Confederate Brigadier General Albert Pike statue was re-erected in Washington on Saturday following an executive order from President Donald Trump. The statue had been attacked in 2020 following disturbances and had been placed in storage.
Albert Pike was born in Massachusetts, but in 1833 he settled in Arkansas. He was admitted to the bar in 1837 and thereafter he became a prominent lawyer. In the 1850s, he became a leader in the Anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party and he helped introduce to Arkansas. He left the national party in 1856 when the Know Nothings failed to adopt a pro-slavery platform. In 1858, he led an effort to have his state expel all free colored people from the Arkansas.
As a lawyer, Pike had developed some ties to Native Americans living in Oklahoma. When the Civil War broke out, he conducted negotiations with those tribes to have them side with the Confederacy in exchange for a state of their own. In November of 1861 he was appointed a Brigadier General and sent to the Indian Territory to command the limited Confederate forces there.
After the war, Pike escaped briefly to Canada and applied for a pardon from President Johnson. He devoted himself to Masonry and re-establishing white supremacy. He opposed Black suffrage saying that “the white race, and that race alone, shall govern this country. It is the only one that is fit to govern, and it is the only one that shall.” As Blacks began to set up African American Masonic lodges he said that “I took my obligations from white men, not from negroes. When I have to accept negroes as brothers or leave masonry, I shall leave it. Better let the thing drift.”
In April of 1868, Pike endorsed the aims of the Ku Klux Klan, although he expressed doubts about their methods. He said:
“If it were in our power, if it could be effected, 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.”
Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C. non-voting member of Congress, issued this statement according to The Hill newspaper:
“Pike himself served dishonorably,” Norton’s statement reads. “He took up arms against the United States, misappropriated funds, and was ultimately captured and imprisoned by his own troops. He resigned in disgrace after committing a war crime and dishonoring even his own Confederate military service.”
“Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not remain in parks or other locations that imply honor,” she continued. “Pike represents the worst of the Confederacy and has no claim to be memorialized in the Nation’s capital.”
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