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Demonstrators gathered at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill campus Monday night achieved a decades-long goal for those opposed to public displays of Confederate statues: They toppled "Silent Sam," a monument dedicated to fallen Civil War-era soldiers.
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In the last year, the university spent $390,000 on security for the statue, according to The News & Observer.
The statue was erected in 1913 after being commissioned by the Daughters of the Confederacy to honor the young men who quit their studies to march off to fight in the Civil War.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/21/6404...testers-tear-down-confederate-statue-on-unc-c
I guess, I am far less surprised that it was toppled than I am that the thing sat on a modern college campus to begin with. After all, the Confederacy was about as anti-American as you can get.
From an 1856 issue of Alabama’s Muscogee Herald:
Free Society! we sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern men and especially the New England States are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meet with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman's body servant. This is your free society which Northern hordes are trying to extend into Kansas.
The last sentence refers to the conflict over slavery between free-soilers and slaveholders. The conflict was not merely about the right to hold another human in bondage, but how that right created the foundation for white equality.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/396482/