Unfortunately, Silent Sam is coming back to the UNC-Chapel Hill. This news comes after a group of student protesters gathered on Aug. 20 to remove the Confederate monument.
On Dec. 3, UNC-Chapel Hill presented a plan to relocate the Confederate monument to a new location, this time indoors due to “public safety concerns.”
These public safety concerns are that if it were returned to its original location, students would tear it down again.
The statue is going back up, despite a massive amount of protest because of a 2015 state law passed by the North Carolina State Legislature that makes it nearly impossible for anything but a state law to remove “objects of remembrance.” This applies to over 100 Confederate statues littered throughout the state.
“The reason it was passed was to protect history,” Sen. Tommy Tucker, a co-sponsor of the bill, said in an interview with the News and Observer. “I don’t have any misgivings about having the bill passed. Monuments can stand where they have been for 150 years or more.”
The problem with trying to protect this history is that the South lost the war. The Confederate States of America was little more than an organized rebellion against the lawful government of the U.S. In other words: treason.
In the U.S. Constitution, it is written: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them.” The Confederates took up arms against the government and killed U.S. soldiers in an attempt to destroy the U.S. That should reasonably constitute levying war.
“Confederate monument building was the culmination of a deliberate campaign to write the history of the Civil War from the Southern point of view,” Sarah Gardner, professor of history at Mercer University, wrote in her article “What We Talk About When We Talk About Confederate Monuments.” “This Southern version portrayed the Confederate cause as just and slavery as a benevolent institution.”
Deliberately rewriting history is called propaganda. Confederate monuments are little more than treasonous propaganda displayed prominently for all to see. It’s vile, it’s disgusting and it shouldn’t be tolerated. The students of UNC-Chapel Hill were right to tear down Silent Sam, and the Board of Trustees is wrong to propose relocating it on campus, state law or not