Albert Pike

Confederate General
Newspaper Editor
Philosopher, Author
Grand Orator

Subject of Controversy

Yankee Beginnings

Apple cider and homemade bread...

In a relatively new United States, Albert was born to Benjamin and Sarah Andrews Pike of Boston, Massachusetts just 4 days after the Christmas of 1809. Albert moved with his Episcopalian family four years later to Newburyport where he was raised and schooled as the oldest of six siblings. Though as a 15 year old prodigy he successfully passed entrance examinations for Harvard, due to financial difficulties, he could not matriculate and left no records there.

Homeschooled

Be true to your school...

Not to be dismayed, Albert obtained books of all disciplines, studying assiduously the classics, History, Latin, Greek, French, Hebrew, and even Sanskrit. He amassed a sufficient proficiency to procure a position teaching at the Newburyport Academy. While continuing his self taught, and privately tutored advanced studies, he eventually became Principal of the Academy. He taught in other schools, as well. This man would become big: huge in physical stature, a long-haired Cavalier gentleman of over three hundred pounds, prodigious in writing --he was prolific, gigantic reputation full of contradictions, and he had one of the largest libraries.

Westward Ho

And you want to take her with you to the heart land of the winter

Desiring to live rather than just read and teach about adventures like those tales of brave Ulysses (not Grant, he left in 1831 for the opportunities of the Western territories. There were allegations around this time that he had some women problems that forced him away. Hitching a ride in Saint Louis, Missouri with a trading party heading to Santa Fe, (which was in the Mexican Territories), after having already hiked a good part of the journey, he thankfully joined that group of about forty. By the fall of 1832 he made it to Santa Fe and he eked out a living as a store clerk and traveling salesman. In 1832 after developing a working relationship with some hunters and trappers that traveled widely in uncharted lands, he eventually made his way with some of them to Arkansas.

Razorback Bucks

Tell your Ma, tell your Pa, I'm gonna send you back to Arkansawaw...

By the beginning of 1833 he had already become a schoolteacher until the door opened for his becoming Editor at the Arkansas Advocate in Little Rock. In an another year he owned the newspaper. It was during this time he met Mary Ann Hamilton, and made her his wife November 28, 1834. (They eventually would have eleven children.) Not staying still again, he sold the paper in 1836 and put out his shingle as lawyer after he had tutored himself while running the Advocate. He became a legal specialist in defending Native Americans' treaty claims against the U.S. Federal Government. Just a year or so before, President Andrew Jackson had made that authorization of the settlement of Georgia Cherokee Indians (and others of these indigenous peoples) in lands west of Arkansas as well as establishing a commission of Indian affairs. Pike would be a Southern sympathizer, but also a Unionist. Everything depended on what was good for business and his dogmatic eclectic philosophies.

Marking more Territory

South of the border, down Mexico way...

Things began to heat up from more than the jalapenos, south and west of Albert's new home. After Texas fought for independence from Mexico, and then in 1845 became annexed into the United States, war broke out with our southern neighbor. Albert Pike joined up with a regiment of the Arkansas Volunteer Calvary, serving the two years of this conflict. (This intrusion was protested by Abraham Lincoln because saw a pro-slavery element behind it.)

Law and Rituals

Listen, do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?

After the war, Pike resumed his law practice, and in 1849 was, just like Abraham Lincoln that year, was allowed to bring cases to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the summer of 1850 he became apprenticed in the Western Star Lodge Number Two in Little Rock, Arkansas.¹ He made it to Master Mason by November, and founded the Magnolia Lodge Number Sixty in that same town in November of 1852. The next year he moved to New Orleans, Louisiana setting up his legal 'shingle' there while he also traveled to Charleston, South Carolina to receive 29 degrees from Albert Gallatin Mackey progressing to Worshipful Master by 1854. He served as many boards and committees for them, and eventually he would be Grand Representative for four different jurisdictions. In 1855, at Mackey's suggestion he rewrote the ritual of the Scottish Rite. He moved back to Arkansas in 1857, though in 1858 he was affiliated with the Marion Lodge Number Sixty Eight in New Orleans and that year in Charleston joined the Supreme Council for the Southern Jurisdiction. Pike's legal business involved claims of the Choctaw Indians which he litigated for three million dollars from the U.S. Senate. He brought Native Americans into their own Masonic Knights of the Golden Circle, the Cherokees of Oklahoma, for example being in the secret society, the Keetowah. He counseled other tribes as well. By 1859 he was the Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of the Southern Jurisdiction now their permanent Sovereign Grand Commander. As Chief of the Royal Order of Scotland for the United States he would become the highest ranking Freemason in America. His famous more than eight hundred and fifty page book, Morals and Dogma would be given out joining his jurisdiction in this appendant body of Freemasonry. Every edition has this preface:

