Remember: countries don’t tend to separate because of political division. Countries separate because of the emergence of national consciousness with territorial divisions, “concentrated ethno-nationalist groups,” according to Ryan Griffiths. Have the divisions within the United States grown to the point at which they constitute divided identities? The mechanism of identity is symbolism. And the symbols that once unified the States are crumbling everywhere. America is in the middle of a grand iconoclasm. In other countries and at other times, the breaking up of images has frequently been a prelude to civil war.
On August 20, 2018, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the youth of America hacked the Confederate statue known as Silent Sam from his foundation, tossed him over in a gleeful moan of collective ecstasy, stomped him from his safety and permanence and solidity. A few in the crowd began, as if in some ancient ritual they were just inventing, to cover his face with crumbly mud they had scraped with their bare hands from the soggy earth.
“It was honestly the best moment I’ve ever had,” Maya Little says, remembering the downfall. She’s a graduate student in history, an organizer, the woman who threw her own blood mixed with red paint on the statue at an event a few months before Silent Sam fell. “It made a great creaking sound, and everyone got quiet. A second later, everyone started hugging and cheering. Then it started raining. It was just a really beautiful moment.” Jake Sullivan, a UNC alumnus, witnessed the fall, too. “I was just deeply sad,” he remembers. “Sure we get angry before or after, but when I see the face of that brave young man buried in the mud and dirt he figuratively fought and died for and privileged white kids awkwardly kick and spit on him, there’s nothing else for someone like me to be but deeply, deeply sad. How did we get here? How is this okay? Who are these people?” Maya Little is African American and Jake Sullivan is the North Carolina division chief for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The United States is a country of Maya Littles and Jake Sullivans. They possess different meanings. They have different histories, belong to different peoples. They already belong, in a sense, to different countries, except that they happen to live in the same country. All they share is a spirit of fury.
Even ten years ago, the UNC administration would have known just what to do after the desecration of a statue: repair the damage and move on. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, a hammer and sickle in bright red, yellow, and green paint covered the statue; the next morning it was scrubbed clean. Even in 2015, the administration removed a “Black Lives Matter” tag when it was sprayed there during a protest. But cleaning is different from restoring. It’s one thing to want a Confederate monument on your campus to be clean. It’s quite another to raise one back up.
Maya Little remembers her first glimpse of Silent Sam as she crossed the UNC campus in the summer of 2016. “You see it immediately when you go to McCorkle Place, which is the forefront of campus. It’s this beautiful quad with all these beautiful buildings that frame it. All these buildings were built by slaves.” Sam’s original location is very much an element of his symbolic power. “He stands at the front of campus, facing north, and not just the North that the South fought against but also against the north part of Chapel Hill, which is a historically Black part of town,” Little explains. “So, imagine anyone from that neighborhood walking towards UNC: What is the first thing they see when they walk onto campus? It’s an armed Confederate soldier.” To put Silent Sam back where he was would be to put his meanings back in their original place.
That’s just what Jake Sullivan wants. He is fighting for restoration in many senses. In November of 2018, he began organizing a protest flyover, and within days the state membership of the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised the money. Originally, they planned to fly on November 3, the date of the UNC homecoming game, but a malfunction in the twin-engine plane prevented takeoff. Their next opportunity was Veterans Day, which suited their purposes fine. “Confederate veterans are American veterans in every sense of the word,” Sullivan says. This time the weather was clear and calm, and the plane worked. A banner with the Confederate flag and the message RESTORE SILENT SAM NOW flew over Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh.
The law is entirely on the side of Sullivan and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. So are most North Carolinians, 53.7 percent of whom support the restoration, a number that rises to 66.8 percent of white voters. In 2015, in direct response to protests over Silent Sam, the North Carolina Senate unanimously passed a ban on the removal of Confederate monuments. “An object of remembrance may not be relocated to a museum, cemetery, or mausoleum unless it was originally placed at such a location.” There is a solution to the problem of Silent Sam. It’s not that hard to figure out. Other jurisdictions have moved Confederate monuments to museums or cemeteries, positions of respect that are not offensively prominent. That way, the Sons of Confederate Veterans can honor their ancestors, and African Americans don’t have to confront monuments to white supremacy as they walk the streets. North Carolina’s state legislature has made that obvious and easy solution impossible. “An object of remembrance located on public property may not be permanently removed and may only be relocated,” the law decreed.
