Rebel Gold
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In the 1830s, Pike distinguished himself as an editor of the Arkansas Advocate and as a lawyer in private practice in Little Rock. But it was through Cushing’s political patronage that he was able to develop a political machine in Arkansas by the 1840s.39 A large, heavily bearded man with dark, thick, flowing hair and brooding eyes, he was an imposing, shrewd and generally brilliant character in his own right. Northern commentators, including those writing in Continental Monthly in the early Civil War, fingered “brutal and arrogant” Pike—in contrast to the “miserable quack” George Bickley—as the dark genius behind the Masonic-influenced, hidden Confederacy, the KGC.40
Pike, born the same year as Abraham Lincoln, combined elements from three important aspects of his life: membership in Scottish Rite Freemasonry; political experience with the Whigs and then with the short-lived anti-immigration, anti-black, anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, followed by the Democratic Party; and, finally, legal and Masonic connections with the Cherokee and other Nations in Indian Territory (what is now Oklahoma) across the border from Arkansas.
With unprecedented speed, Pike rose through the higher ranks of the Scottish Rite, and eventually wrote its key manifesto, Morals and Dogma. He had first become a Masonic brother in 1850 in Little Rock, where he was initiated under the three “Blue Lodge” degrees of common—otherwise known as “symbolic” or “craft”—Masonry. (These neophyte degrees—Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason—are stepping-stones to the higher degrees in the two main forms or “appendant” systems of American Masonry: the Scottish Rite and York Rite. Most Masons today only participate in these lower, common degrees of initiation in the fraternity and, unlike those initiated into the advanced degrees, have no special knowledge of tightly held secrets or ancient mysteries.) After advancing through the basic degrees, Pike quickly received, by 1853, all ten additional degrees of the York Rite, with its strong early-American roots in New England. The top degree for a York Rite Mason happens to be that of “Knight Templar.”
Later that year, brother “Knight Templar” Pike switched his fraternal focus to the Scottish Rite, with its progressive thirty-three degrees, exotic rituals, symbol of the double-headed eagle, and twin credos of “from chaos, order” and “liberty, equality and fraternity.”41 Formally, the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry confers twenty-nine higher degrees—including that of “Knight Kadosh”—up to the rank of thirty-second degree for those over twenty-one years of age. It ultimately confers a final, thirty-third, degree as an honorary title on a select few. Members of the Scottish Rite Supreme Council are thirty-third-degree Masons.
The Scottish Rite’s origins in America are not entirely clear. Basic or “craft” Freemasonry (involving the lower degrees) had already established public lodges in the American colonies, chiefly in Philadelphia and Boston, by the 1730s. The higher-degree Scottish Rite is believed to have migrated to American shores in the second half of the eighteenth century, most likely from France and the French West Indies colony of Santo Domingo.42 (Recall, many Scottish Masons had fled to France during political and social unrest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hence the name Scottish Rite, according to some Masonic authorities. It is possible that the Rite also was influenced by certain German [Bavaria- and Frankfurt-based] Freemasonic strands emerging in the late eighteenth century.)
By the late 1700s, the Rite had established its strongest beachheads in the South, in New Orleans and Charleston, both cities a popular refuge for French Protestants (Huguenots). Charleston also had a large, socially prominent Jewish population, whose representation on the Rite’s Supreme Council was second to that of the Huguenots. Around the same time, the Rite had established footholds in New York City, Albany, Philadelphia and Boston. Its core centers would coalesce around Charleston and New York by the early 1800s.
Pike, who would emerge as the world’s most powerful Freemason, joined the Scottish Rite in Charleston in March 1853. He revised its rituals between 1855 and 1857 and became a thirty-third-degree member later that year. Elected to the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite’s Southern Jurisdiction in July 1858, he ultimately became its Sovereign Grand Commander, in January 1859. (Pike would hold the supreme position until his death, in 1891. Highly revered by the Scottish Rite, he is interred in the House of the Temple headquarters in Washington, D.C.) Coincidentally, Pike’s confirmation as a Supreme Council member came a few days after the mysterious death—possibly the result of a slow-acting poison—of prominent Supreme Council member John A. Quitman in Mississippi.