Everyone is free to reject and dissent from whatsoever herein may seem to him to be untrue or unsound. It is only required of him that he shall weigh what is taught, and give it a fair hearing and unprejudiced judgment.

Then we are told the book was supposedly only given to those who reached the 32 degree. This book is claimed by Masons not to contain policy for their group and is not widely read or given out presently. They point out that it is used as a source for "Anti-Masons" for out of context quotes. The book does have references to ancient religions, that from a conservative Christian perspective look suspicious. Like this snippet:

Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism, and Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be mislead; to conceal the Truth, which it calls light, and draw them away from it. Morals and Dogma, p. 104-5, 3rd Degree

Nevertheless, more insidiously, he probably did associate with other southern Masons, like John Slidell of Louisiana (who connived in getting the War with Mexico started). Their pro-slavery stance was bringing this boil on his record to a head as this debate heated up.

Uncivil War

Though born in a Union state, and enjoyed his enrichment suing the Federal government, he now stayed sincerely loyal to Arkansas which seceded from the Union in early 1861. Richmond sent orders to General Pike in November of that year giving him command of Indian Lands nearby. Using his lucrative connections with the Indian Tribes, he made treaties with them, promising the South's victory, and keeping their land, and amassed eight hundred Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees, over which Albert Pike was made Brigadier General.

Battle of Pea Ridge

March 1862

The Night They Drove Ole Dixie Down

After he paid the recalcitrant aborigines, he and his brigade marched along the Cane Hill road to join General McCulloh near the rear. They fought with the sixteen thousand men under Major General Van Dorn attacking the ten thousand Union troops in Missouri under Major General Samuel Curtis in the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern to the Rebels, or to the ultimate victors, Pea Ridge. This Arkansan especially wanted revenge on the Federal forces that had inflicted injury on those southern sympathizers in this officially Union state, under martial law, and did not like the predominant German immigrant population that had joined Federal forces. This battle was extremely important as the CSA capture of materiel would have enabled twice as many Confederate forces to be able to muster an attack into Springfield and eventually St. Louis and they also wanted to disrupt the reinforcement of Ulysses S. Grant. The Union forces had full and half-breed Indians fighting on their side too.

In the beginning the Confederate forces had the upper hand, and this must have been when the scalping and looting of Federal troops must have occurred, because the counterattack by Colonel Carr started what became one of the North's first victories and kept Missouri in the Union. Dorn had a tremendous flanking movement that instead of being an advantage proved to spread him out too thinly, and they lost McCulloh, but they had captured the Elkhorn tavern. In trying to follow and finish those that fell back, they ran into regrouped artillery that then rained canisters of death down on the screaming charging Rebels. The Union forces now went after the spent CSA forces that had fallen back to the Elkhorn Tavern. The ammunition train left behind at Bentonville proved disastrous when Curtis moved his artillery up closer against Van Dorn, and the sent forth the most intense barrage of the War at that time. The consequential charge of the Federals forced a retreat that turned into a rout. This was where desertion became a problem for the South especially in the severe deprivation in the Ozarks. Both sides lost more than a dozen percent in casualties.

The atrocities and desertions forced Pike's resignation of his commission, and he was charged and arrested by other officers for embezzlement.

