A prosperous land and slave-owner of Scotch-Irish descent, Hinson voted for secession from the Union in both the February and June 1861 elections. He had welcomed Union General Ulysses S. Grant to his home when Grant was in the area during the Union attack on Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862. However, Hinson took up arms after his two sons were mistaken for bushwhackers while hunting and summarily executed, decapitated, and their heads put on fence posts at the Hinson plantation.The family was turned out of their home by Federal troops without any compensation later in 1862. The house was later burned. On December 31, 1862, Hinson killed his neutral neighbor, Swiss immigrant Albert Rougemont, with whom he had had a long-running argument for years before the war, and whom he blamed for his house having been burned. The murder was investigated by the Union Provost Marshal, with many of Hinson's neighbors attesting to his decades of violence before the war and his well-known "Secesh" position at the outset of the war. The verdict of the Provost Marshal was not recorded.