Pike, Albert (1809–1891)

US lawyer, journalist, and soldier. Leaving New England in 1831, he wrote for and later owned an Arkansas newspaper, and was admitted to the bar in 1837. He took a break from the law to serve in the Mexican War. By the 1850s he had become a popular poet as well as a successful lawyer. An opponent of secession, he nevertheless obtained a brigadier's commission in the Confederate army and commanded Indian troops at the battle of Pea Ridge (1862). A dispute with a superior led to his arrest and then his resignation in 1863. After the war, he practiced law in Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington, DC A prominent Freemason, he headed the southern branch of the Scottish Rite from 1859 until his death, and he rewrote the rituals in a book, Morals and Dogma of the...Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1872; revised several editions). He was born in Boston, Massachusetts.