Of Statuary, Symbolism, and Sam

For want of something more constructive to fight about, our community may soon be embroiled in a dispute over whether Silent Sam, the Confederate memorial statue on the UNC campus, should or should not be hauled down.

This is one of those quarrels that cannot possibly be decided on artistic merits, for the reason that nobody is really concerned with the actual statue itself, but only what it symbolizes. Those who want it removed view it as a left-over emblem of the defense of slavery. Those who would retain Silent Sam--or some of them, anyway--insist that States Rights, not slavery, was why the Southern States fought the Civil War, that a majority of white North Carolinians didn't even own slaves, and so on.

Let me say at once that I am in favor of leaving Silent Sam where he is--but not for the reasons cited above, which are totally specious. In the first place, while States Rights were why the South sought to secede from the Union, the Rights in question were meant to protect the ownership and employment of slave labor.

I have long relished the story of what General Jubal Early reportedly said to General John C. Breckinridge following the defeat of Early's Confederate army at Winchester. Breckinridge had been the Southern Democratic candidate for President in 1860; Early had strongly opposed secession. Now, four years later, as the two men retreated southward through the rain with what was left of their thoroughly-whipped forces, Early remarked, "Well, General, what do you think of the 'rights of the South' in the Territories now?"

Secondly, it is true that most white North Carolinians did not own slaves. But those who did own them controlled the politics in the State, and the vote to secede in 1861 was an early example of what was for generations the guiding maxim of Southern politics. This is, that if you can make a sufficiently lurid appeal to people's racial prejudices, you can always get them to vote against their own economic and social interests.

The issue that got all this started, in its latest incarnation at least, was the dispute over the presence of the Confederate battle flag atop the capitol of my native State of South Carolina. The flag had not been placed there by those who had fought for it, but instead a century later to serve as a conscious rallying symbol of white opposition to the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that racial segregation in school was unconstitutional .

The statue of Silent Sam, however, is another matter, as are the multi-hundreds of similar statues of Confederate soldiers on courthouse lawns and other public places throughout the Southern states. Sam is the product of another and different time, when thousands of white-bearded old men wearing grey uniforms were looking forward to their approaching oblivion. They wanted their place in time to be marked.

The distinction is crucial. People do learn, and grow. Just as we no longer drown witches, burn heretics, or bar women from voting, so most of us have also learned a few things about civil rights, human dignity, and equal opportunity for all.

Silent Sam and the other Confederate monuments were erected by the survivors of the war and by their children and grandchildren to commemorate the war they had fought and lost when young. Another such monument, to my mind far more moving, are the tablets in Memorial Hall on the UNC campus with the names of more than three hundred students and former students at the university who died in that war.

If the right to own human beings as slaves lay behind the secession of the South in 1860-1861, it does not follow that the principal motivation of most of those North Carolinians who enlisted in the Confederate Army was to support the institution of slavery. It was far more basic and visceral than that. Their State was under attack. That was...