Silent Sam and Senator Sam
Two thoughtful readers with differing views on Confederate memorials passed along dueling viewpoints – one from the late Senator Sam Ervin and the other about Silent Sam at UNC-Chapel Hill. Reading both suggests where Confederal memorials should be and where they shouldn’t be.
Senator Sam
Senator Ervin spoke in August 1965 at the dedication of the Memorial to the Army and Navy of the Confederate States of America at Gettysburg. The reader gave me a reprint of the speech from The State magazine, November 1984.
The memorial was built, Ervin said, thanks to “various patriotic organizations, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who are devoted to the truth that nothing so strengthens the nation as reading the nation’s history, whether that history is recorded in books or inscribed upon monuments.”
Agreed. Let’s read the history.
Ervin traced at length events of the battle, “brought about by Lee’s daring invasion of the South, which marked the heyday of the Confederacy.” And said of the outcome:
“At Gettysburg the South lost by death and disabling wounds a multitude of her sons possessing high military capacity. As a consequence, Gettysburg impaired to a substantial degree the South’s ability to wage the offensive warfare absolutely necessary to ultimate military victory. In this way, Gettysburg combined with the South’s shrinking manpower and material resources to make inevitable the South’s defeat in the way of attrition carried on by Grant after he assumed direction of the Union campaign in Virginia.”
Then Ervin raised the issue we wrestle with today:
“When one ponders the story of the soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy who fought at Gettysburg and countless other engagements on land and sea, he cannot avoid putting this question to history: What inspired these men to fight so bravely, always against great odds and oftentimes to death?
“The assertion that they fought to perpetuate slavery does not suffice to answer the question. Most of them did not own or expect to own a single slave. Indeed, few of them had any material stake whatever in the victory of the Confederacy.”
Why then, did they fight? Out of duty, Ervin said. He quoted the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery:
“Not for fame or reward, not for place or for rank, not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity, but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it, these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died.”
Soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy, Ervin said, “taught by example this precept of their great chieftain, Robert E. Lee: ‘Duty then is the sublimest word in our language’.” Ervin concluded:
“As long as Fame her record keeps, may this memorial join history in bearing to the generations the message that the soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy fought for the cause they loved in simple obedience to duty as they understood it and that they illustrated by their lives and by their deaths in a fashion unsurpassed in the annals of time this enteral truth:
“’Defeat may serve as well as victory,
To shake the soul and let the glory out’.”
Silent Sam
The other reader sent a digital presentation about the history of Silent Sam at UNC-Chapel Hill, prepared last year by James L. Leloudis, Professor of History, and Cecelia Moore, PhD, at UNC. It begins:
“Since 1913, UNC’s Confederate monument — known locally by the nickname Silent Sam — has presided over the north entrance to McCorkle Place, the oldest part of campus. It is often the first thing a visitor sees. The statue is not ‘merely a monument to the dead,’ university leaders explained when it was erected. It is also ‘a lesson for the living’.”
What is the lesson?
“One place to start is with the history of the monument itself, and of the time in which it was erected. There were two waves of Confederate memorialization. In the first, which began soon after the Civil War and stretched into the 1880s, communities constructed monuments, most often in cemeteries, to mourn the dead.”
UNC has had several such monuments, including the old Memorial Hall, marble tablets with the names of the university’s Confederate dead (which now flank the stage in the present Memorial Hall) and the Carolina Alumni Memorial in Memory of Those Lost in Military Service, dedicated beside Memorial Hall in 2007.
Silent Sam, the history argues, is different:
“UNC erected Silent Sam during the second wave of memorialization, which took place in the early decades of the 20th century. At that time, civic leaders raised statues of Confederate soldiers in courthouse squares and similarly prominent public spaces.
“Construction of these new monuments occurred at the end of a long struggle over the freedom and citizenship rights of former slaves and their descendants. That conflict began with emancipation and stretched through the closing years of the 1890s.
“In North Carolina, the racial strife culminated in violent political campaigns for white supremacy in 1898 and 1900. The victors secured white rule by stripping the right to vote from men of color and imposing an oppressive system of racial apartheid known as Jim Crow….
“University leaders and the United Daughters of the Confederacy began to plan and raise funds for UNC’s Confederate statue in 1908. Five years later, they dedicated it during June graduation exercises.”
That’s when Alumnus/Confederate veteran/UNC trustee Julian S. Carr delivered the infamous keynote address, boasting that in 1865 he had “horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because on the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a [white] Southern lady.”
Carr “explained the statue’s relationship to North Carolina’s racial politics and, in doing so, distinguished it from the tablets in Memorial Hall and similar expressions of mourning for the Confederate dead.”
“Carr noted that the monument honored not only alumni who died for the Confederacy, but also the veterans who fought on after the South’s defeat to re-establish government by and for whites only. Those men ‘saved the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race,’ he declared. ‘Praise God’.”
His story about whipping the woman “surely reminded” his audience of “other familiar uses of bodily violence to impose racial subjugation — by lash-wielding masters in the time of slavery and by Ku Klux Klansmen and lynch mobs in the era of Jim Crow.”
That rhetoric was common at the time among politicians and historians. The presentation notes several examples, including quotes from UNC history professors who “described racial violence (whites against blacks) as a necessary evil — an essential means of ‘spreading salutary terror’ in defense of white rule.
“These were the ideas that University president Francis P. Venable invoked when he described UNC’s Confederate monument as a ‘brilliant lesson in bronze and granite to all coming generations of students’.”
Indeed it is.
A final word
Memorials to soldiers and sailors who fought bravely and out of duty, as they saw it, have a place at battlegrounds and cemeteries. Memorials to white supremacy – and to racial subjugation, whippings and murder – have no place on State Capitol grounds or state university campuses.
