Albert Pike

Albert Pike 1809-91, American lawyer, Confederate general in the Civil War, b. Boston. He settled (1832) in Arkansas, where he became a newspaper editor and a lawyer. He was a captain in the Mexican War. In the Civil War, Pike secured for the Confederacy the loyalty of the tribes in the Indian Territory . Criticized for inept handling of his Native American brigade, especially at the battle of Pea Ridge (Mar., 1862), he resigned. After the war he practiced law in Memphis and Washington. His Prose Sketches and Poems Written in the Western Country (1834) resulted from a trip over the Santa Fe Trail. A prominent Freemason (he joined the order in 1850), his writings on the movement include Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871).

Pike, Albert (1809–91) Confederate army officer. Pike left his native Massachusetts and headed for the southwest, where he held a variety of jobs and entered the law and politics, becoming famous and wealthy in the process. Personal problems led him to relocate to New Orleans in 1853. There, at the outbreak of the Civil War, he became commissioner of Indian affairs for the Confederacy and organized several Indian regiments to fight for the South. Mutilation of Union dead by Pike's Indian regiment and Pike's accusation of treason against the Confederacy for treaty violations brought him widespread opprobrium, and he fled as the Confederacy collapsed, living out the rest of his life in the wilds of the Ozarks amid widespread rumors of moral turpitude and becoming a leading Freemason.

Pike, Albert, (1809–91),born in Boston, went to the Southwestern frontier (1831), and two years later settled in Arkansas, where he became a prominent journalist and lawyer, and wrote of his frontier adventures in Prose Sketches and Poems, Written in the Western Country (1834). After serving in the Mexican War, he continued to practice law in various Southern cities, although during the Civil War he commanded Indian troops in the Confederate army, whose atrocities were bitterly criticized by other generals, provoking his Letter to the President of the Confederate States (1862) and causing his temporary arrest and flight to Canada. He was a leader of the Freemasons and published poetry, legal works, and books on Masonic dogma and ritual. Of his poems, published in Nugae (1854) and Hymns to the Gods (1872), the best known is Dixie (1861).