Tale of Two Statues

When I was a little boy, I could look out my bedroom window and marvel at the East Side Park, which was directly across the street.  Besides accommodating a large green area that all the children in the neighborhood could utilize as a playground, it also included a church, a county courthouse, and a county administrative building.  However, the thing about the park that intrigued me the most was the statue that stood at its far end.  It was of a soldier, all in stone white, facing away from my window.  When I was old enough to read, I could see it was dedicated “in honor of the soldiers and sailors of the County of Oswego who nobly defended the Union, 1861-1865.”  It was a little strange the statue was facing the opposite direction from where those who went to war about eighty years before my birth actually went, which was South, across the Mason-Dixon Line.  But, the statue was facing East Bridge Street, the main thoroughfare of Oswego, New York.

In 2007, I moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home of the main campus of the state university.  Located near the downtown is lovely McCorkle Place, which is part of the campus.  At the end of this park next to East Franklin Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, is a bronze statue, also of a soldier, known as Silent Sam.  I could see it is dedicated “to the sons of the University who entered the war of 1861-1865 in answer to the call of their country.”  Unlike the other statue, it was facing the right direction, North, from where the boys from New York came.

It is quite a coincidence that the two small cities in America that mean the most to me have these statues with similar images located in predominant parks near main east-side thoroughfares.  They were both constructed by organizations that were passionate about the sacrifice of local young men and wanted to preserve that sacrifice for posterity.  However, they represent opposite sides in the Civil War that tested whether the United States of America “so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”  Happily for us in the Twenty-First Century, our nation has endured.

It is interesting to note that neither statue mentions the real reason for the war, the preservation of slavery.  The war started with the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860.  Within a few months, eleven Southern states voted to secede from the USA.  Why?  Because the president-elect was opposed to slavery where it was and to its expansion in the western territories.  The slavocracy, the rich and powerful five percent of Southern society who owned almost all the slaves, felt threatened by a man who was not even on the ballot in their states.  Without slavery, their civilization would be “Gone with the Wind.”  They also believed their states still had the sovereign right to legally leave a Union they had joined seventy-two years before.

Neither side could convince the masses to fight either to maintain or end slavery.  In the North, Abolition was not a mainstream belief.  It was considered a radical idea.  In the South, as I stated, the vast majority were not slaveholders.  So the leadership of both sides had to couch their reasons for going to war from another perspective.  In the North, it was to defend and preserve the Union.   In the South, it was to defend their new country, the Confederate States of America, against an invasion from the North, to protect their woman from being raped, and to guarantee the non-slaveholding white male majority's superiority to the black race.

I am very happy the rebellion of the eleven Southern states was defeated and today we are still the United States of America.  However, there have been Southerners in the last one hundred fifty years who have wanted to preserve the memory of the so-called “lost cause” by building monuments to those who died fighting for it.  Take note of Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Silent Sam was dedicated in 1913 at a time when The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a public university, was an all-White segregated school.  Thankfully, today it is integrated.  But, how can the University’s administration expect the Black student body, faculty, and staff to tolerate a symbol of a time when White North Carolinians fought to preserve the slavery of their ancestors?  In addition, how can the University’s administration maintain on its campus a symbol of a rebellion against the United States of America?  Do we build statues to Benedict Arnold?  Like Joe Paterno at Penn State, Silent Sam must go.

On the other hand, do we really need or want such statues in the public sphere, even the one in Oswego?  Do they glorify war and thereby encourage it as an option in the future?  Do they serve as an educational tool for the public to better understand the past?  Or both?  However, this is a subject for another discussion.