IF YOU’RE on Twitter but not following @sams_reckoning, you should be. The people behind the account call themselves Silent Sam’s Reckoning. For more than two years — while the debate raged over whether the toppled Confederate monument should be put back up, while the statue lay hidden and wrapped in a tarp, while one chancellor lost a job over it and another’s has been threatened — they’ve pressed on, posting occasional updates on their longterm historical research project. The work is significant.
Silent Sam’s Reckoning does not post the kinds of threads that typically go viral. Partly that’s because the totality of their work is what’s most impressive, rather than any single revelation. So I checked in with them to ask some broader questions about their ongoing project. They release their findings in threads that thoroughly document UNC’s Confederate dead one at a time, as research is completed, full of awful yet unsurprising discoveries. The documenting is the point. Silent Sam’s Reckoning brings the receipts (#samsreckoning).
The group also posts relevant information that veers slightly from the main research objective at hand. This linked thread, for example, showed the violent history of the old campus quad and directly connected it to the Confederate monument’s placement.
In one sense, their research is a living rebuttal to plaques that adorned the plinth upon which Silent Sam stood. One depicted a student looking away from his books to answer the call of a woman holding a sword and representing North Carolina. Another stated: “To The Sons Of The University Who Entered The War Of 1861–65 In Answer To The Call Of Their Country And Whose Lives Taught The Lesson Of Their Great Commander That Duty Is The Sublimest Word In The English Language”.
The campus Confederate monument was not a nameless memorial. It honored real people. We know their names. They’re in marble inside Memorial Hall. Now we know so much more.
THE FOLLOWING Q&A with Silent Sam’s Reckoning was conducted over Twitter DMs. Their work is about halfway to its goal, and so far has found that 100% of those honored by Silent Sam directly benefited from slavery, a significant finding. A common argument for keeping the statue had been that many of the UNC alumni and students it honored were supposedly from humble backgrounds without connections to slavery. The researchers share many more fascinating insights and findings below. (Emphasis in bold are mine.)
MIKE OGLE for STONE WALLS: I know nothing about who is behind your account, but your impressive work speaks for itself. What can you tell us about what/who Silent Sam’s Reckoning is?
SILENT SAM’S RECKONING: We are an activist research collective. We initially organized in solidarity with and to support the work of other anti-racist and anti-fascist activists at UNC. As more Confederate monuments are removed, we stand in solidarity with all the communities working to reckon their histories and build communities that are welcoming to all their residents.
OGLE: Could you describe the project, including when and why you undertook it? How much do you have remaining? What is the ultimate goal?
SILENT SAM’S RECKONING: The very first tweet was 13 January 2019. After the Silent Sam statue fell on 20 August 2018, individual and organized groups of neo-Confederates had been harassing the UNC community with alarming frequency and always claiming that their devotion to the era was pride in their heritage and had nothing to do with bigotry. Sam’s Reckoning chose to organize and to look more closely at the men UNC publicly honored with Silent Sam. Our findings support our assertion that one cannot remove the bigotry from the South’s history (or the North’s for that matter) and to romanticize the myth of the honorable South purposefully shelves the horrors that were integral to pre-war Southern society.
In the words of James Baldwin, “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” These Lost Cause apologists didn’t act alone. They found a willing partner in the State to perpetuate harm: from the GOP-led General Assembly that tried to protect the monument through legislation, to the UNC Board of Trustees who enacted a 16-year moratorium on removing white supremacists’ names from the campus landscape, to UNC Chancellor Folt who refused to remove the monument and then later backed a new $5.3 million “history and education center” to house it, to the UNC Police who surveilled, threatened, brutalized, and arrested UNC student activists (while welcoming armed neo-Confederates to campus with handshakes and special treatment), and most recently to UNC Chancellor Guskiewicz who lied to the UNC community about the administration’s involvement in brokering a $2.5 million payout to the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Our project opposes these allied powers of ignorance. The central goal of our work is to compile an unimpeachable data set about the scope of slaveholding among the families of the 287 Silent Sam honorees. Also we try to spotlight and critique related historical events, figures, and symbols that the University has tried to whitewash. We hope our work will help people draw connections between UNC’s past and the present-day campus struggles against white supremacy.
We have reckoned 139 of the 287 names formally honored by UNC. So far, our research shows that one hundred percent of the families of the UNC Confederate dead were enslavers. And these families were the super-wealthy planter elite, among the top 2% of all enslavers in North Carolina. We intend to reckon all 287 names.
OGLE: Why is investigating, documenting, and disseminating this information important? Why continue even though UNC’s Confederate monument has been gone for two and a half years now?
SILENT SAM’S RECKONING: The monument may be gone, but what it stood for is not. A good thing to remember is that months after the monument was gone from campus, the UNC Board of Governors thought it was appropriate to give it to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and to give the SCV money to “maintain” the monument.
