A Life of Albert Pike
Walter Lee Brown
978-1-68226-164-4 (paper)
July 1997
$46.95
About
A Life of Albert Pike, originally published in 1997, is as much a study of antebellum Arkansas as it is a portrait of the former general. A native of Massachusetts, Pike settled in Arkansas Territory in 1832 after wandering the Great Plains of Texas and New Mexico for two years. In Arkansas he became a schoolteacher, newspaperman, lawyer, Whig leader, poet, Freemason, and Confederate general who championed secession and fought against Black suffrage. During his tenure as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite—a position he held for more than thirty years beginning in 1859—Pike popularized the Masonic movement in the American South and Far West. In the wake of the Civil War, Pike left Arkansas, ultimately settling in Washington, D.C., where he lived out his last years in the Mason’s House of the Temple.
Drawing on original documents, Pike’s copious writings, and interviews with Pike’s descendants, Walter Lee Brown presents a fascinating personal history that also serves as a rich compendium of Arkansas’s antebellum history.
Author
Walter Lee Brown (1924–2014), professor emeritus of history at the University of Arkansas, served as editor of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly for more than three decades. He was the author of the textbook Our Arkansas.
Reviews
“Tells everything any reader would want to know about Albert Pike and more . . . a must-read for historians of the American South, Arkansas, Jacksonian America, and American legal history.”
—W. David Baird, Journal of Southern History
“The standard account of Pike.”
—Daniel D. Liestmon, Southwestern Historical Quarterly