The administrators are trapped. If they put Silent Sam back, they’re asking for riots. And you can debate what “jurisdiction” means, and you can debate what “similar prominence” means, and you can debate whether the state law is in violation of Title VI and Title IX, but “may not be relocated to a museum” is surely clear enough. They cannot ship the thing elsewhere. The activists on both sides, highly organized and entirely capable of violence, would refuse compromise anyway. “If UNC officials have already said countless times that the memorial is at the ‘gateway’ of the University, how can there be any other place of similar prominence on campus?” Sullivan points out, and he’s not wrong. Maya Little has a simpler proposal for what to do with the statue: “They should leave the monument in the ground, in the dirt where it fell, and put a plaque up commemorating the people who have fought against it.” That will be tough on the alumni tour.
As the old myths fall, the myths of the first Civil War are falling first. The war’s memory weighs so much more heavily in the South than the North because the devastation was so much more extreme there. South Carolina lost 60 percent of its landed value, and 20,000 of its 60,000 white men of military age over the course of the war. All that suffering, all that death, must have had some noble purpose, right? The South’s myth of the “lost cause” relied on “states’ rights” for justification. The North, for its part, developed the myth that they had fought the war to end slavery. Both are only dubiously reflected in the historical record. On Lincoln’s memorial, a quote from his second inaugural loads the mass death of the war he prosecuted with the significance of a redemptive divine retribution for the crime of slavery: “He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.” But even after the war’s outbreak, Lincoln was clear enough about his motivations. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” he wrote in a letter. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.” The value of Black lives was always incidental.
Christy Coleman, the former CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, is wrestling with America’s competing mythologies at the exact moment when the old symbols and the old stories have stopped working. She began her career in museum work by attending Civil War reenactments and playing a slave—a gutsy business, inserting the story of human property into historical memory that wanted to forget that part of the story. She knows why the lost cause remains such a powerful force in Southern life. “When you’re talking about that level of trauma, particularly to the white South, there is this need to reconcile their grief,” she says. “And the way they did that was to take slavery out of the picture.” The essence of the lost-cause ideology is a forgetting within remembering, an amnesia necessary to have a morally coherent history.
Northern triumph required its own form of forgetting within memory. “When the North and the South do reconcile, one thing they reconcile over pretty easily is white supremacy. That’s the first thing,” Coleman says. Union and Confederate soldiers gathered together to cement their brotherhood in arms in ceremonies that raised the monuments to the Confederate dead—monuments like Silent Sam. Southern fiction imagined an antebellum South of “happy darkies” retelling romances between Union soldiers and Southern belles—wildly popular in the North as well as the South. Black veterans—there were more than 200,000—were disinvited to the celebrations. You might say that the North won the war and the South won the peace. But that’s not entirely accurate. The North won progress. The South won heritage. The North won the future. The South won the past. And it is not clear at all which is more powerful. The reconciliation is “how we chose to lie to each other for a hundred and fifty years,” as Coleman puts it.
The irony of figures like Silent Sam is that, far from representing the overcoming of America’s internal hostilities, they represent their resumption by other means. Union brigadier general James S. Brisbin was sent to pacify the white South during Reconstruction. “These people are not loyal; they are only conquered,” he wrote back. “I tell you there is not as much loyalty in the South today as there was the day Lee surrendered to Grant. The moment they lost their cause in the field they set about to gain by politics what they had failed to obtain by force of arms.” In the disputes over the election of Rutherford Hayes in 1876, the election with the highest turnout in American history (over 80 percent), both sides claimed victories in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. An informal deal was struck to give Hayes the presidency in exchange for pulling federal troops from the South, essentially ceding the whole region to white supremacy. The Redeemers came back to power and immediately disenfranchised Black voters. They called it the Compromise of 1877. Compromise was the cost of the union.