The enigmatic six-foot-two, three-hundred-pound Masonic scholar from Little Rock had become the intellectual sine qua non of the inner temple of the powerful fraternal order. That said, neither the Supreme Council (Southern Jurisdiction) nor Pike as its Sovereign Grand Commander spoke for all Freemasonry or controlled all Masons. Although influential, the Scottish Rite and its elite could not dictate rules or policy for regional or state Grand Lodges of common, or craft, Freemasonry scattered throughout the nation.
Recognizing the limits of his new authority, Pike wasted no time reorganizing the Scottish Rite. No small part of this included the destruction of records. Pike is quoted in the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction’s chronicles as saying that all of the organization’s records that are not “worthy of preservation” should be “committed to the flames.”43 He then quickly moved to consolidate control over a recalcitrant regional lodge in New Orleans. That achieved, he embarked on a grander strategy: to widen the Scottish Rite’s popularity in the South and West through a revised, more alluring set of rituals. This he carried out by culling choice bits from Jewish mysticism, medieval Christian sects and even alchemy in the process of revising the initiation rites.44
Pike expanded the Supreme Council itself, from nine to thirty-three members, with representation from across the South, that is, from the budding Confederacy. In an April 2, 1861, address to a Supreme Council session in New Orleans, he avowed: “There is a world of significance in the fact, that this Body, which only a few short months ago was the Supreme Council, in name, for the Southern, and, in fact, for the Southern and Western Jurisdiction of the United States of America, is now the Supreme Council … for the Confederate States of America.”45 He went on to assert that “the convulsions which rock the outer world, severing the bonds that have heretofore tied State to State, and creating new Republics, do not shake the firm foundations of our Masonic governments and institutions.” As it turned out, the long-existing dividing line between the “Northern Jurisdiction” and “Southern Jurisdiction” of the Scottish Rite would mirror the future demarcation lines between the Union, Confederacy and border states. That is, the New York–based “Northern Jurisdiction” would be neatly defined as east of the Mississippi, north of the Ohio, south of the St. Lawrence, and west of the Atlantic—precisely the settled area outside the Confederacy.
An unabashed apologist for slavery, Pike also saw to it that key supporters of the Southern cause were corralled into the Supreme Council’s ranks by the fall of 1859. Most significant among his appointments to the Council in 1859 was that of Kentuckian John C. Breckinridge, who then was vice president of the United States under James Buchanan.46
With the onset of the Civil War, Breckinridge headed to the battlefield as a major general in the Confederate Army and then, near war’s end, was called to serve under Jefferson Davis as the Confederacy’s secretary of war. Like Quitman, Cushing and Pike, Breckinridge was a veteran of the Mexican War and a Scottish Rite Mason. A slaveholder, Breckinridge endorsed the doctrine of states’ rights and limited federal sovereignty (his paternal grandfather, John Breckinridge of Kentucky, had been a major promoter of that doctrine with his friend and colleague, Thomas Jefferson). He did not, however, at least publicly within the uncommitted border state of Kentucky, champion secession until very late in the game. His private views might have been far less moderate.
Breckinridge, according to the pseudonymous author of Narrative of Edmu
nd Wright, was a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle. The aristocratic vice president would “flaunt the emblems of treason under the nose of an imbecile president (Buchanan),” observes the author, who adds:
John C. Breckinridge was, and still is, one of the great lights of the K.G.C. He is indebted to the Order for his nomination at Cincinnati on the Buchanan ticket, and for subsequent political advancement. While Breckinridge was vice-president of the United States, he publicly wore, in the City of Washington, the emblematic jewelry of this traitorous Order—thus shamelessly parading his treason to the Government of which he was one of the principal officers.47
Another damning charge against Breckinridge comes from the New York World’s editorial of June 1862, as quoted in Henry Conkling’s (1864) An Inside View of the Rebellion:
In the dark days of 1860, we had the imbecile and false-hearted Buchanan at the head of the Government; the incompetent and perfidious Cobb was ruining the public credit. The thief Floyd was transferring the public arms to the Southern States…. The Senate was presided over by the traitor Breckinridge and both houses of Congress swarmed with secessionists.48
Breckinridge would play a central role in delivering the KGC’s most important prewar goal: ensuring the election of Abraham Lincoln as a “justification” for secession. The 1860 National Democratic Convention in Charleston, chaired by none other than Pike’s New England mentor, Caleb Cushing, had ended in bitter acrimony and without an unchallenged front-runner candidate. Consequently, Breckinridge was put forward in a rump convention in Baltimore as a southern Democratic alternative candidate (supporting slavery’s extension into the territories) to northern Democratic leader Stephen Douglas. This unprecedented move—of dividing the party in the run-up to the election—split the Democratic Party ticket at the polls and handed Lincoln, who was committed to preventing the spread of slavery, a sufficient margin in the Electoral College to take the four-party election. (Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote, followed by Breckinridge and the others.)
