Skip to main content

Author: Pike, Albert

Biography:

PIKE, Albert (1809-91: ANBO)

He was the son of a Boston cobbler, Benjamin Pike, and his wife Sarah Andrews. By a lucky chance, he was sent in 1825 to live with an uncle who taught at the Framingham Academy and who discovered that the boy had an exceptional memory. Eight months later, he passed the qualifying exam for Harvard but for financial reasons could not attend. For a time he taught school and contributed poetry to Boston magazines. Determining on a more adventurous life, he started travelling west in 1831 and fetched up in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where he taught school, edited a newspaper, and studied law. In 1834 he began to practise law and married Mary Ann Hamilton, whose money enabled him to buy the newspaper and begin to be active in the politics of the region. He also became a leader among the Masons: in 1859 he was elected Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction. The Pikes had ten children, seven of whom died young. Though Pike's wife left him in 1853, one of their daughters stayed with him for the rest of his life and edited three posthumous collections of his poetry. Pike's specialization (and greatest success) as a lawyer was Native American claims against the government--cases in which his gift for languages was an asset. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was made Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Confederacy and given the rank of Brigadier-General in the Confederate Army, in which role he organized and armed several Indian regiments on the understanding that they would fight only to defend their own territory. Disputes on this and other issues with his superiors led to his resignation and to charges of treason against him. He went into hiding in the Ozarks, where he worked on reforms in Masonic ritual; he later published a classic work on the subject, Morals and Dogma of Freemasonry (1872). Pike received a Presidential pardon in 1866 and went back for a time to practising law. In 1868 he moved to Washington DC; in 1873, he and his daughter Lillian took up residence in the Masonic Temple of the Supreme Council--and there he died. In 1899 the Washington Masons erected a bronze statue of him which has for different reasons been a flashpoint of controversy several times since then, for Pike not only was a senior officer in the Confederate Army but was also suspected (probably unjustly) of having been responsible for some of the ritual associated with the Ku Klux Klan. (ANBO 25 June 2020; ancestry.com 24 June 2020; Wikipedia 24 June 2020)

 

Books written (1):