TO THE EDITOR:
If Silent Sam should remain on our campus, it should stand as a reminder of our state’s ugly history. The effort by a few to keep this monument as a testament to the bravery of students who traded in their books for rifles in defense of our state is a well-intentioned move but not one based on the statue’s original purpose, as Adam Domby (“Why Silent Sam was built: A historian’s perspective,” Jan. 20) pointed out.
In reality, the statue documents an effort by many in the wake of the Civil War to erase the true history of the Confederacy as a government founded to preserve slavery and the domination of the white race. These men and women conveniently distanced the Confederacy from slavery and romanticized the rebels as honorable defenders of liberty and states’ rights.
That there have been letters to the DTH restating the same argument in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary shows the effectiveness of monuments like Silent Sam in rewriting our country’s history. Silent Sam should remind us of the true nature of the Confederacy, as its Vice President Alexander Stephens outlined in his Cornerstone Speech in response to Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the equality of races: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery and subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
John Green
Senior
English
