| Carved
at the base of Albert Pike’s statue at Third and D Streets
in Northwest Washington are the words, “philosopher, jurist,
orator, author, poet, scholar, soldier.” Some of his contemporaries
could accurately add, “libertine, traitor, glutton, incompetent,
murderer.”
Born in Massachusetts, Pike was six feet tall and weighed
300 pounds, an imposing image even without his waist length
hair. He claimed he attended Harvard but no record of it
exists. He made up for any lack of verifiable formal education
with a self-taught curriculum in the classics and poetry,
and he could converse in Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and
French. With this training he became a schoolteacher, but
by 1831 he left for the wilds of the west after rumors of
affairs made it impossible for him to remain in Massachusetts.
After many adventures traveling south from Tennessee to
the Mexican territories, Pike settled in Arkansas. He practiced
law, specializing in claims on behalf of Native Americans
against the federal government. In spite of his northern
sympathies, he sided with the Confederates when the Civil
War began. He negotiated treaties with several Native American
tribes to fight for the South, and was made a brigadier general
to lead them. In March 1862, his brigade fought at the Battle
of Pea Ridge, resulting in a Confederate rout after which
his men were accused of desertion as well as scalping and
defiling the bodies of Union dead. For this, he was forced
to resign and later he was even imprisoned when his fellow
officers charged him with misappropriating funds.
After the war he abandoned his wife in Arkansas and roamed
the east and mid-west practicing law, writing poetry, editing
a newspaper, and reputedly creating the rituals of the Ku
Klux Klan for Nathan Bedford Forest. This is quite possible,
since at that time he was immersed in rewriting the rituals
of Freemasonry, becoming Grand Commander of the Scottish
Rite Masons. Pike finally settled in Washington DC in 1868,
where he soon added more ammunition for his detractors to
use against him by carrying on with the vivacious 19-year-old
sculptress, Vinnie Ream, forty years his junior.
Undoubtedly, Albert Pike was brilliant and notorious, and
perhaps because of both, contingents representing the Daughters
of the Confederacy and the Masons came to regale his memory
and decorate his statue when it was installed in 1901. Speeches
that day extolled his work for the Masons, but carefully
ignored his infamous reputation. One speechmaker predicted
that, “the name of Albert Pike will grow bright as the
ages roll by.” Today, few recall his name and fewer
yet recognize who that giant statue at Judiciary Square might
have been.
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