On the eve of Thanksgiving, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) over a Confederate monument that had stood for more than a century on the university’s flagship campus, in Chapel Hill, before demonstrators toppled it in August 2018.
The settlement might, at first glance, appear to be a workmanlike solution to a vexing issue. It ensures that the monument, commonly referred to as Silent Sam, will no longer adorn the university campus. Under the terms of the consent decree, the SCV will take custody of the monument and receive $2.5 million in “non-state funds” for a “charitable trust” to care for it. In a statement to the UNC community, which for more than a decade has been riven by the controversy over the monument, UNC Interim Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz applauded the Board of Governors for “resolving this matter.”
The settlement, though, establishes a de facto financial partnership between the university system and the SCV to preserve the monument. The SCV is free to use Silent Sam and this generous subsidy to continue its long-standing misinformation campaign about the history and legacy of the Civil War, with an endowment that rivals that of the university’s history department. But the cost to the university can’t be fully tallied in dollars and cents. A great public university should stand for the pursuit of truth, not the promotion of historical distortions and falsehoods. In seeking an expedient solution, the university system has succeeded only in aggravating the problems that the removal of the statue was supposed to address.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans traces its roots back to 1896. Members pledge to honor their “heroic” Confederate ancestors by perpetuating their “glorious heritage of valor, chivalry and honor” and instilling in their descendants “reverence for the principles represented by the Confederate States of America.” For its first eight decades, the SCV was overshadowed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a national network of women’s memorial associations that took the lead in honoring all things Confederate.
But during the 1980s, the SCV was reborn in response to an increase in the perceived threat to its traditional narrative, its membership growing to about 30,000, spread out over roughly 800 local camps. Until then, the SCV’s embrace of a largely mythical Lost Cause narrative that celebrated Confederate generals as Christian warriors, rank-and-file soldiers as defending a noble cause rooted in a constitutional defense of states’ rights, and its denial that slavery had anything to do with the war remained largely unchecked in much of the South. The SCV dismissed new scholarship that emphasized the centrality of slavery and emancipation to the war, as well as the roughly 180,000 African Americans who fought in the United States Army, as politically correct “revisionism.” Indeed, the SCV became the modern voice of the Lost Cause as a racial ideology, which in its origins and well through the Civil War centennial in the 1960s celebrated the ties of Confederate soldiers and their descendants as the friends and protectors of “faithful slaves” and their descendants.