The Confederate Monument, University of North Carolina, commonly known as Silent Sam, is a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier by Canadian sculptor John A. Wilson, which stood on McCorkle Place of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) from 1913 until it was pulled down by protestors on August 20, 2018. Its former location has been described as "the front door" of the university and "a position of honor".
Establishing a Confederate monument at a Southern university became a goal of the North Carolina chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1907. UNC approved the group's request in 1908 and, with funding from UNC alumni, the UDC, and the university, Wilson designed the statue, using a young Boston man as his model. At the unveiling on June 2, 1913, local industrialist and UNC trustee Julian Carr gave a speech espousing white supremacy, while Governor Locke Craig, UNC President Francis Venable and members of the UDC praised the sacrifices made by students who had volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. The program for the unveiling simply referred to the statue as "the Confederate Monument", with the name "Soldiers Monument" also being used around the same time. The name Silent Sam is first recorded in 1954, in the student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel.
Beginning in the 1960s, the statue faced opposition on the grounds of its racist message, and it was vandalized several times during the civil rights movement. Protests and calls to remove the monument reached a higher profile in the 2010s, and in 2018, UNC Chancellor Carol L. Folt described the monument as detrimental to the university, and said that she would have the statue removed if not prohibited by state law. Increased protests and vandalism resulted in the university spending $390,000 on security and cleaning for the statue in the 2017–18 academic year. On the day before fall classes started in August 2018, the statue was toppled by protesters, and later that night removed to a secure location by university authorities. A statement from Chancellor Folt said the statue's original location was "a cause for division and a threat to public safety," and that she was seeking input on a plan for a "safe, legal and alternative" new location.
UNC-Chapel Hill's board of trustees recommended in December 2018 that the statue be installed in a new "University History and Education Center" to be built on campus, at an estimated cost of $5.3 million, but this was rejected by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors. The pedestal base and inscription plaques were removed in January 2019, with a statement from Chancellor Folt citing public safety.
In 2019, UNC donated the statue to the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) with a $2.5 million trust for its "care and preservation". However, the agreement was struck down by a judge, and the statue was returned to UNC in 2020.
As of 2024, UNC-Chapel Hill states the statue is in an undisclosed storage facility.
Early history, 1909–1913 Campaign
During the American Civil War, over 1,000 students and employees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) enlisted, of whom 287 are known to have lost their lives. University president David Lowry Swain had petitioned the Confederacy to exclude students in their final two years from conscription, and this was granted in 1863, but revoked a year later. Swain was able to keep the university open throughout the war by educating the few students unable to fight—those too young to enlist, exempt because of ill health, or discharged because of war injuries—though the senior class in the spring of 1865 had only one student.
In 1907, the North Carolina chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) decided that its next major goal was to be "the erection, on the campus at the State University, of a monument to the students and faculty, who went out from its walls in 1861 to fight and die for the South." University President Francis Preston Venable spoke to the 1909 UDC Convention, approving of the plan for a monument, and saying that record of the students who enlisted "should ever be before the eyes of the present-day students". The request for a monument was presented to, and approved by, the UNC board of trustees on June 1, 1908.
The monument was funded by the university, alumni, and the UDC. UNC and the UDC spent until 1913 fundraising the $7,500 that Canadian sculptor John Wilson charged for the statue, which he discounted from his asking price of $10,000. The Daughters originally were slated to give $1,500 of the cost of the statue, though their success at fundraising led the university to ask for them to cover $2,500 by 1911. Most of the rest of the cost was covered by alumni donations. UNC eventually had to give $500 to reach the contracted total of $7,500. The statue was planned to be in place by 1911 for the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. Raising funds to pay for the statue delayed the project by two years.
Design Unlike his earlier Daniel A. Bean sculpture (an unarmed 15-year-old Union Army enlistee), John A. Wilson depicted the infantryman armed with a rifle, but with no cartridge box on his belt. This has been explained as a choice to make the soldier "silent" by not providing ammunition to fire his gun. However, historian Adam H. Domby suggests that the lack of a cartridge box stemmed from Wilson's lack of knowledge about the requirements of mid-19th century weaponry, saying "In fact, he was never meant to be silent, and those who organized, funded, and dedicated the monument would be horrified at the thought that future generations would see Sam as a pacifist." As with the Bean sculpture, Wilson used a northerner, Harold Langlois of Boston, as his model. That was part of a tradition of "Silent Sentinels", statues created in the North, often mass-produced, depicting soldiers without ammunition or with their guns at parade rest. As with the other statues, the memorial was positioned to face north, towards the Union.