Leaving on the First Train Out of Town

If you're traveling in the North Country far

Deserting his wife, Pike now played the role of wandering poet. The reality was that he fled to Canada (a British territory, also used as a headquarters of CSA espionage) He wound up in Memphis, Tennessee (Where he must have met his successor of Sovereign Grand Commander, James Daniel Richardson.) He assumed editorial-ship of the Memphis Appeal. But some of his writings also have purported to be for Nathan Bedford Forest's Ku Klux Klan. And there was reported to be a meeting in Nashville in 1867 of ex Confederate generals discussing the Pulaski, Tennessee ideas, and Pike was designated Arkansas' Grand Dragon. In the April 16, 1868 edition he wrote:

With Negroes for witnesses and jurors, the administration of justice becomes a blasphemous mockery. A Loyal League of Negroes can cause any white man to be arrested, and can prove any charges it chooses to have made against him. ... The disenfranchised people of the South ... can find no protection for property, liberty or life, except in secret association.... We would unite every white man in the South, who is opposed to negro suffrage, into one great Order of Southern Brotherhood, with an organization complete, active, vigorous, in which a few should execute the concentrated will of all, and whose very existence should be concealed from all but its members.

Though some pro-Southern historians, of an earlier era, gleefully relate these connections, current Mason public relations reports deny this vehemently. There exists today the Prince Hall lodges that were formed for African-Americans. (President Barack Obama is a member.)

What a Capitol Idea

He moved to Washington D.C. in the next year, practiced law until 1880, and made his home until he died in the house of the Scottish Rite Temple there. Although while he still faced accusations from the past that continued after his death, thirty-nine days after Teddy Roosevelt was inaugurated, James D. Richardson, (CSA Major) now Pike's replacement as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Scottish Rite Masons ordered the huge statue of Albert Pike to stand in the Nations' Capitol. He also asked congress to provide the federal funding and land to erect it! This larger than life bronze is the only statue of a Confederate thus honored in the Federal seat of government.

Footnotes

¹ He was now in a group that traces its roots back to the British Venetian Party of the early eighteenth century. Their ties to the East India Company, who in turn, reach back with ritual and religious world view {no matter what Judea-Christian outward manifestations can be viewed or boasted) to the Roman Empire and pagan slavery made it to the colonies before that century was finished. (They borrowed from the Egyptians and wherever and this explains pyramids and obelisks prevalent whether on looks in Saint Paul's Circle, or Washington D.C. --Headquarters of the Scottish Rite. The 1801 origins in the U.S. of Scottish Rite is correlated to remnant Tories. Though before the Revolutionary War, many patriots met in these lodges, and Americanized them afterwards, they had to go almost underground do to rising resentment against them in the 1820's.

Notes

Heated controversy surrounds Pike's supposed involvement with the Ku Klux Klan with his Masonic brotherhood (a former ambassador to Spain, Claude Bowers calls Pike a patriotic founder of the KKK). Occultic writings abound in Morals and Dogma like this quote from it:

Magic....perfectly ... reconciles these two terms -- faith and reason-- those who accept it as a rule may give their will a sovereign power that will make them the masters of all inferior beings and of all errant spirits.

The book mysteriously disappears from libraries supposedly. I hope these notes help show why a case was made regarding these allegations. Freemasonry denies he was involved with the Klan, and state that his book was merely a lesson book, not a guide. Any former, or even earlier Mason author that has history that cast dispersion on any of their well-known is dealt with high-financed circular reasoning.

This course of action became necessary after New York born democrat, John Slidell, of Louisiana, was not received by the Mexican government when sent there as commissioner to offer to buy the coveted lands from them. (Slidell becoming infamous as a pro-slaver and Confederate emissary to France later. Slidell's daughter Mathilde married Baron Emil Erlanger whose great grandfather was Cecil Rhodes' partner. Slidell and Benjamin -mentioned elsewhere- negotiated the Confederate war bonds: the Erlanger Loan with this banker.) The US then sent troops to the disputed land between the Rio Grande and Nueces precipitating a skirmish which "Shed American blood on American soil" and giving Zachary Taylor a chance to win the war and the presidency after it was over in 1848. He was a Whig that eventually dissolved allowing the Republican Party to ascend. By he end of the Civil War Benjamin, Pike and Slidell would all be exiles.