In the election’s wake, seven Deep South states seceded, from December 1860 to February 1861. It would take the firing on Fort Sumter several months later to spark the secession of the Upper South slave states. That final act toward precipitating full secession and Civil War was led by Confederate Maj. Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard of Louisiana, a Scottish Rite Freemason. According to Edmund Wright, Beauregard had tried to establish a KGC castle at West Point.49
But Breckinridge was not Pike’s only key antebellum appointment to the Scottish Rite’s Supreme Council. Howell Cobb of Georgia, the U.S. secretary of the treasury under Buchanan, was also named to the expanded thirty-three-member body.50 This, like the Breckinridge appointment, helped bolster the KGC–Scottish Rite nexus and solidify the Council’s representation beyond the confines of Charleston’s city limits. Cobb, a former governor of Georgia and son of a wealthy plantation owner, came late to the secessionist table, at least in his public pronouncements. After Lincoln’s election, he became an uncompromising secessionist and an eventual candidate for the presidency of the Confederacy. During his tenure in the Buchanan cabinet, Cobb was believed to have aided the KGC by helping funnel funds out of the U.S. Treasury on the eve of the Civil War.51 Cobb, perhaps the most powerful member of Buchanan’s cabinet, would, like Pike and Breckinridge, become a Confederate general.
Perhaps Pike’s biggest pre–Civil War coup—and one that certainly contributed to his initial postwar exclusion from presidential amnesty—was recruiting the Cherokee and other Indian nations to the Confederate and KGC cause.52 As the chief Scottish Rite Mason in Arkansas in the 1850s, Pike had included Indian Territory in the Arkansas “Grand Consistory of the Thirty-Second Degree” under his direct control. He then went on to establish numerous Scottish Rite lodges among the various displaced tribes living in Indian Territory. Moreover, on the eve of the Civil War, Pike initiated several tribal leaders into the advanced thirty-second degree of the Rite. One of these high-level initiates, a Cherokee leader from Little Rock, Elias Boudinot, was invited to serve as secretary of the Arkansas Secession Convention in March 1861.
Pike had long been fascinated by Native American culture. Polyglot that he was, the expatriate New Englander eventually learned how to communicate with members of the Western Nations in their native tongues (complementing his fluent French and working knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Sanskrit). Before settling in Arkansas in 1832, Pike had traveled as a member of a trading party through what is now New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma—meeting Choctaw, Cherokee, Creeks, Chickasaw and Seminole along the way. Once established in Arkansas, he developed an abiding affinity for the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, an estimated fifty thousand Native Americans forced by the U.S. government into Indian Territory from homelands in the East. He would regularly embark on camping and hunting excursions with tribe members; and, as a bar-certified lawyer by 1835, he began to focus his Little Rock–based practice on advocating Indian rights before Congress.
In particular, Pike pressed for federal payment of claims due for Indian lands that had been confiscated earlier in the nineteenth century. He obtained a six-figure settlement for the Creeks and went on to win other important suits and financial rewards for the aggrieved tribes. In securing one of those payments—$500,000 for the Choctaw—Pike obtained Vice President Breckinridge’s backing to let him name members of the Senate conference committee deciding the fate of the payment.53 Breckinridge, at the time, had recently been named a member of the Scottish Rite Supreme Council by Pike.
