Image via Twitter/WRAL
All fall down
by Tom Sullivan
Image via Twitter/WRAL
Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last night marched on and toppled the controversial "Silent Sam" statue memorializing the university's Civil War war dead:
Monday’s gathering started as a demonstration in support of a UNC graduate student who faces criminal and honor court charges for throwing red ink and blood on the Confederate statue in April. The downtown Franklin Street event quickly morphed into a march to the UNC campus, where police officers stood at the monument.
A skirmish broke out early when someone threw a smoke bomb. Police chased one man and arrested another for resisting, delaying and obstructing an officer.
The protesters quickly took control of the area immediately around the statue, hoisting four tall banners in a square that almost completely obscured it. The head of the Confederate soldier occasionally poked out from the top of the banners.
After early skirmishes, police stood back from protesters surrounding the statue. About 9:30 p.m., students used a rope to topple "Silent Sam." UNC Chancellor Carol Folt issued a statement acknowledging the longstanding controversy surrounding the statue, but not exactly condemning the "unlawful and dangerous" actions students took in toppling it. Police later loaded the statue into a truck.Silent Sam is down pic.twitter.com/mUqf7NkS0A
— Samee Siddiqui (@ssiddiqui83) August 21, 2018
Michael Keenan Gutierrez who teaches writing at UNC posted at We're History:A message from Chancellor Folt on the Confederate Monument: https://t.co/Qp42b6410P pic.twitter.com/T3HoBCEfXw
— UNC-Chapel Hill (@UNC) August 21, 2018
Silent Sam was among many “Silent Sentinels,” – statues of soldiers without cartridge box, soldiers who could no longer fire a shot – that were manufactured and bronzed in the North and then sent down south for public display. Many of these statues look remarkably similar. Like Silent Sam, they also face north, toward the Union.Protests of the statue date from as early as 1992. The United Daughters of the Confederacy and university alumni erected the monument in 1913, one of many erected in the period in tribute to the “mystique of chivalric Southern soldiers and the noble Confederate leadership embodied in Jefferson Davis,” otherwise known as the "Lost Cause."
The duty due to our dear Southland, and the conspicuous service rendered, did not end at Appomatox[sic]. The four years immediately following the four years of bloody carnage, brought their responsibilities hardly of less consequence than those for which the South laid upon the altar of her country 74,524 of her brave and loyal sons dead from disease, a grand total of 133,821.Mob action in removing the statues is indeed vandalism and a crime. New Orleans serves as a more fit model. But it is done. We will see what reaction comes from those who still romanticize the Old South celebrated by Carr and the UDC.
It is true that the snows of winter which never melt, crown our temples, and we realize that we are living in the twilight zone; that it requires no unusual strain to hear the sounds of the tides as they roll and break upon the other shore, “The watch-dog’s bark his deep bay mouth welcome as we draw near home”, breaks upon our ears—makes it doubly sweet to know that we have been remembered in the erection of this beautiful memorial. The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are, that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South – When “the bottom rail was on top” all over the Southern states, and to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States – Praise God.
I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.