Sidenote to the notes for the sake of pertinent background information:

It is significant that the new Republican Party's Abraham Lincoln opposed the invasion of Mexico seeing the slavery interests behind it---it was the Wilmot Provisio, as a matter of fact, that was introduced to congress which attempted to exclude any lands taken from prohibition of slavery. The connection of Freemasonry (and it's offshoots) and slavery gets even more entangled with British Secret Societies, (East India Company and Dutch West India slaver cohorts brought Freemasonry to the Colonies) that continued into the Civil War. Tories were allowed to live in the New United States as stated in the Treaty of Paris, and they were recruited for this secret organizational liaison especially after that second attempt to get back America in 1812. This 1801 Tory organization the Grand Council of the Princes of Jerusalem of the Mother Supreme Council of the Knights Commander of the House of the Temple of Solomon of the Thirty-Third Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Order of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in the United States. They relocated in Charleston, South Carolina in 1831, especially after some flack up north, where they would loom large in British interests in the Confederacy. Pike even wrote that the early lodges were predominantly Hebrew. John Wilkes Booth is acknowledged as one of their villains. These associations, that Albert Pike made are understandably put way way on the back shelf by many different powers-to-be. These are Kabalah ritual inspired lodges. Jews as well as Gentiles were and are members, like the West Indies Shephardic Jew, Judah P. Benjamin involved with the Charleston Hebrew Aid Society and in the 1850's did whitewash work for Slidell and his Knights of the Golden Circle (Kyklos or Kluklos) {sound like Ku Klux Klan?} later in New Orleans after trouble back in South Carolina. This first practicing Jew elected to Congress, eventually ran the Confederate secret service as their first Attorney General. This character who escaped to England after the Civil War who was implicated in the assassination of Lincoln. He was friend with Jacob Thompson a Confederate agent operating in New York, as well as John Surrat another spy who in 1870 admitted his involvement in the Booth affair. Judah's best friend was Gusatavus A. Myers, whose mother's grandfather was Moses Michael Hays --the key one who brought the Scottish rite to the colonies. Moses Myers, whose house guested British consuls, of Norfolk, Virginia was even praised by Queen Victoria the plaque of which can be seen this day on Freemason Street!

Somewhere around the time before or after the Mexican War, Pike probably became acquainted with these kinds of men.

Around the time Pike was in charge of all the American Indians in the Confederacy, Mason oriented Sioux attacked and killed seven hundred New Ulm, Minnesota while the town was devoid of young fighting men off to the fronts.

Freemasonry provided ritual to a Protestant population that had been shorn of that human need for religious activity in its break from heavy liturgical origins.

It was a group of Bronx Merchants in 1843 who were spearheaded by Henry Jones that created the offshoot, the B'nai B'rith. There is a link to Zionism and those interested in creating a 'New World Order' ushering in the Messianic age, which some sources claim is the origin of the Pre-tribulation Rapture doctrine. (See Christian Eschatology for more information.) They are deistic at best, and Luciferian at worst, depending on what sources one should believe. When one reads the rest of Pike's unfolding story, then one uncovers a "founding father" that included initiating behind the scenes documents for secret organizations that are easily denied. Meyer Lansky is not telling either. The Rothschilds, J.P. Morgan, Cyrus Adler, the Fabian Society, Teddy Roosevelt, and who knows else get caught up in all this, too. The assassinations of Lincoln and McKinley could look suspicious in hindsight, one could surmise...

One biographer, William Henry Venable relates:

If General Pike had given the same time and erudition to the world of literature, instead of to the secret order of which he was the head the Masons, his name would, undoubtedly, have been classed with the Ruskins, Emersons, and Carlyles.

Important Disclaimer:

No attempt is being made here to implicate any one type of people in this essay, as no group or race is exempt from power and racism, and one must not stereotype in one direction or the other. I am definitely not an anti-Semite, and I think most Freemasons are patriotic Americans. The debate is out in my opinion as to whether it is a good idea for a conservative Christian to be involved with a ritualistic organization, but I acknowledge that it is a free country.

I do not think that there is an overt or covert operation today by normal rank and file Masons to do any harm to anyone or any country.

Sources:
http://www.etext.org/Politics (John Covici) covici@ccs.covici,
http://www.multied.com/Bio/CWcGENS/CSAPike.html
Biography: "Albert Pike--Hero or Scoundrel?" The Smithsonian Associates Civil War E-Mail Newsletter, Volume 5, Number 1
http://www.civilwarstudies.org...
http://www.cuttingedge.org/detail.cfm?ID=181"
http://www.freemasonry.bc.ca/b...
http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/jelkins/lp-2001/pike.html
http://www.masonicinfo.com/pike
http://www.freemasonrywatch.com Why Albert Pike's Statue Must Fall The Scottish Rite's KKK Project, by Anton Chaitkin