Silent Sam itself was another such compromise. At 4:30 p.m. on the afternoon of June 2, 1913, Julian Carr, an industrialist and supporter of the Ku Klux Klan who received an honorary degree from UNC, inaugurated the statue with a speech in which he bragged about his courage in flogging an African American woman: “One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of a hundred Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.” The record does not relate whether the audience chuckled at this anecdote, but after the Carr speech, they marched to the monument itself for the unveiling, and sang “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground,” an old, mournful tune of soldiers who just want to be home. Even at the inauguration of the statue, it told a double story: the story of white supremacy and the story of the sufferings of ordinary men.
The great-great-grandson of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, has devoted a fair portion of his life to trying to fathom the crossroads where those stories meet. “If we forget the evil that has created our history, we’re doomed to repeat it,” Bertram Hayes-Davis says. “Those folks that want to tear that monument down have no earthly idea what it stands for or who those people are. On the other hand, the guys who are standing there saying this is where it absolutely needs to be no matter what are on the other side of the ballpark.” You can only remember so much when it comes to the Civil War. You have to choose the memory of slaves or beloved sons. You have to forget someone.
Both Christy Coleman and Bertram Hayes-Davis know what should be done with Silent Sam. He should be moved to a museum or to a Confederate Cemetery, a place of contemplation where the work of history, uncovering the mystery of why people did what they did so that we may understand why people do what they do, may be undertaken. The legislature has rendered the obvious solution impossible. But also, to put these monuments aside would be to fail to reckon with the reality on the ground: For Maya Little and Jake Sullivan, Silent Sam is not some abstruse historical question. The rise and fall of the statue in their midst is lived experience to them. They want to relive history. They don’t want the compromises of the past. Why would they cherish the disinterested contemplation of history? How much nuance can you tolerate when they try to take away your humanity? How much discussion can you have when they want to degrade your ancestors? How can you be reasonable when they want to take away your future? How can you be civil when they want to strip away your past?
On December 3, 2018, Chancellor Carol Folt and the UNC board of trustees continued the grand American tradition of impossible compromise when they recommended the construction of a new building on campus to house Silent Sam. The construction was going to cost $5.3 million plus an additional $800,000 in annual operating costs. It was an ingenious answer in a way. If they couldn’t put Silent Sam in a museum off campus, they would bring a museum to campus.
The solution satisfied nobody. “Why would our ancestors want their contributions and sacrifices moved from the public square to a place where we will be the only ones to appreciate them?” Jake Sullivan wonders. “Certainly, where the proposal suggests it should go is far out of the way and down by the hospital, where it would see very little related foot traffic. It’s essentially just a basement for the university to store what it now considers its trash.” For Maya Little, the new building is a direct threat to the student body, since there can be little doubt that there will be violent protests by both sides wherever it is. “Where are they going to build this mausoleum, this shrine for Silent Sam?” she asks. “That’s five minutes away from a synagogue. And it’s in South Campus, where most Black students continue to live, because UNC still is a very segregated campus.” For Sullivan the new building for Silent Sam is a garbage disposal and for Maya Little it’s a shrine.
On December 14, the board of governors rejected the proposal anyway. At the time of writing, the question of Silent Sam remains up in the air. The truth is that no compromise was ever possible because of all the compromises America has already made, the compromises by which America built itself, by which it has lived. The forces ripping Americans apart have seams already prepared for the tear. “We’re fighting for our lives,” Little says. “We’re fighting for our dignity. We’re going to keep fighting no matter what.” Monumental symbols are supposed to bind the past to the future. Silent Sam serves that role faithfully. He watches over the cracks that are opening just as he was supposed to watch over the covering up of the old cracks. The tensions of the American origin remain. It is a double country. Black woman. White man.
Silent Sam was a vicious, fraudulent lie that kept America together. When the lies you tell yourself no longer make sense, how do you live?
Like any psychotic break, America’s current political insanity goes back to its beginnings. The three-fifths clause, debated at the Philadelphia Convention, was right at the heart of the Constitution, right at the heart of the new country. It was the first compromise that should not have been made in a country defined by compromises that should not have been made.
