Five years after the statue of a Confederate general was toppled in Washington D.C., the National Park Service announced that Albert Pike will again stand over the corner of 3rd and D Streets NW.
“The National Park Service announced today that it will restore and reinstall the bronze statue of Albert Pike, which was toppled and vandalized during riots in June 2020,” said the NPS Monday. “The restoration aligns with federal responsibilities under historic preservation law as well as recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and re-instate pre-existing statues.”
The Pike statue was toppled during protests over the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a white police officer. Even before the protests, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) introduced a bill to remove the statue in summer 2019.
“The statue was authorized in 1898 by Congress, not the District, at a time when D.C. lacked home rule,” said an October 2020 press release from Norton’s office. She also noted that the statue was donated by the Freemasons in 1898 and that the society agreed that the statue should be removed. The Scottish Rite Freemasonry Supreme Council confirmed this in a 2020 press release.
According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, Pike was a native of Boston, Mass., who served as the Confederate Indian commissioner and military commander of Indian Territory during the Civil War. He started out his adult life with a trading party moving west and he also taught school and wrote poetry while living in Arkansas. Pike later purchased the Little Rock Advocate and became an attorney, practicing law before the Supreme Court.
“In 1852 he represented the Creek Nation of Indian Territory in a claim for ceded tribal land. His efforts attracted the attention of the Choctaw and Chickasaw, who hired him to pursue a similar case in 1854. Although Pike won the cases, insufficient reparations were awarded to the tribes in 1856 and 1857,” said the historical society.
Pike decided to serve the Confederacy and was appointed Confederate commissioner of Indian affairs in March 1861. In that role, he negotiated treaties of alliance between the Confederate government and various Native American tribes. By October 1861, he was appointed as brigadier general of the Provisional Army of the Department of Indian Territory, with his headquarters at Fort Davis in the Cherokee Nation. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Pike struggled to lead his troops.
“After participating in the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, in March 1862, Pike withdrew his troops to Fort McCulloch in the Choctaw Nation,” the historical society said. When Trans-Mississippi District Commander Gen. Thomas C. Hindman ordered Pike to send troops to Arkansas in May 1862, Pike resigned and argued that his troops should “not serve outside Indian Territory.”
Pike was arrested in November 1862 for this protest, but charges were later dropped. After the war, he devoted his life to working for the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in Washington, D.C., and became reclusive, said the Oklahoma Historical Society. He died there in 1891.
Per the NPS’s Monday announcement, the D.C. Pike statue has been in secure storage since its removal and that it is currently undergoing restoration by the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center. It also said the statue “honored Pike’s leadership in Freemasonry, including his 32 years as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Ancient Rite of Scottish Freemasonry.”
“Even though the Scottish Rite no longer had any ownership rights to the sculpture, this Supreme Council has repeatedly voiced its strong support for any governmental decision to remove the statue, because we recognized that its existence could be a concern among some citizens,” said the organization in 2020. “We can never condone unlawful acts; otherwise the foundation of our society would crumble. However, the statue has belonged to the people since we gave it to them more than a hundred years ago. Our prayer is that the removal of the statue can be at least a small step toward healing our nation’s wounds.”
Now, the NPS has said that the move to reinstall the statue “supports both the Executive Order on Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful and the Executive Order on Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which direct federal agencies to protect public monuments and present a full and accurate picture of the American past.”
President Donald Trump has also called for restoration of several U.S. Army base names that had previously been changed as part of an effort to remove Confederate associations. This Juneteenth – a federal holiday established by former President Joe Biden – Trump also argued in a social media post that the U.S. had too many holidays. During Biden’s tenure, there were moves to remove Confederate statues across the country, from lawmakers calling for the removal of all Confederate statues from the Capitol to the melting of a statue in Charlottesville, Va.
According to the NPS, site preparation to repair the Pike statue’s damaged masonry plinth will begin shortly. It plans for the fully restored statue to be reinstalled by October.
Norton said Monday that she plans to reintroduce her bill to permanently remove the statue and “authorize the Secretary of the Interior to donate it to a museum or a similar entity,” following the NPS announcement. As of this week, the original bill had been passed by the House Committee on Natural Resources.
“I’ve long believed Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not remain in parks and locations that imply honor,” Norton said. “The decision to honor Albert Pike by reinstalling the Pike statue is as odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable.”