Silent Sam is gone. I didn’t expect to feel like this.
Among the pictures on our living room wall hangs the framed photograph of an imposing obelisk in the square of a small Georgia town. It memorializes a great-grandfather who gave the land on which the village stands, and who, at the outbreak of Civil War. organized a fighting company and took it northward to join Gen. Robert E. Lee’s great Army of Northern Virginia. He claimed to resist “an unconstitutional invasion of my homeland.” There is no mention of slavery. He died in battle on the James River in August 1864.
A family tradition has it that a detachment of Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s soldiers, marching across Georgia in the last year of that conflict, trooped down the breezeway of his desolate plantation house as my great-grandmother and their children sat at dinner, but inflicted no damage. I have often wondered if this forbearance was a gesture of chivalry to a fallen foe.
When I spoke of this Georgia ancestor and his times in a lecture at the Virginia Historical Society some years back, I cautioned that so far as I could tell, “the gist has little to do with racial pride [or] ... accord with the Confederate cause as it would have been understood ... For a remote descendant the satisfaction ... lies in a sense of rootedness ... a continuity with the history of a nation so largely shaped by conflict.” It will be understood, then, that when I spoke recently in defense of Silent Sam at the Chapel Hill public library and was challenged by a fiery-eyed listener who demanded, “Aren’t you ashamed of your views?” my answer was “No, not in the least.”
Yet such ancestral scenes may explain my unusually intense reaction to the desecration of Silent Sam. Silent Sam had seemed doomed in recent months as UNC administrators and trustees and the police dithered while the statue was vandalized. Still, it was hard to imagine that this fine work of sculptural art and memory would be surrendered to organized violence.
So what, if not ordinary nostalgia, accounts for the intensity of my reaction? It has nothing to do with race. Those who extenuate this lawless assault on emblems of the Southern past seem honestly to believe that it springs from the detestation of racism — a loathing I share. But for me, that seems too simple.
The 19th century historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote of the bitter aftermath of the English civil war: “One old Cavalier had seen half his manor house blown up. The hereditary elms of another had been hewn down. A third could never go into his parish church without being reminded by the defaced scutcheons and headless statues that Oliver [Cromwell’s] redcoats had stabled their horses there.” Such are the bitter memories of all civil wars, everywhere.
The U.S. has, until now, been relatively exempt from such memories. The lines inscribed on the Statue of Liberty read in part, “Give me ... the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Not a flattering welcome, but a useful clue. Much of the immigration to these shores is explained by a “yearning” to cut foreign ties and obligations and the itch to be emancipated from history itself.
I had the good fortune to grow up in a history-conscious household where historical realities were valued in their fullness and memorials retained a living presence. Certainly, that included Silent Sam, a remembrance of duty and self-sacrifice that I have known as an unoffending visual companion since boyhood. Perhaps that is why its mob destruction is like the severing of a limb. And it hurts.