Why Silent Sam should stand again at UNC
Judge Allen Baddour should be hailed for his self-reversal this month on Silent Sam. His ruling, which vacates the $2.5 million Silent Sam settlement between the UNC System Board of Governors and The North Carolina Division Sons of Confederate Veterans Inc., denies possession of the memorial to an organization which, whatever its claims, would reinforce Silent Sam’s gratuitous association with neo-Confederate sentiment. Silent Sam should be put back where it was — and had been for more than a century — before the vandals struck. And with proper security measures and identification of its origins.
The ideology that has animated recent attacks on Silent Sam has been driven by chronological confusion. Those who view such monuments as markers of Lost Cause celebration forget that from the collapse of Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction in 1868 to the stolen election of 1877, much of the South lay under military occupation and Confederate memorials would have been viewed as impudent challenges to federal authority. It is, however, undeniable that the dawn of the 20th century witnessed perhaps the most virulent onset of racially discriminatory measures in American history. The ensuing Jim Crow reaction (written by the Supreme Court into national law in 1896) registered national fatigue with the hard task of dealing with the aftermath of slavery and civil war. Reaction came with reunion, as it often does.
My ancestry on both sides includes Confederate officers; one Georgia great-grandfather, who fought with Lee, died in the cause. That is a fact, not a boast — nor, however, is it an apology. It emboldens me to say a dissenting word or two about the revisionist fervor that led to Silent Sam’s dismantling and handed the UNC governing boards a challenge which they have handled clumsily. And unhistorically. “History,” in its root sense, is “inquiry” — a search for understanding. Thus far, the treatment of the Confederate statue issue has been marked by contempt and evasion.
The context has been the overdue rejection of institutionalized “racism” to the exclusion of complicating factors also worthy of study — not least the Cotton South’s fateful absorption in an economy to which human slavery was thought essential. It is true and tragic that a region that earlier had earlier produced articulate critics of slavery from Washington to Jefferson became, for expedient reasons, dependent upon it.
The dismissal of significant but regrettable events in the shaping of who and what we are is historically impoverishing; and that is certainly true of the rage to erase markers testifying to the existence of the Confederacy and to the undoubted fact — as does Silent Sam — that thousands of young men, many with no personal stake in slavery, found it worthy of the risk of life and limb.
A great historian trained in the shadow of Silent Sam — C. Vann Woodward — explored with matchless eloquence what he called “the burden of southern history.” And what is that burden? It is the sense that the South, old and new, has known defeat, poverty and the failure of an inhuman ideology. That is in stark contrast to the triumphalist tenor of American exceptionalism: a favorite theme of one recent president who saw only brightness in the national record — and with a heavy infusion of fantasy. It is a frame of mind that no southerner conscious of the lingering “burden” of our regional history can share. And it is folly and tragedy to destroy its monuments.
This story was originally published February 24, 2020 at 12:00 AM.