The Confederate Monument, University of North Carolina, commonly known as Silent Sam, is a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier by Canadian sculptor John A. Wilson, which once stood on McCorkle Place of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) from 1913 until it was pulled down by protestors on August 20, 2018. Its former location has been described as "the front door" of the university and "a position of honor".
Establishing a Confederate monument at a Southern university became a goal of the North Carolina chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1907. UNC approved the group's request in 1908 and, with funding from UNC alumni, the UDC and the university, Wilson designed the statue, using a young Boston man as his model. At the unveiling on June 2, 1913, local industrialist and UNC trustee Julian Carr gave a speech espousing white supremacy, while Governor Locke Craig, UNC President Francis Venable and members of the UDC praised the sacrifices made by students who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. The program for the unveiling simply referred to the statue as "the Confederate Monument", with the name "Soldiers Monument" also being used around the same time. The name Silent Sam is first recorded in 1954, in the student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel.
Beginning in the 1960s, the statue faced opposition on the grounds of its racist message, and it was vandalized several times during the civil rights movement. Protests and calls to remove the monument reached a higher profile in the 2010s, and in 2018, UNC Chancellor Carol L. Folt described the monument as detrimental to the university, and said that she would have the statue removed if not prohibited by state law. Increased protests and vandalism resulted in the university spending $390,000 on security and cleaning for the statue in the 2017–18 academic year. The statue was toppled by protesters, and later that night removed to a secure location by university authorities. A statement from Chancellor Folt said the statue's original location was "a cause for division and a threat to public safety," and that she was seeking input on a plan for a "safe, legal and alternative" new location.
UNC-Chapel Hill's board of trustees made a recommendation in December 2018 that the statue be installed in a new "University History and Education Center" to be built on campus, at an estimated cost of $5.3 million, but this was rejected by the university system's board of governors. The pedestal base and inscription plaques were removed in January 2019, with a statement from Chancellor Folt citing public safety.
In November 2019, in response to a lawsuit from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, UNC donated the statue to the group, with a $2.5 million trust for its "care and preservation", on the condition that the statue would not be displayed in the same county as any UNC school. However, in February 2020 the settlement was overturned by the judge who originally approved it, who ruled that the SCV lacked standing to bring the lawsuit.
Early history, 1909–1913
Campaign
During the American Civil War, over 1,000 students and employees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) enlisted, of whom 287 are known to have lost their lives. University president David Lowry Swain had petitioned the Confederacy to exclude students in their final two years from conscription, and this was granted in 1863, but revoked a year later. Swain was able to keep the university open throughout the war by educating the few students unable to fight—those too young to enlist, exempt because of ill health, or discharged because of war injuries—though the senior class in the spring of 1865 had only one student.
In 1907, the North Carolina chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) decided that its next major goal was to be "the erection, on the campus at the State University, of a monument to the students and faculty, who went out from its walls in 1861 to fight and die for the South." University President Francis Preston Venable spoke to the 1909 UDC Convention, approving of the plan for a monument, and saying that record of the students who enlisted "should ever be before the eyes of the present-day students". The request for a monument was presented to, and approved by, the UNC board of trustees on June 1, 1908.