U.S.
On the edge of campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill stands a statue of a young man. Facing north, he leans slightly forward, grasping a musket. Known by students as “Silent Sam,” he depicts a Confederate soldier, one of dozens of UNC students who signed up to fight for the South during the Civil War. Julian Carr, one such student turned veteran, spoke at the monument’s dedication ceremony in 1913.
“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,” he said, “when the facts are, that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.”
“One hundred yards from where we stand,” Carr continued, “less than 90 days perhaps after my return from Appomattox [where Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Army under Ulysses S. Grant], I horse-whipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of the 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 30 nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shotgun under my head.”
By the time of his dedication speech, Carr was a wealthy industrialist. Though known as “General,” he never made it past the rank of private when serving with the 3rd North Carolina Cavalry.
Oliver Marth is a recent graduate of the university. He works at the planetarium, within walking distance of the memorial. “Silent Sam stood out to me very much when I first came here,” he says. “Since the shooting in Charleston there’s been a lot more talk about it. Personally, I think there’s something to be said for not trying to whitewash our history, understanding that this is where we came from: that slaves built this school, that we fought for the Confederacy, that these things really did happen.”
Silent Sam is something of an anomaly in North Carolina, and the South in general, but only because of its location. Many Confederate memorials stand, not on university campuses, but near seats of political power: county courthouses and the grounds of State capitols. If erected on battlefields or cemeteries (as countless others are), they would have been relegated to a receding past and properly seen as commemorative. Instead, these monoliths have served for decades as an unambiguous statement by a ruling class that, although defeated militarily, would never capitulate.
In the South, it seems as if there’s a Confederate on every corner. North Carolina hasover 50 such memorials in front of former or current county courthouses alone.
“If the Confederacy had raised proportionately as many soldiers as the postwar South raised monuments,” wrote historian James M. McPherson in his 2007 book, “This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War,” “it might not have succumbed to ‘overwhelming numbers.’”
One memorial in front of the Wilson County Courthouse in North Carolina took the form of a segregated drinking fountain. The separate faucets for whites and blacks were removed only in 1960. Though meant to honor both Revolutionary and Civil War dead, it too depicts the flag of the Confederate States of America.
This flag that has been much in the news of late. Gov. Nikki Haley has called for its removal from the South Carolina Capitol. It has just been removed from the grounds of the Alabama Capitol by order of Gov. Robert Bentley. The Confederate battle flag is incorporated into the state flag of Mississippi. That state’s House speaker has called for it to be changed, as has Republican Sen. Roger Wicker.
Dylann Storm Roof, the alleged perpetrator of the Charleston massacre, in which nine African-Americans were shot dead, purportedly because of their race, was caught in Shelby, North Carolina. Not far from where he was taken custody, in front of the Cleveland County Courthouse, stands another statue of a Confederate soldier. Over 20 feet tall, this one also faces north and stands on a massive granite column weighing several tons. Below him, depicted in bas-relief, is a draped Confederate flag and an inscription reading “Lest we forget.”
Unlike some parts of North Carolina, Cleveland County was enthusiastic about the prospect of Civil War. This commitment to the cause continued after defeat in the form of a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which led to federal troops occupying Shelby’s Courthouse Square until 1872. The dedication of the Confederate monument is widely seen as reclamation of the space.
The attention of protesters is turning from Confederate flags to monuments. One in Charleston was recently tagged with graffiti, as was one in Baltimore, the phrase “Black lives matter” spray-painted on both. Protesters have also burned Confederate flags, and it's a trending topic on social media.
There are more monuments to the Confederacy than anything else on the grounds of the North Carolina State Capitol in Raleigh: an enormous, soaring memorial to “Our Confederate dead,” one dedicated to women of the Confederacy, and one commemorating Samuel A’Court Ashe, the last surviving commissioned officer of the Confederate States Army, described in the inscription as a “patriot.”
Another statue on the state capitol grounds depicts Henry Lawson Wyatt, a private in Company A, Bethel Regiment, North Carolina Volunteers. He appears to creep forward tentatively, bareheaded, rifle in hand. The real Henry Wyatt distinguished himself by receiving a bullet to the forehead while trying to burn down a wooden building, thus becoming the first Confederate casualty of the Civil War. Tarboro also has a memorial fountain in his name.
