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The Albert Pike Memorial, torn down by BLM rioters, is being put back up by the Trump administration.
I don’t know that Pike has many cheerleaders left in our era. Even among supporters of the Confederacy.
He was a racist and an anti-Catholic bigot.
Despite being described as a Confederate general, he was a shyster lawyer who specialized in representing Indian tribes and then parlayed that into incompetently ‘commanding’ Indian allied forces on the Confederate side which performed poorly against the Union’s Indian allied forces. There were claims of scalpings on both sides.
The Pike Memorial was put up by Masons to honor him for reasons of complicated internal Freemasonry politics that frankly no one today is likely to care about.
I doubt anyone cares much about Pike today, but there is a principle that memorials are put up legally and cannot just be vandalized and torn down by radicals. That principle is the only conceivable reason the Pike Memorial should be going up.
It’s not about honoring Pike, it is about honoring the rule of law.
A much better example of a memorial that should be put back is the Confederate Memorial (also called the Reconciliation Monument) that the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War just voted to restore. There’s a very good article about this over at thenewamerican.com
The beautiful statue of Robert E. Lee upon his horse Traveller has been melted down to be repurposed into another public art monument. Maybe another colossal overweight black woman in sweat pants?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/26/charlottesville-robert-e-lee-melted-confederate-statue
Yeah, I can’t remember reading anything about Pike in my numerous readings on the Civil War.