June 9, 2009

Simon Pollard Hughes, an ex-Confederate officer, was a typical post-Reconstruction conservative Democratic politician. He was elected to the Arkansas House of Representatives in 1866 and then served one term as the state’s attorney general. He was elected governor twice, the first time in 1884, but was denied nomination for a third term in 1888. His longest time in office was as associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, in which he served from 1889 to 1904. He died in 1906.