TO THE EDITOR:
For the past week, I have been following the debate over Silent Sam, and I would first like to applaud the thoughtfulness of the previous letter writers. Yet I feel the discussion has focused too narrowly on matters of slavery and wartime sacrifice. I would argue that the monument actually has little to do with the Civil War at all.
In fact, the Civil War was deeply unpopular in certain parts of our state, particularly in the mountains and western Piedmont. Some residents of this area had economic ties to the North, some had religious objections and others resented the prestige slavery brought to eastern planters. Many Confederate conscripts resisted through desertion.
These tensions did not disappear after the war. During the 1890s, shared economic interests motivated poor whites and poor blacks to form an uneasy political alliance known as Fusion politics, after the joint Populist and Republican tickets for which they voted. This movement threatened the oligarchic power of eastern elites and prompted a massive race-baiting campaign in 1898, culminating in the overthrow of Wilmington’s biracial city council by white paramilitary forces.
Once conservative Democrats regained power, they promptly disenfranchised African Americans, in effect turning North Carolina into a one-party state.
In order to drive an ideological wedge between the races, white supremacists reimagined the Civil War as a symbol of racial solidarity, and it was in this era that Confederate statues were erected throughout the state. Sam is therefore less a monument to slavery than to postwar white supremacy.
Walker Elliott
Senior
History and German