The struggle was over Northern against Southern representation but it was also over the nature of taxation and representation and also over what constituted a human being. Slave states received three-fifths of a vote for every slave in their possession, which increased their taxes but also their power. In the debates on July 12, 1787, founding father Edmund Randolph “lamented that such a species of property exists, but as it did exist the holders of it would require this security.” That national lament, a squirming acceptance of recognized evil, began shaping the course of American history right away. Without the three-fifths clause, Jefferson would not have beaten Adams in the election of 1800. Without the three-fifths clause, Virginia would not have controlled the presidency for thirty-two of America’s first thirty-six years. The Electoral College, then as now, gave precedence to Southern and reactionary elements that shaped the country.
Slavery and racism are not uniquely American. The British Empire helped to create the transatlantic slave trade, and powerful interests relied on slavery for their wealth and privilege. But the British Empire was not ripped apart by abolition. Brazil was a slave-based economy, importing nearly half of all slaves during the nineteenth century, and it abolished the practice only in 1888. Slavery has left a terrible legacy of cruel degradation in Brazil, but the end of slavery did not require the near destruction of the country. The unique American contradiction is slavery embedded among people celebrating freedom—both impossible and actual. The crisis comes as a question—a question that America refuses to answer: Do Black people count? Because America refuses to answer the question, the question refuses to go away. It is the American question. It is the question that American history has been trying to work out. Do Black people count? The answer America has always given is “sort of.” Three-fifths.
The founders, and those who followed them, hoped the whole ugly business of slavery would just go away. Thomas Jefferson embodied his national contradiction to such an extent he amounts practically to an allegory. He was a double man. He hated slavery and lived by it. During the period when he was writing the Declaration of Independence, he described the slave trade as a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people…” He believed that slavery destroyed master as well as slave. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” he wrote. Nonetheless, Jefferson was, as a matter of course, deeply racist, a slaveholder, believing African Americans to be foul-smelling and subject only to “transient” grief. Jefferson preached ideals and impregnated his slaves. His hypocrisy was American to the core. He ate the fruits of slavery but knew the tree was rotten. He wanted life to go on as before and knew that it couldn’t. Jefferson believed that the young men who had “sucked in the principles of liberty as if it were their mother’s milk” would end slavery in a generation or so.
Inconsistency, not racism, is the American bugbear. For the sake of the Union, in order to remain whole, it compromised on a reality not subject to compromise. The same insoluble mess that faced the framers of the Constitution faces the UNC board of governors. Maya Little’s blood and paint, “Black Lives Matter” on one side, and on the other the pride of Jake Sullivan in his ancestors, the tenderness of an established way of life.
At this point in history, 240 years after its composition, much of the US Constitution simply does not apply to reality. Democrats and Republicans alike worship the document as a sacred text, indulging a delirious sentimentality that was the precise opposite of what the framers envisioned as the necessary basis for responsible government. I’ve seen Trump supporters at rallies with whole chunks written out on the backs of their shirts. During the 2016 election, Gold Star father Khizr Khan waved around a pocket Constitution at a Clinton rally like a talisman to deflect Trump’s insults; the New York Times reprinted the whole thing, with commentary, like the Talmud. It’s absurd. The practice of constitutional law in the United States gives absolute significance to meanings that have long since vanished into history. The geniuses who wrote it, and who signed it less than 100 miles from unclaimed wilderness, never imagined for a moment that their plans for a new republic would survive for 250 years. They were much too sensible. The founders never desired their permanence. It is only their great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren who conjure the founders into gods among men. Americans worship ancestors whose lives were spent overthrowing ancestor worship; they pointlessly adhere to a tradition whose achievement was the overthrow of pointless traditions. Jefferson himself believed it was the “solemn opportunity” of every generation to update the constitution “every nineteen or twenty years.” Before Trump and anything he may or may not have done, there was already a constitutional crisis. There is no way to govern rationally when your foundational document is effectively dead and you worship it anyway.
The legitimacy crisis that has infected the American political system can’t be resolved with an election. It’s not a question of political choices, this president or that president, this party or that party. People are losing faith in the basis of the government of the country. They’ve already lost faith in their political class. They’ve nearly lost faith that government can be an instrument of policy. They’re starting to lose faith in their history. Faith may sound like a vague and arbitrary foundation. But ultimately faith in its own reality is the substance of any nation.
The United States, if it is to survive, requires a new Constitutional Convention. The loathing overtaking the country makes that possibility more remote every day.