Protesters topple Silent Sam Confederate statue at UNC

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Protesters were apparently working behind the covering with ropes to bring the statue down, which happened more than two hours into a rally. It fell with a loud clanging sound, and the crowd erupted in cheers.
A skirmish broke out early when someone threw a smoke bomb. Police chased one protester and arrested another for resisting, delaying and obstructing an officer.

The crowd quickly took control of the area immediately around the statue, hoisting four tall banners in a square that almost completely covered it. The head of the Confederate soldier occasionally poked out from the top of the banners.

Police formed a perimeter around protesters. One banner said, “The whole world is watching. Which side are you on?” Some of the demonstrators wore Carolina blue bandannas over their faces that said, “Sam must fall.”

Several bystanders wearing Confederate flags on T-shirts watched the protest and some engaged in arguments with protesters.

The event, which began outside the downtown post office in Chapel Hill, unfolded as students begin a new semester at UNC, almost a year after a massive protest against Silent Sam in the aftermath of violence in Charlottesville. Protesters vowed to sustain the pressure on the university to relocate the Confederate monument, but campus and UNC system officials insist state law prevented them from doing so.

I will never understand why anyone would want build a monument to honor the losers of a war.

If any Civil War monuments are to be erected, they should be monuments to General William Tecumseh Sherman -- now THAT guy knew how to win a war!

If you talk to a lot of people in the South, the Civil War never ended.

I will never understand why anyone would want build a monument to honor the losers of a war.

If any Civil War monuments are to be erected, they should be monuments to General William Tecumseh Sherman -- now THAT guy knew how to win a war!

Advocates of the Lost Cause further argue that Confederates were not defeated on the battlefield; rather, they were overwhelmed by massive Union resources and manpower. Under this presumption, the South was destined to lose from the beginning, hence "Lost Cause." Robert E. Lee said as much in General Orders No. 9, his famous farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House on April 10, 1865, when he insisted that the army had been "compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources." While this is "a comforting conclusion and it is not without a substantial basis of fact," according to the historian Bell Irvin Wiley, it also understates the Union's military accomplishment, which involved actively subduing a vast and populous country. It also understates the Confederacy's wartime industrial capacity and its ability to field and supply large armies. Under the direction of its chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, the Confederacy was self-sufficient in military hardware by 1863. In addition, the flip side of this argument, that Union generals were mere butchers, is grossly exaggerated. Casualty rates at Cold Harbor were comparable to those during Pickett's Charge.

The Lost Cause further extols the gallantry of Confederate soldiers and insists that they had not forfeited their honor in losing to a vastly superior foe. The idealized "Johnny Reb" was heroic, unfaltering, and law-abiding.This, too, came in part from Lee's General Orders No. 9, in which he lauded the loyalty, valor, and "unsurpassed courage and fortitude" of "the brave survivors of so many hard-fought battles." While few dispute that most Confederate soldiers fought bravely, painting with a broad brush obscures a more complicated historical reality. Desertion rates were particularly high among both sides during the Civil War—totaling between 10 and 15 percent of Confederate soldiers—and in June 1862, Confederate general James Longstreet estimated that of the 32,000 Virginia soldiers under his command, fully 7,000 were absent without leave. More soldiers were executed for lawlessness—North and South—than in all other American wars combined.

The Lost Cause characterizes almost all Confederate military leaders as saintly, but Lee ranks first among heroes. Appearing almost Christ-like in subsequent Southern iconography, he found near-instant admiration among many Northern Democratic Party members following the surrender at Appomattox. Only four days after Lee accepted Ulysses S. Grant's terms, the New York Herald admitted that Lee was "generally well spoken of" in the North. His status in the South, meanwhile, only increased after his death in 1870, especially through the efforts of former Confederate general Jubal A. Early and the publication of the Southern Historical Society Papers. Early in the twentieth century, Douglas Southall Freeman, his sympathetic, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, further enhanced this image.

In addition to Lee, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson was also presented as a saintly and nearly flawless general immediately after his death following the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. Lost Cause authors such as John Esten Cooke and Robert Lewis Dabney emphasized Jackson's deep religiosity and eccentric behavior. James Longstreet, however, long remained the exception, dogged by questions about his performance at the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), and vilified because of his postwar affiliation with the Republican Party. Revisionist biographies of Lee, such as Alan Nolan's Lee Considered (1991), and of Longstreet, such as William Garrett Piston's Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant (1987), have challenged the idea that either general was a simple hero or villain

In 1776 the American colonists rose up in rebellion, and mobs across the thirteen colonies pulled down equestrian statues of King George of England.

Then we fought a war of Independence to break away from the said king.

It took until 1790 for the dust to settle and for us to become a recognized separate independent country from the UK.

But after it was all over in 1790 we didn't go back re erect the statues of King George. Doing so would have been considered insanely absurd.

These confederate statues are all the equivalent of restoring the statues of king George in 1790. Ass backward insanity. We don't have statues of the Kaiser, or Saddam Hussein. So why do we have statues of the defeated traitors who started the civil war? Taking down confederate statues is the obvious commonsense thing to do. Doesn't need to be justified. The question to answer is :why were they put up in the first place?

In 1776 the American colonists rose up in rebellion, and mobs across the thirteen colonies pulled down equestrian statues of King George of England.

Then we fought a war of Independence to break away from the said king.

It took until 1790 for the dust to settle and for us to become a recognized separate independent country from the UK.

But after it was all over in 1790 we didn't go back re erect the statues of King George. Doing so would have been considered insanely absurd.

These confederate statues are all the equivalent of restoring the statues of king George in 1790. Ass backward insanity. We don't have statues of the Kaiser, or Saddam Hussein. So why do we have statues of the defeated traitors who started the civil war? Taking down confederate statues is the obvious commonsense thing to do. Doesn't need to be justified. The question to answer is :why were they put up in the first place?

I can't believe you posted this...

It is not a matter of who committed what crimes, but which side betrayed the nation, and which side lost the war. Let's not lose our historical perspective -- the traitorous Confederacy lost the war. We do not honor traitors or losers. It is just that simple.

In 1776 the American colonists rose up in rebellion, and mobs across the thirteen colonies pulled down equestrian statues of King George of England.

Then we fought a war of Independence to break away from the said king.

It took until 1790 for the dust to settle and for us to become a recognized separate independent country from the UK.

But after it was all over in 1790 we didn't go back re erect the statues of King George. Doing so would have been considered insanely absurd.

These confederate statues are all the equivalent of restoring the statues of king George in 1790. Ass backward insanity. We don't have statues of the Kaiser, or Saddam Hussein. So why do we have statues of the defeated traitors who started the civil war? Taking down confederate statues is the obvious commonsense thing to do. Doesn't need to be justified. The question to answer is :why were they put up in the first place?

...The Union started the war with crippling economic sanctions on individual states. Some of the Union leaders rapped and killed Native American children yet they are fine to be cheered on because they were on the winning side?