Silent Sam is not just a symbol. It’s a masterpiece of art.
The controversy over Silent Sam, the memorial to the ordinary Confederate soldier at UNC-Chapel Hill, has eclipsed the artistic heritage of the bronze statue and its place in American art. The sculptor John A. Wilson, who was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1877 and lived to 1954, was one of the finest public monument sculptors in American and international art, whose bronze figural sculptures stand artistically with those of his contemporaries Augustus Saint Gaudens and John Quincy Adams Ward. Wilson’s other commissioned monuments still stand in Louisiana, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
These monuments were commissioned by civic groups and states as memorials during the City Beautiful movement, which spanned the post-Civil War era to World War I. Bronze was the preferred medium because it was more durable than marble.
The monuments celebrated military figures, battles and events, which are unpopular themes today, but share an artistic unity with European public monuments from the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. In America, the artistic template for this movement is the George Washington statue by French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon, commissioned in the late eighteenth century and which stands at the State Capitol Building in Richmond, Virginia.
Wilson, who was instructor in modeling at the School of Architecture at Harvard University for 32 years, emphasized natural anatomical form in his statues. They are dynamic in repose. Silent Sam, divorced from its political connotations, is a timeless study in the sadness and isolation of the average soldier in any war. Wilson’s other commissions are of Union soldiers, soldiers in various wars and firefighters.
His most recognized statue is the Washington Grays Monument in Philadelphia from 1908, which was commissioned by Pennsylvania to commemorate the soldiers from the 17th, 21st and 49th Pennsylvania Militia in the Civil War. It stands in front of the Union League in Philadelphia. In 1909, he sculpted the Massachusetts Monument, which stands in the Baton Rouge National Cemetery, to commemorate the Massachusetts sailors and soldiers who perished in the battles during the Civil War in the Gulf area.
The Private Daniel A. Bean statue, which dates from 1911, commemorates Bean and stands in his hometown of Brownfield, Maine. In 1909, Wilson created two monuments, a monument in the form of a bronze eagle as a tribute to the soldiers from Dudley, Massachusetts, who fought in all of America’s wars, from the Revolution to the Spanish-American War, and The Firemen’s Memorial, a memorial to fallen firefighters in Boston, Massachusetts.
The statue known as Silent Sam was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to commemorate the roughly 40 per cent of the UNC students who left the university to serve in the Civil War. The statue was dedicated in 1913. The pedestal is a bas relief of young men leaving their school books behind.
What is not acknowledged is that Wilson created a subtext to the theme of war’s peace by excluding a cartridge box on the belt of the soldier, which Wilson carried over from his statue of Bean two years before. Silent Sam cannot fire his gun, a farewell to arms long before Ernest Hemingway made it an epitaph.
The statue is vilified now because of the scandalous dedication by Julian Carr in 1913 but the statue itself is a timeless masterpiece of a soldier in war. Where will Silent Sam lie in limbo? The Ackland Museum has been suggested but that would increase the incendiary reaction. North Carolina has always been a celebrator of the arts, so a solution somewhere may be found.