“I grew up in Raleigh, so I rode by that big one in front of the state Capitol all the time,” says Holden Richards, a local photographer. “As a child, I assumed they were monuments to war, but I didn’t realize that it was a war in the United States or what the point was. Now I see them, distinctly, as symbols of the Confederate South, and an attempt to celebrate and memorialize the values of that time.”
“Is it not the Confederate soldier,” asked Julian Carr at another monument dedication in 1917, “who, poor and worn with wounds, has been the guiding sire of the grand new South?”
These metal soldiers stand guard all over the states that made up the former Confederacy, often on pedestals at an unreachable height, sometimes at parade rest, sometimes advancing, almost always armed. But their history is not as monolithic as it seems.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy almost exclusively funded and sponsored these Confederate memorials. The UDC, along with the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, was the successor organization to the United Confederate Veterans, according to Harry Watson, a history professor at UNC Chapel Hill.
“Their stated goals always were to venerate memory of Confederacy, to insist on nobility and rightness of the Confederate cause, to make sure that version of history was taught in Southern schools and Southern textbooks — so they were rigorous as far as textbook censorship really — and to memorialize Confederate dead,” Watson says, defining what has become known as the cult of the Lost Cause. “They did all these things with the understanding that the Confederacy was a noble and perhaps sacred cause that should always be respected and venerated by white Southerners.”
“The subtext,” he adds, “was that the pro-Confederate white South was the only South that ever really existed and was the only one that mattered. Maintaining that view, and the white supremacy that was the political arm of it, was a sacred duty of everyone in the white South. The UDC and SCV were using their textbook supervision and monument building as a way of inculcating that message.”
A spokeswoman for the UDC was unavailable for comment.
One could say these monuments represent history mostly to the extent that it can be revised. What has been called the Solid South was anything but: According to Watson, many Southern whites opposed secession, took up arms against the Confederacy or avoided conscription and accepted the end of the war with a willingness to end slavery and create a biracial political movement. Watson believes the cult of the Lost Cause was a mythological answer to that political movement — a pitched ideological battle that took place decades after the end of the war.
A statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the old Chatham County, North Carolina, courthouse was defaced with black shoe polish and grease shortly after it was erected in 1907. Despite a reward, the perpetrator was never found. Chatham County was not initially in favor of secession, voting decidedly against a Constitutional Convention in February 1861. By war’s end, 700 of the 2,000 men Chatham County sent into conflict were dead.
North Carolina Chief Justice William Clark spoke at the dedication of the Chatham County statue. Later, during a commencement address at the historically black St. Augustine’s School of Raleigh, he made his views explicit. “The colored people do not wish social equality,” he said, “and the white people would not tolerate it, and there the matter ends.”
The statue in Chatham County, as everywhere else, shows a soldier who appears healthy and well fed, a far cry from the increasingly malnourished men fed into the maw of that terrible war as it neared its end.
“Obviously these monuments were intended to honor the bravery of individuals who thought they were doing their patriotic duty,” Watson said. “But in addition, they were put there with a very clear political purpose, and that’s one of the reasons they go up on courthouse lawns.”
The same political agenda was behind the enormous Confederate memorials on the grounds of Southern state capitols, like the one in South Carolina which still, at least for the moment, flies the Confederate battle flag, or the ones in Alabama, North Carolina, Texas and Arkansas. “The purpose of that,” says Watson, “was to say that pro-Confederate politics are the power structure of the post-Reconstruction South, and if you don’t like it get over it.”
Garrick Brenner is the executive director of Progress NC, a progressive public policy advocacy organization. Nonetheless, he says the monuments should stay put.
“This is my way of thinking, my personal opinion,” he said, “but I don’t think we should take down that Confederate memorial because it reminds people of history, and I think it’s important for people to remember history.”
But Watson the historian has a different take.
“Some people might say that today they’re harmless — they didn’t prevent what they were intended to prevent — but they do remain as rallying for the occasional white supremacist,” he says, “and they remain a bone in the throat of those who want to emphasize that those statues don’t speak for the South of today.”
Additional research provided by Will Sexton.
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