CHAPEL HILL — The University of North Carolina’s main campus here has for decades touted the fact that it is the nation’s oldest public university. But it’s most recent challenges concerning the Silent Sam monument have dredged up similar struggles in its past — including the fact that the university, at one point, was forced to close.
Frank Lea of Laurinburg, a recent winner of The Laurinburg Exchange’s “Six-Word Contest,” sparked the idea that UNC may have suffered from the effects of the Civil War more than many realize.
“I’ve been reading the stories in The Exchange about the Silent Sam monument, and it reminded me that I had been told years ago the college nearly closed following the war,” he said. “So many of its students fought and died in that war, and I heard the school only had six students when the war ended.”
Lea is right — and wrong.
According to The Daily Tar Heel, the university’s student newspaper, the university faced numerous challenges immediately after the war and, in fact, did have to close its doors for four years.
The student newspaper said UNC was one of the nation’s most-attended schools in the country prior to the Civil War, but …
“The school did somehow manage to keep classes going throughout the war,” claimed a piece by the newspaper’s editorial board in April 2017. “But the war would destroy all the progress the first public school in America had made to that point. Due to war debts, lack of student interest and the financial effects of the war, the University of North Carolina had to close its doors for four years after the South surrendered.”
While UNC can claim to be the nation’s oldest public university, the fact that it closed for four years in the 1860s following the War Between the States means “we cannot claim to be in continuous operation,” according to The Daily Tar Heel.
The student newspaper also took a strong stand on Silent Sam and those who chose to fight for the Confederacy.
“By choosing to honor the Confederate alumni of our University, we are ignoring those at UNC who fought to keep the Union together and who tried to keep our University afloat during the mess the Confederates caused,” the editorial board claimed. “Before the war, many UNC faculty members spoke against students wishing to secede — and the Board of Trustees rejected a petition to stop classes for the war effort.
“The voices from this University who tried to warn against the destruction the war would cause were ignored by hot-headed racists,” it continued. “The people who Silent Sam commemorates believed protecting slavery and racism was more important than uplifting the voices of Black communities contributing to their community without recognition or compensation.”
UNC eventually re-opened its doors and re-established itself as one of the nation’s best universities in the country, with a student population of nearly 30,000. In 2017, as it appears today, that student body has continues to cast a jaundiced eye at the Silent Sam monument.
“It should be clear that our nation is better off given the outcome of the war … (but) there is nothing to glorify about the old South or the Confederacy that tried to defend its legacy of oppression,” the student newspaper concluded.
The Silent Sam monument was erected in 1913 on McCorkle Place, the university’s upper quad, facing Franklin Street. It was toppled by students in August and has been in a secret location since.
W. Curt Vincent can be reached at 910-506-3023 or cvincent@laurinburgexch.wpenginepowered.com.
