TO THE EDITOR:
Whether or not you consider Silent Sam to be a monument to racism, it is a monument to treason. When we recite the Pledge of Allegiance, we pledge to an “indivisible” nation. Composed less than 30 years after the Civil War, the Pledge acknowledges that we cannot be faithful to a nation while we try to break off part of it for ourselves.
The rebels of other countries won varying levels of autonomy for themselves, like the Basque in Spain or the Uyghur in China. This is America. The Confederates didn’t get that, so they deserve to go down in history as unsuccessful traitors defending an ignoble cause: slavery. Saul Alinsky said, “there can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father.” So why do we honor the rebels of 1776 and not those of 1864? The former won and the latter did not.
To be fair, all of 19th-century America was run by landed elite with ideas about race that varied from bad to worse. We have a better nation to which to pledge our allegiance today, no thanks to the Confederacy. We should thank the students who defended freedom abroad, even when they didn’t always find it when they came back home. On that note, if tuition keeps going up, Silent Sam might be one of the only soldiers left on campus.
Dominic Powell
Class of ’10
