At that convention, Hinds successfully advocated for constitutional provisions establishing the right to vote for adult freedmen, and for public education for both black and white children.

[1] Campaigning for Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 presidential election, Hinds was threatened and targeted by the Ku Klux Klan.

The economy and labor system, which had relied upon slavery, were in shambles, and fighting between Confederate and Union forces had led to population decline and the loss of millions of dollars of property.

He believed that in the wake of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, and the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, freedmen in the South should enjoy the same liberties as in the North, and underestimated continuing fierce resistance from whites who had sided with the Confederacy.

Hinds found himself referred to as a carpetbagger, a pejorative term used by resentful Southerners to disparage Northerners who moved south during Reconstruction.

Elected to Congress for the 2nd congressional district early that year as a Republican, 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 Ulysses S. Grant and for civil rights for former slaves.

On October 22, 1868, en route to a campaign event for Grant near the village of Indian Bay in Monroe County, a man shot Hinds and fellow Republican politician Joseph Brooks in the back with a shotgun.

A Coroner's Inquest identified the shooter as George Clark, secretary of the Monroe County Democratic Party and a local Klansman.

[9] A week after the attack, The Morning Republican newspaper published the story, recounting that "Men passing and returning soon found Mr. Hinds lying in the road still alive and rational, but conscious of the fact that his wound was of such serious nature that but a few moments more remained of his earthly career.

"[10] Arkansas Governor Powell Clayton feared that the murder of Hinds, coming amid rising violence against Republicans and former slaves, was a precursor to a general attack on state officers to seize control of the government and the polls prior to the election, and initiated military action against the Ku Klux Klan.