TO THE EDITOR:
Every few years, some radical demands that Silent Sam be removed. I recall that in the ’50s such a demand was made by Junius Scales and Herbert Aptheker, both members of the Communist Party. Now it’s professor Horne, who obviously doesn’t know much history. The South tried hard for a peaceful secession, but President Abraham Lincoln was eager to go to war to prevent it. In 1860-61, there was nothing in the Constitution and laws of the United States forbidding a state’s secession, but the North couldn’t permit it for economic reasons. Horne says that secession was “in the name of enslaving Africans.” Nonsense! Africans had, sadly, been enslaved here since the 1600s. Why would the South go to war over it in 1860-61?
Look at the first bills the U.S. Congress passed after the Southern states were out. Abolition of slavery? No! That came later. If some ignoramus condemns southern secession, he should also condemn the secession of the United States from the British Empire.
Silent Sam is certainly not a “monument to the defense of slavery,” as Horne says, but a monument to soldiers who lost their lives in defense of their home state against aggression.
J. E. Williams
Class of ’50
