Biography

He was born in Calais, Maine

Calais, Maine

Calais is a city in Washington County, Maine, United States. The city has three United States border crossings or also known as a Port of entry with the busiest being on the St. Croix River bordering St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada...

, was a journalist in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 during the mid 19th century. From 1850-1860 he was the chief Washington correspondent and associate editor of the New York Tribune

New York Tribune

The New York Tribune was an American newspaper, first established by Horace Greeley in 1841, which was long considered one of the leading newspapers in the United States...

. The Tribune was the chief source of news and commentary for many Republican newspapers across the country. Republican editors reprinted his dispatches prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War

American Civil War

The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...

. In 1854 he led the fight against the Kansas-Nebraska Act

Kansas-Nebraska Act

The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing settlers in those territories to determine through Popular Sovereignty if they would allow slavery within...

, calling for the formation of a new political entity to oppose it. Pike wrote that a "solid phalanx of aggression rears its black head everywhere south of Mason and Dixon's line, banded for the propagation of Slavery all over the continent." His reports were, "Widely quoted, bitterly attacked or enthusiastically praised, they exerted a profound influence upon public opinion and gave to their author national prominence, first as an uncompromising anti-slavery Whig, and later as an ardent Republican."

President Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...

 appointed Pike to be minister to the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

, where he fought Confederate

Confederate States of America

The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...

 diplomatic efforts and promoted the Union war aims from 1861 to 1866. On returning to Washington in 1866, Pike resumed writing for the New York Tribune and also wrote editorials for the New York Sun.

He was an outspoken Radical Republican, standing with Thaddeus Stevens

Thaddeus Stevens

Thaddeus Stevens , of Pennsylvania, was a Republican leader and one of the most powerful members of the United States House of Representatives...

 and Charles Sumner

Charles Sumner

Charles Sumner was an American politician and senator from Massachusetts. An academic lawyer and a powerful orator, Sumner was the leader of the antislavery forces in Massachusetts and a leader of the Radical Republicans in the United States Senate during the American Civil War and Reconstruction,...

 and opposing President Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson was the 17th President of the United States . As Vice-President of the United States in 1865, he succeeded Abraham Lincoln following the latter's assassination. Johnson then presided over the initial and contentious Reconstruction era of the United States following the American...

. Long before black suffrage became a major issue Pike had come to believe that the freed slaves must be given the vote. Pike in 1866-67 strongly supported Black suffrage and the disqualification of most ex-Confederates from holding office.

Pike did not admire Ulysses Grant as a politician, and drifted away from the Republican party. By 1872 Pike was disenchanted with Black suffrage and the corruption and failures of Reconstruction. He argued the federal government should withdraw its soldiers from the Southern states. He was a strong supporter of the Liberal Republican movement that in 1872 opposed President Ulysses Grant, denounced the corruption of his administration. Pike's boss, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley was an American newspaper editor, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer, a politician, and an outspoken opponent of slavery...

 was the Liberal Republican nominee in 1872. Greeley lost to Grant by a landslide, then died. the new editor of the Tribune Whitelaw Reid

Whitelaw Reid

Whitelaw Reid was a U.S. politician and newspaper editor, as well as the author of a popular history of Ohio in the Civil War.-Early life:...

 sent Pike to South Carolina to study the conditions in the deep South under Reconstruction.

Pike's reports on South Carolina

In 1873 Pike toured South Carolina and wrote a series of newspaper articles, reprinted in newspapers across the country and republished in book form in 1874 as The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government. It was a widely read and highly influential first hand account of the details of Reconstruction government in South Carolina, that systematically exposed what Pike considered to be corruption, incompetence, bribery, financial misdeeds and misbehavior in the state legislature. His critics argue the tone and emphasis is distorted and hostile toward African Americans and Grant Republicans.

The Prostrate State painted a lurid picture accusing African American lawmakers with a lack of decorum in the management of public affairs. Pike used the term "Sambo" to describe them; it became a racial slur in the 20th century.

Historian John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin was a United States historian and past president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and...

 said "James S. Pike, the Maine journalist, wrote an account of misrule in South Carolina, appropriately called The Prostrate State, and painted a lurid picture of the conduct of Negro legislators and the general lack of decorum in the management of public affairs. Written so close to the period and first published as a series of newspaper pieces, The Prostrate State should perhaps not be classified as history at all. But for many years the book was regarded as authoritative—contemporary history at its best. Thanks to Robert Franklin Durden, we now know that Pike did not really attempt to tell what he saw or even what happened in South Carolina during Reconstruction. By picking and choosing from his notes those events and incidents that supported his argument, he sought to place responsibility for the failure of Reconstruction on the Grant administration and on the freedmen, whom he despised with equal passion.

Durden wrote that the fundamental clue to Pike's hostile position to African Americans in his book The Prostrate State was that "in the 1850s no less than in the 1870s, is to be found in his constant antipathy toward the Negro race."

In his biographical study of Pike, Durden concluded that Pike had been ardently "free soil" before the American Civil War because he thought that the West should belong to the white man. Durden said Pike despaired of living alongside arrogant slaveholders and their repulsive human property, and that he urged peaceful secession during the 1860-61 crisis partly because he had one eye cocked on the chance of getting rid of "mass of barbarism" and that during some of the Civil War's darker days he would have settled for a compromise peace if it meant only that a Gulf coast or Deep South "negro pen" would be lost to the Federal Union. Durden wrote that The Prostrate State made makes sense only in this context, and to the extent that Pike's racial views were representative "the Civil War and Reconstruction take on a new dimension of tragedy."

Historian Mark Summers concludes that Pike stressed the sensational, but "however maliciously and mendaciously he shaded his evidence, his accounts squared with those of his colleagues Charles Nordhoff of the New York Herald and H.P. Redfield of the Cincinnati Commercial. James Freeman Clarke, a leading Boston abolitionist, visited South Carolina and reported back to tell his Boston congregation that the facts presented by Pike, "were confirmed by every man whom I saw."

Durden (2000) reports:

" A sweeping indictment of Republican rule in this state (and, by inference, other southern states), Pike's dramatic, "eye-witness" account gained much attention throughout the country. The book was so popular because it was seen as the work of an allegedly impartial Maine Republican and old foe of slavery who had come to his senses about the "wicked corruption" of the carpetbaggers and their "ignorant and barbaric" Negro allies. Pike's book not only played a role in the ending of Reconstruction but was much used by historians well into the twentieth century. In fact, it was far from objective, simply reflecting Pike's long-standing racism."