Successful lobbying for slave-holding Indian tribes proved lucrative for Pike, and it helped the KGC and the Confederacy on many levels. First, he would earn substantial fees (paid mostly in gold coin) that could be put toward future unnamed causes. As biographer Robert L. Duncan noted: “One of the still unsolved mysteries in the life of Albert Pike concerns the $190,000 received” for his prosecution of the Indian claims.54 “For the times, this was a staggering fortune, and there is no record that Pike invested it or paid off debts with it.”
Second, Pike would win the enduring respect and admiration of several Indian nations (for whom he acted as paymaster in disbursing hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold-coin payments) that would later side with the Confederacy. Such an alliance, bolstered by trained Indian cavalry units, would provide a buffer against Union use of Indian Territory as a staging ground for raids against his adopted home of Arkansas and its huge Confederate neighbor, Texas.
Finally, Pike would secure an important position within the Confederacy. Beginning in March 1861, he would be appointed Confederate commissioner to the Indian tribes, then commander of the Department of Indian Territory, and, ultimately, brigadier general in charge of Indian troops fighting for the Confederate States of America. (As it turned out, an untested Brigadier General Pike would be harshly criticized for the mismanagement of his Native American brigade at the March 1862 battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas. This high-level censure—over accusations of scalping and mutilations by his troops—contributed to his resignation from the Rebel army in late 1862, after little more than a year of service. Pike, who quickly condemned the scalpings, somehow managed to avoid court-martial over the Confederate debacle at Pea Ridge, perhaps through the good offices of his friend, Jefferson Davis.)
Despite personal setbacks in his official role in the Confederate Army, Pike cemented a broad strategic alliance—and long-lasting friendships—with important elements from each of the Five Civilized Tribes. Once again, the KGC’s cryptic symbols provide a marker. An article in the August 29, 1861 edition of the Arkansas True Democrat describes Pike’s presentation of two symbolic flags to the principal chiefs of the Creeks and Seminoles.55 The “Confederate” flags comprised “a crescent and a red star [italics added] in a green union and upright bars of red and white for the Creeks, and the same for the Seminoles, with the exception of diagonal bars,” the article said.
In pro-slavery alliance treaties undertaken for the Conf
ederacy, Pike secured for the tribes significant autonomy and economic rights far beyond what the Nations had enjoyed from Washington. These alliances, still secretly active after the war in federal no-man’s land (that is, in Indian Territory, which remained virtually lawless for decades), would play an important role for the postwar KGC.
Pike’s alliance with Chief Stand Watie was crucial. A “Confederate” Cherokee leader who would fight under CSA officers Pike, Thomas Hindman, Benjamin McCulloch and Sterling Price, Watie emerged as a feared hit-and-run cavalry raider in Indian Territory, Arkansas, Missouri and Texas. The hard-charging warrior would become a brigadier general in 1864, making him the only Native American to achieve the rank of general in the Confederate Army. It was during that year that Watie executed two stunningly successful raids—the capturing of the federal supply steamship J. R. Williams on the Arkansas River in June; and, a few months later, the seizing of a Union supply train carrying an estimated $1.5 million worth of matériel. These bold ambushes of federal convoys would foreshadow the postwar KGC’s activities. Small coincidence that Price, Watie’s highly respected Confederate Army commander, was, according to the 1864 Holt Report, the KGC’s operational leader on the trans-Mississippi Western front.56
Through Pike, Watie had become a thirty-second-degree Scottish Rite Mason just before the outbreak of hostilities. As war approached, the mixed-blood Cherokee leader signaled his readiness to join the Rebel ranks far beyond any other Indian Nation leader. His early, staunchly pro-South position had challenged the majority will of the full-blood “Pin” Cherokees under the leadership of Chief John Ross, who initially sought to remain neutral and to protect Cherokee sovereignty. Following a series of Confederate victories at the beginning of the war, the entire Cherokee nation under Ross signed an alliance treaty with the Confederacy, thereby joining, in October 1861, the other four Civilized Tribes in the secessionist cause. Those treaties maintained that Indian troops were to be used only to defend Indian Territory itself. However, to Pike’s consternation, that would not be the case: Confederate Indian troops were soon deployed outside the territory’s borders, by orders from Richmond.