Albert Pike was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 29, 1809. When he was small, his family moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he was educated. Pike taught in various schools until 1831, when he went out west to Independence, Missouri. There he joined hunters and traders headed for Santa Fe, New Mexico, then went on another expedition into the Staked Plain of New Mexico and Texas. In 1833, he was in Arkansas, where he worked as a schoolteacher. At 300 lbs., he was a physically imposing man. He became a poet, lawyer, planter and newspaper publisher. Pike was a Whig, and stood opposed to Arkansas' secession, but accepted it once the Confederacy was formed. Pike had made many contacts among Native American tribal leaders, and had helped the Creeks and other tribes obtain $800,000 in a long court battle with the federal government. This made him a clear choice for Confederate envoy to the Native Americans, and he was able to convince many Indian leaders to support the Confederacy. On October 7, 1861, he negotiated a treaty with the Chief John Ross of the Cherokee Nation, which provided more generous terms than the treaties with the United States for members of the "Five Civilized Tribes": Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole. Commissioned a brigadier general on August 15, 1861, he began training three Confederate regiments of Native Americans. Pike's troops fought victoriously at the Battle of Pea Ridge, but were routed by a Union counterattack. Unable to reassemble his troops, he contributed to the Confederate defeat. Later, the Union claimed that the Native Americans had scalped some of the dead or wounded soldiers on the field. Pike's difficulties were made worse when he and Maj. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman, commander of the Trans-Mississippi District, exchanged charges related to shady handling of money and materials. Hindman ordered that Pike be arrested, but Pike escaped into the hills of Arkansas and eluded a court-martial. His resignation was accepted on November 11, 1862. After the Civil War ended, Pike went back to practicing law, and was a national spokesperson for Freemasonry. Pike died in the District of Columbia, on April 2, 1891.
| Nationality |
American |
| Cover Price |
$19.95 |
| No. of Pages |
100 |
| Height x Width |
10.6
x
8.0
inch |
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| Conflict |
Amer Mexican War |
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Albert Pike (December 29, 1809–April 2, 1891) was an attorney, soldier, writer, and Freemason. Pike is the only Confederate military officer or figure to be honored with a statue in Washington, D.C. The statue sits in Judiciary Square.
Pike joined others in 1845 in supporting actions against Mexico, what became the Mexican War. He helped raise the Little Rock Guards, a company incorporated into the Arkansas cavalry regiment of Colonel Archibald Yell, and served as its captain.
In 1861, the Arkansas state convention named Pike its commissioner to Indian Territory and authorized him to negotiate treaties with the various tribes. As a result of his experience there, the Confederate War Department appointed him a brigadier general in the Confederate army in August 1861 and assigned him to the Department of the Indian Territory. Pike assisted the tribes that supported the Confederacy in raising regiments. He believed that these units would be critical to protecting the territory from Union incursions, but his belief that the Indian units should be kept in Indian Territory brought him into early conflict with his superiors. In the spring of 1862, General Earl Van Dorn ordered him to bring his 2,500 Indian troops into northwestern Arkansas. Despite his opposition to the move, Pike obeyed, and his Indian force of about 900 men joined Confederate forces in northwest Arkansas. On March 7–8, 1862, they participated in the Battle of Pea Ridge (a.k.a. Elkhorn Tavern), led by Pike. Pike proved a poor leader, and he failed to keep his force engaged with the enemy or in check. Charges circulated widely that the men had stopped their advance to take scalps. After the battle, Pike and his men returned to Indian Territory.
Additionally, Pike wrote on several legal subjects, and continued producing poetry, a hobby he had begun in his youth in Massachusetts. His poems were highly regarded in his day, but are now mostly forgotten. Several volumes of his works were self-published posthumously by his daughte
He began to write poetry as a young man, which he continued to do for the rest of his life. When he was twenty-three, he published his first poem, “Hymns to the Gods.” Subsequent poems appeared in contemporary literary journals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and local newspapers. His first collection of poetry, Prose Sketches and Poems Written in the Western Country, appeared in 1834. He later gathered many of his poems and republished them in Hymns to the Gods and Other Poems (1872). After his death these appeared again in Gen. Albert Pike’s Poems (1900) and Lyrics and Love Songs (1916).