Silent Sam and Senator Sam
Two thoughtful readers with differing views on Confederate memorials passed along dueling viewpoints – one from the late Senator Sam Ervin and the other about Silent Sam at UNC-Chapel Hill. Reading both suggests where Confederal memorials should be and where they shouldn’t be.
Senator Sam
Senator Ervin spoke in August 1965 at the dedication of the Memorial to the Army and Navy of the Confederate States of America at Gettysburg. The reader gave me a reprint of the speech from The State magazine, November 1984.
The memorial was built, Ervin said, thanks to “various patriotic organizations, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who are devoted to the truth that nothing so strengthens the nation as reading the nation’s history, whether that history is recorded in books or inscribed upon monuments.”
Agreed. Let’s read the history.
Ervin traced at length events of the battle, “brought about by Lee’s daring invasion of the South, which marked the heyday of the Confederacy.” And said of the outcome:
“At Gettysburg the South lost by death and disabling wounds a multitude of her sons possessing high military capacity. As a consequence, Gettysburg impaired to a substantial degree the South’s ability to wage the offensive warfare absolutely necessary to ultimate military victory. In this way, Gettysburg combined with the South’s shrinking manpower and material resources to make inevitable the South’s defeat in the way of attrition carried on by Grant after he assumed direction of the Union campaign in Virginia.”
Then Ervin raised the issue we wrestle with today:
“When one ponders the story of the soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy who fought at Gettysburg and countless other engagements on land and sea, he cannot avoid putting this question to history: What inspired these men to fight so bravely, always against great odds and oftentimes to death?
“The assertion that they fought to perpetuate slavery does not suffice to answer the question. Most of them did not own or expect to own a single slave. Indeed, few of them had any material stake whatever in the victory of the Confederacy.”
Why then, did they fight? Out of duty, Ervin said. He quoted the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery:
“Not for fame or reward, not for place or for rank, not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity, but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it, these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died.”
Soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy, Ervin said, “taught by example this precept of their great chieftain, Robert E. Lee: ‘Duty then is the sublimest word in our language’.” Ervin concluded:
“As long as Fame her record keeps, may this memorial join history in bearing to the generations the message that the soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy fought for the cause they loved in simple obedience to duty as they understood it and that they illustrated by their lives and by their deaths in a fashion unsurpassed in the annals of time this enteral truth:
“’Defeat may serve as well as victory,
To shake the soul and let the glory out’.”
Silent Sam
The other reader sent a digital presentation about the history of Silent Sam at UNC-Chapel Hill, prepared last year by James L. Leloudis, Professor of History, and Cecelia Moore, PhD, at UNC. It begins:
“Since 1913, UNC’s Confederate monument — known locally by the nickname Silent Sam — has presided over the north entrance to McCorkle Place, the oldest part of campus. It is often the first thing a visitor sees. The statue is not ‘merely a monument to the dead,’ university leaders explained when it was erected. It is also ‘a lesson for the living’.”
What is the lesson?
“One place to start is with the history of the monument itself, and of the time in which it was erected. There were two waves of Confederate memorialization. In the first, which began soon after the Civil War and stretched into the 1880s, communities constructed monuments, most often in cemeteries, to mourn the dead.”
UNC has had several such monuments, including the old Memorial Hall, marble tablets with the names of the university’s Confederate dead (which now flank the stage in the present Memorial Hall) and the Carolina Alumni Memorial in Memory of Those Lost in Military Service, dedicated beside Memorial Hall in 2007.
Silent Sam, the history argues, is different:
“UNC erected Silent Sam during the second wave of memorialization, which took place in the early decades of the 20th century. At that time, civic leaders raised statues of Confederate soldiers in courthouse squares and similarly prominent public spaces.
“Construction of these new monuments occurred at the end of a long struggle over the freedom and citizenship rights of former slaves and their descendants. That conflict began with emancipation and stretched through the closing years of the 1890s.
“In North Carolina, the racial strife culminated in violent political campaigns for white supremacy in 1898 and 1900. The victors secured white rule by stripping the right to vote from men of color and imposing an oppressive system of racial apartheid known as Jim Crow….
“University leaders and the United Daughters of the Confederacy began to plan and raise funds for UNC’s Confederate statue in 1908. Five years later, they dedicated it during June graduation exercises.”
That’s when Alumnus/Confederate veteran/UNC trustee Julian S. Carr delivered the infamous keynote address, boasting that in 1865 he had “horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because on the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a [white] Southern lady.”
Carr “explained the statue’s relationship to North Carolina’s racial politics and, in doing so, distinguished it from the tablets in Memorial Hall and similar expressions of mourning for the Confederate dead.”
“Carr noted that the monument honored not only alumni who died for the Confederacy, but also the veterans who fought on after the South’s defeat to re-establish government by and for whites only. Those men ‘saved the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race,’ he declared. ‘Praise God’.”
His story about whipping the woman “surely reminded” his audience of “other familiar uses of bodily violence to impose racial subjugation — by lash-wielding masters in the time of slavery and by Ku Klux Klansmen and lynch mobs in the era of Jim Crow.”
That rhetoric was common at the time among politicians and historians. The presentation notes several examples, including quotes from UNC history professors who “described racial violence (whites against blacks) as a necessary evil — an essential means of ‘spreading salutary terror’ in defense of white rule.
“These were the ideas that University president Francis P. Venable invoked when he described UNC’s Confederate monument as a ‘brilliant lesson in bronze and granite to all coming generations of students’.”
Indeed it is.
A final word
Memorials to soldiers and sailors who fought bravely and out of duty, as they saw it, have a place at battlegrounds and cemeteries. Memorials to white supremacy – and to racial subjugation, whippings and murder – have no place on State Capitol grounds or state university campuses.