Also, the UNC Confederate dead continue to be honored in other ways by the University. There is still a Confederate shrine on UNC’s campus, Memorial Hall, which features large marble tablets chiseled with the names of the same men that Silent Sam honored. These tablets were created through the efforts of William Saunders (former head of the North Carolina Klan), Paul Cameron (at one time the largest slaveholder in North Carolina) and Cornelia Philips Spencer (a white supremacist who advocated for closing UNC during Reconstruction, rather than allow Black people to enter the institution). The University holds commencement ceremonies and the annual University Day celebrations in this space.
A lot of people in power do not appreciate that sustaining the Confederate myth is harmful, and that that harm is documented. The Sam’s Reckoning project believes that if the community knows about documented harm, it can lead to honest community conversations.
OGLE: Are there any specific people or families you’ve documented so far who stand out as especially illuminating in some way?
SILENT SAM’S RECKONING: The research has been very confirming and that has been an experience in and of itself. To date, all the people we’ve reckoned have benefited directly from chattel slavery: either they themselves or their parents were slavers. We weren’t surprised that Sam’s Reckoning found these receipts, but we hadn’t expected to have reckoned almost 50% and not find a single name honored by UNC who hadn’t directly benefited from enslaving people.
In addition to confirming our hypothesis about slaving rates among the Confederate dead, we’ve seen many factual patterns emerge. There are too many to list here, but here are a few that are revealed by the sources:
The slaving empires of many of these families were extensive, and they went back for generations and generations. We often see how an extended family of siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, etc., might enslave hundreds of people within a single county. Many had entire networks of slave labor camps, multiple plantations stretching across several states. And for most of these families, they are documented as slavers all the way back to the first U.S. Census in 1790 — likely further back than that.
We noticed that there was a pipeline between the wealth centered in the Wilmington and Lower Cape Fear region of North Carolina and the University. Many of the Silent Sam honorees came from this area, and many of their relatives served as UNC Trustees or were early financial supporters of the University.
Many of these families were deeply involved in the dispossession of land from indigenous people. Many took advantage of the “land grant” system to amass thousands of acres. Some of the men who would later fight for the Confederacy, first fought for the United States in military campaigns against Native people, such as the Seminole Wars. One unexpected thing was that we found there was a chain migration of inter-married families of elite eastern North Carolina planters in the 1830s and 1840s to northern Florida to “settle” giant tracts of this stolen land around what is now Tallahassee.
We’ve seen many cases of family members of the UNC Confederate dead who were racist political leaders or who were involved in individual incidents of racial violence. There are several cases of family members who organized White Supremacy Clubs, part of the racist movement that led to the Wilmington Massacre and Coup. We have found two cases, so far, of family members who were involved in lynchings.
We have discovered that some of the Confederate dead had less than stellar service records during the War. We see records of soldiers who served only a few months, others who spent most of the war on furlough, absent without leave, or away from the front due to questionable medical reasons. Oliver Tyrel Parks (Class of 1861) was court-martialed for gambling and cowardice.
Also, in terms of contemporary connections, we have seen countless cases of the former plantations of these families being transformed into modern B&Bs, wedding and event venues, hunting lodges, golf courses, gated communities, and more. The former sites of trauma for black and indigenous people continue to enrich the descendants of wealthy white settlers, and serve as their playgrounds and refuges.
Also, here are a few individual cases that are worth mentioning:
Two of the Silent Sam honorees were the ancestors of UNC Chancellor Ferebee Taylor: James W. Ferebee (Class of 1861) and James Cameron Moore (Class of 1854).
[Note from Ogle: “This is particularly interesting to me because of Ferebee Taylor’s role in the mishandling of James Cates. When UNC-Chapel Hill “investigated” the circumstances that led to Cates’s death, Taylor, then UNC system VP, took the responsibility of writing a summation of what concerned local Black people said about police negligence. Taylor’s account was incredibly lacking, and occurred just after he’d traveled to northern Virginia to Robert E. Lee’s birthplace to honor the 100th anniversary of Lee’s death.”]
The father of Samuel Park Weir (Class of 1860) sold slave insurance policies.
The great-grandfather of Tristim Lowther Skinner (Class of 1840) ran a slave ship. So did the great-grandfather of Henry Burgwyn Jr. (Class of 1859).
We’ve found two cases, so far, of men who are honored as Confederate dead but actually survived the war: William Lee Alexander (Class of 1842) died in 1870; Adolpe Lastrapes (Class of 1862) lived until 1933.
OGLE: Have you learned anything that has been particularly surprising or shocking even to you?