A bronze plaque in bas-relief on the front of the memorial's base depicted a woman, representing the state of North Carolina, convincing a young student to fight for the Southern cause as he dropped his books, representing students leaving their studies. A smaller bronze plaque on the left side of the base said:
Another bronze plaque on the right read:
"Duty is the sublimest word in the English language" is a quote from a letter attributed to Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, but revealed in 1914 to have been a forgery.
Dedication
The program for the unveiling of the monument started at 3:30 pm, on June 2, 1913. Attendance was reported to be 1,000. Speeches were given by, among others, Mrs. Marshall Williams, president of the local division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy; and Francis Preston Venable, the university's president. The University Band played Dixie while "students formally accepted the monument", and the program concluded with a rendition by a quartet of "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground".
The Governor of North Carolina, Locke Craig, also spoke; regarding the service of students who died in the war:
The dedication speech which has attracted the most subsequent notice was given by Julian Carr, a prominent industrialist, UNC alumnus and trustee, former Confederate soldier, and the largest single donor towards the construction of the monument.
This speech has been described by UNC history professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage as one in which Carr "unambiguously urged his audience to devote themselves to the maintenance of white supremacy with the same vigor that their Confederate ancestors had defended slavery." In it, Carr emphatically praised the student-soldiers and soldiers of the Confederate Army for their wartime valor and patriotism, adding that
According to Brundage, Carr's phrase "the four years immediately succeeding the war" is a clear reference to the Reconstruction era, when the Ku Klux Klan, working to restore the dominance of traditional white hierarchy in the South, terrorized blacks and white Republicans. Later in the speech; Carr stated:
20th century The monument appears on an undated, early 20th-century postcard. A picture from 1918, with two soldiers in front, appeared in the 1961 yearbook Yackity Yack.
The statue was called the "Soldiers Monument" in the first student newspaper reference to it in 1913, but was referred to as the "Confederate Monument" in the program for its unveiling, and this name was used from the 1920s through the 1940s.
The earliest known use of the name "Silent Sam" is from 1954, in the campus newspaper The Daily Tar Heel. A story developed that "Sam" would fire his gun if a virgin walked by, but never did (he was silent) because he never saw any. In 1937 this story was called an "old local wisecrack".
In 1971, the monument was defaced with paint following a basketball victory. In 1986, the statue was temporarily removed and shipped to Cincinnati, where it was cleaned and restored by bronze specialists Eleftherios and Mercene Karkadoulias. They repaired cracks, removed green oxidation, and gave the statue a protective wax coating. The refreshed statue was put back in place six months later. The cost was $8,600.
Controversies and protests
1960–1970s The monument has been a subject of controversy and a site of protest since the 1960s. In 1965, a discussion about the monument's meaning and history occurred in the letters to the editor of the UNC student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. In 1967, poet John Beecher "debated" Silent Sam, reading to the statue from his book of poetry To Live and Die in Dixie. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the monument was vandalized with orange, green, red, and yellow iridescent paint, including a hammer and sickle. In the early 1970s, the monument was the site of several demonstrations by the Black Student Movement.
1990–2009 Students gathered by the statue to speak out after Los Angeles police officers were found not guilty in the 1992 Rodney King trial. In 1997, a Martin Luther King Jr. Day march focusing on issues facing UNC housekeepers ended at the monument.
In 2003, Gerald Horne, at that time director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, in a letter to The Daily Tar Heel, called the monument "an eyesore".
2010–2016
Several protests in the late 2010s were directed toward the statue, along with calls for its removal. In January 2011, Adam Domby (then a graduate student in history at UNC, later assistant professor of history at the College of Charleston), wrote a letter to The Daily Tar Heel entitled "Why Silent Sam was built: A historian's perspective". The letter highlighted Julian Carr's speech at the dedication of the statue, which Domby had uncovered in the university archives in 2009. Carr's speech, in which he praised the Confederate soldier as a defender of the "Anglo Saxon race" and bragged about whipping an African-American woman "until her skirts hung in shreds", became a galvanizing force in activists' efforts to get the statue removed.
On September 1, 2011, a group variously known as the Real Silent Sam Movement or Committee held a protest "to attract attention to the statue's history". That group "campaigned over the past two years [2011–2013] to replace the current plaque with one that tells what they call "the true history of the confederate soldier."
North Carolina NAACP President Reverend William Barber II spoke at a program held on the monument's centenary in 2013.