Hinton, Richard Josiah

HINTON, RICHARD JOSIAH (1830–1901). The relationship of pre–Civil War radicalism with its focus on slavery and post–Civil War radicalism with its focus on labor and socialism can be traced through the life of Richard Josiah Hinton. Born on 25 November 1830, the son of a London stonemason, Hinton was apprenticed to both the craft and trade unionism. Soon after his twentieth birthday he sailed for America, landing in New York where his evening school education and countrymen’s ties drew him to the printing trade. A talented student, Hinton continued his earlier interest in geology and geography at the Columbia School of Mines and dabbled in medicine as well. He soon rose from the compositor’s bench to the newsroom and began his lifelong career as a journalist.

Hinton’s first political commitments were formed by his hatred of slavery. He was an early organizer of the Republican Party. Resolved that more was necessary to defeat slavery than ink or ballots, he went west to support the Kansas free-state forces in 1856. Before departing he was given a Sharps rifle by New York abolitionists Theodore Parker and Henry Channing, though he kept his pen as well, serving as correspondent for both the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Traveler. Hinton’s hyperbolic report of the sacking of Lawrence galvanized northern indignation and presented the Republicans with the issue of “Bleeding Kansas.”

During his days with the free Kansas forces Hinton first met John Brown. The two became friends and Brown confided his plans for a guerrilla invasion of the South. Believing the scheme impossible, Hinton did not volunteer to go along, though he remained a behind-the-scenes supporter throughout. After Brown’s raid failed and he awaited the gallows, Hinton conspired with other radicals to free him. He reconnoitered federal facilities, planned safe houses and routes of flight, and with the help of his friend, the socialist editor Adolf Douai, he recruited several German-American Forty-Eighters with military expertise. Though their extensive preparations were well developed and included even planting an agent in the militia company guarding him, John Brown himself called off the attempt fearing more unnecessary bloodshed.

Like that of other radical abolitionists of his day, Hinton’s ideal of emancipation encompassed far more than freedom from bondage; he was a consistent advocate of color-blind equality. These views earned him the first commission to recruit and command black soldiers in the Civil War. During his four-year tour of duty, Hinton denounced the discriminatory treatment of the black men in his regiment who were passed over for promotion because of their color. He also helped found the Kansas Emancipation League, which aided the more than four thousand slaves who fled to Kansas. Such a wartime résumé fitted him well for his appointment in 1865 as acting inspector general of the Freedmen’s Bureau. A few years later he distinguished himself as one of the few labor journalists who supported free Chinese immigration to the United States and denounced the intolerance with which they were received in the Pacific states.

With the end of the war and the rise of a new labor movement in its wake, Hinton covered the conventions of the National Labor Union for several papers. In 1867 while touring the cooperatives of Europe, he was invited to address the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association in London. Deeply impressed with the socialist program of the First International, Hinton went on to help organize a secret section of the party comprising mostly federal government employees in Washington, D.C. In 1872, Hinton and the rest of the English-speaking “Yankee” sections were purged from the party by German-American Marxists who viewed their feminist and civil libertarian ideals as petit bourgeois reformism.

In spite of these bitter factional battles that soon destroyed the First International in America, Hinton retained his socialist principles. He joined the Socialist Labor Party and emerged as one of the party’s leaders in New York City during the Henry George campaign of 1886 and was appointed managing editor of the New York Leader after the socialists wrested it away from the single-taxers. Hinton’s refusal to surrender his equalitarian ideals to socialist expediency soon got him in trouble again. In 1893, the same year he published a biography of John Brown (John Brown and His Men), he was thrown out of a socialist party for a second time, in this instance for allegedly campaigning for a Republican candidate.

Hinton found a new leftist niche when Eugene Debs announced his conversion to socialism and the formation of the Social Democracy from the remnants of the American Railway Union. Within that organization the major fight was between the advocates of political action and the proponents of “colonization,” a plan to plant a cooperative colony in some sparsely populated western state. Hinton was appointed chair of the Colonization Commission and wrote a column for the party organ, the Social Democrat. After spending months in 1896 searching for a suitable homesite for the first cooperative commonwealth, Hinton and his fellow commissioners surprised the party when they announced that their preferred site lay in Tennessee. In the end, the scheme failed to secure the backing of the party and floundered. Undaunted in his retiring years, Hinton helped his old comrade from the Yankee First International, Joshua Ingalls, to set up a cooperative colony at Henderson Bay, Washington, that grew to include 110 members. Hinton died in 1901 while researching a further edition of his biography of John Brown in London, England.

Hinton, Richard J. John Brown and His Men (1893). New York: Arno Press, 1968.

Lause, Mark. Race and Radicalism in the Union Army. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Messer-Kruse, Timothy. “The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1831–1876.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1995.

Quint, Howard H. The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953.