SILENT SAM’S RECKONING: Slavery permeated every facet of antebellum UNC students’ lives, and their college life was no exception. It was their slaveholding families’ wealth that allowed them to attend UNC — wealth built off of the exploitation of stolen labor and land. Many of these students didn’t come to Chapel Hill alone. They frequently forced a person enslaved by their family to go with them to cook their meals and provide for every need and want. Or, if they didn’t, the cost of UNC providing students a “college servant” was built into the University’s fee system (by 1830 it was $2 per session, where tuition was $15 and lodging $1). The buildings where these students lived and studied were constructed by skilled, enslaved laborers. Every bit of food the students ate was grown or cooked by enslaved laborers, every drop of water they drank was carried from springs and wells by enslaved people; and on and on…
Out of all of that, it has been particularly disturbing how many antebellum UNC students used “slave inheritance” as a de facto trust fund to bankroll their education at UNC. We usually saw a “slave inheritance” happen like this:
A slaveholding parent might die before their child, the student, had reached the age of majority (21). The parent’s will would bequeath people that they had enslaved to their heirs. Because minor heirs could not yet legally enslave the people willed to them, a trustee would be appointed by a probate court. That trustee would then “hire out” these enslaved people to other local enslavers. The proceeds of these hiring fees were then applied by the trustee towards the child’s school fees. This would often go on for years, until the child enslaver-in-waiting would turn twenty one. We have uncovered several cases of antebellum UNC students paying their way at the University through this trust system.
Here is a link to our thread on William Sillers, a good example of this immoral scheme:
OGLE: When completed, will you publish the results of your research all together somewhere?
SILENT SAM’S RECKONING: We’ll see! We have some ideas on how to make this research more usable, but for now we’re just trying to focus on completing the research itself — which is a large enough undertaking.
OGLE: What methods and resources do you typically rely on to research a name, and how many hours or how much work would you estimate goes into each one?
SILENT SAM’S RECKONING: This is time-consuming, labor-intensive work. It can take anywhere from 3 hours to 3 months to complete a full reckoning of a single name from the list of 287 UNC Confederate dead. It really depends on how quickly the evidence surfaces.
We use genealogical research sites like Ancestry, Confederate military records, data published by the UNC General Alumni Association, University histories, archival sources, historical newspapers, and burial and probate records to do this work.
OGLE: Do you have any overarching takeaways? What lessons can interrogating this history teach us about today?
SILENT SAM’S RECKONING: We hope each reader will have their own takeaways from the project. But there are some lessons that emerge for us, the researchers.
We can’t help but think about this work in the context of the general devaluing of facts and truth that allows disinformation to metastasize. Many of the comments we’ve gotten, especially early on, show how deeply ingrained the romanticized Lost Cause ideology is for some. For example, one commenter argued that monuments like Silent Sam were just dedicated “to nameless farm boys who didn’t own slaves but defended their homes.” Others said that all the Civil War-era UNC “boys” immediately laid down their books and rushed off to enlist, or that most were just common soldiers who followed orders. None of these myths are supported by the data.
The men honored by the Silent Sam monument weren’t “nameless;” they were the sons of some of the most well-known aristocratic families in the South: the Alstons, the Bryans, the Polks, the Moreheads. So far, all of them came from households that trafficked, enslaved, and exploited human beings. The majority of the 287 UNC dead were over 21 years old and were from UNC cohorts earlier than the wartime classes of 1861-1865. These were not common enlisted men. They were the rich and well-connected who were given commissions to lead companies, regiments, or entire brigades in the campaign to uphold the system of chattel slavery which constituted much of their own families’ wealth.
ONE GOOD THING: Thanks to a bounty of amazing stories and storytellers, today’s one good thing is several good things. This is just a few of the tremendous resources and pieces of late:
The Chapel Hill Community History initiative through the public library that has brought us local civil rights history and the “Re/Collecting Chapel Hill” podcast has a great new online exhibit titled “I Was Still Singing”. The exhibit highlights the contributions of Black women throughout Chapel Hill’s history. Its first section focuses on public health pioneers, and the presentation and video are stunning. After that section on the “body,” they’ll be unveiling two more this month on the mind and soul.
The Marian Cheek Jackson Center launched its new site of local Black neighborhood history, From The Rock Wall. The oral histories are still there, and the archives of photographs, but so is much more. Just a couple of examples are a GIS dynamic map of historic Black businesses, and the “soundwalk” tour of Northside led by Pat Jackson and Rev. Willis Fearrington. There’s a ton of local history to explore on the site.
WUNC has a podcast series called “Pauli” about Pauli Murray that is hosted and produced by Leoneda Inge, WUNC’s talented race and southern culture reporter.
Scalawag published a thoughtful reflection by Dolores Chandler on Pauli Murray and Murray’s legacy titled “Pauli Murray: Black revolutionary.”
For Carolina Alumni Review magazine, Barry Yeoman reported an important story about the work environment for faculty of color at UNC in this pivotal time. It’s titled “The Fierce Urgency of Now.”
This one is not new but just came to my attention. Last year Joel Sronce and Matthew Conrad Brown made this striking film connecting the 1969 food workers’ strikes at UNC to the current conditions for food workers at UNC system schools 50 years later. It’s called “What Binds Us To This Place”. Favorite quote from a recent food worker: “A closed mouth does not get fed.”