man dies, is measured less by what he has done than by the promises of the future. Performance itself is forgotten in the ample assurance afforded by character. Already Mr. Hinds had given himself sincerely and bravely to the good cause. By presence and speech he was urging those great principles of the Declaration of Independence whose complete recognition will be the cope-stone of our Republic, when he fell by the stealthy shot of an assassin. It was in the midst of this work that he fell, and on this account I am glad to offer my tribute to his memory.

As the life he led was not without honor, so his death is not without consolation. It was the saying of Antiquity, that it is sweet to die for country. Here was death not only for country, but for mankind. Nor is it to be forgotten, that, dying in such a cause, his living voice is echoed from the tomb. There is a testimony in death often greater than in any life. The cause for which a man dies lives anew in his death. “If the assassination could trammel up the consequence,” then might the assassin find some other satisfaction than the gratification of a barbarous nature. But this cannot be. His own soul is blasted; the cause he sought to kill is elevated; and thus it is now. The assassin is a fugitive in some unknown retreat; the cause is about to triumph.

Often it happens that death, which takes away life, confers what life alone cannot give. It makes famous. History does not forget Lovejoy, who for devotion to the cause of the slave was murdered by a fanatical mob; and it has already enshrined Abraham Lincoln in holiest keeping. Another is added to the roll,—less exalted than Lincoln, less early in immolation than Lovejoy, but, like these two, to be remembered always among those who passed out of life through the gate of sacrifice.