Читать книгу Feature Writing and Reporting - Jennifer Brannock Cox - Страница 57

Chapter 1 takes the reader all the way back to the beginning of the story, answering the story’s basic questions: Who is Silent Sam, how did he get there, and what was his purpose?

On June 1, 1908, the Board of Trustees at UNC–Chapel Hill approved a request from the North Carolina division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy: The university supported a plan to build a Confederate monument.

The Civil War had been over for 43 years. In a time when the average life expectancy was around 50, the college students who’d left their campuses to fight in the war were becoming old men. In Chapel Hill, UNC President Francis Venable expressed a sudden urgency.

“I hope very much that this laudable purpose can be carried out,” Venable wrote in a March 1909 letter to the chairwoman of the U.D.C.’s monument committee. “You know that more than one thousand of the alumni entered the Confederate service and surely something should be done to perpetuate the patriotism and heroism of these noble sons of the university.”

And so began a five-year process to build the monument that became known as Silent Sam. In the beginning, the statue wasn’t going to be a statue at all, but instead what Venable, UNC’s president until 1913, described in a letter as a “memorial gateway to campus.”

The author quickly answers one of the primary questions readers have: Where did this statue come from, and why was it built? Readers may skim a historical feature looking for a simple answer. They don’t want to dig for it. Hopefully, they’ll get engaged in the story while searching and decide to stay.

By September 1909, Venable had come to agree with the opinion of Annie Hill Kenan, the chairwoman of the U.D.C.’s monument committee. Kenan had favored a statue, and in a Sept. 24, 1909, letter, Venable wrote that her original idea “was the wisest one.”

The university and the U.D.C. hoped to dedicate the statue at the 1911 commencement, on the 50th anniversary of the start of the war. Venable wrote of “a great reunion,” one that would include Confederate veterans.

Instead, cost concerns and a back-and-forth among Venable, the U.D.C. and the potential designers of the monument delayed the proceedings. By early 1910, Venable and the U.D.C. favored a design from John Wilson, a Boston-based sculptor. He originally asked for $10,000.

Venable feared the U.D.C. couldn’t raise the money. Wilson wrote back in late March 1910, pleading for the work: “I should very much like to undertake the Soldier Boy at this time,” he wrote, “as it appeals to me particularly.” He and Venable agreed on a cost of $7,500–$5,000 of which UNC alumni raised, with the additional $2,500 coming from the U.D.C.’s own fundraising.

It took another three years for the statue to become reality, amid fundraising challenges and debates about its location. At last, the statue arrived in time for a dedication in early June 1913. The ceremony began at 3:30 p.m., according to a program. A band played Dixie.

The North Carolina governor, Locke Craig, addressed a crowd of dignitaries. Venable spoke, too. The last scheduled speaker was Julian Carr, who was a UNC student until he left to fight for the Confederacy. Carr espoused the virtue of the South, and those who fought for its cause, in laudatory, grandiose language.

“I dare to affirm this day, that if every state of the South had done what North Carolina did without a murmur, always faithful to its duty whatever the groans of the victims, there never would have been an Appomattox,” Carr said, according to a copy of his speech.

Midway through it, Carr veered from praising the fight of Confederate soldiers to describing what they “meant to the welfare of the Anglo-Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.”

Moments later Carr recounted his return to Chapel Hill after the war ended:

“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 100 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 shotgun under my head.”

The dedication ceremony ended. UNC, after five years of planning, at long last had its Confederate monument.

Meanwhile, Carr’s words, those about saving “the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South” and “horse-whipping a negro wench,” became lost to history. They remained so for almost 100 years, hidden in plain sight in a collection of Carr’s papers, until a graduate student discovered them.

Walking through the statue’s history chronologically allows the reporters to reveal the original intent behind it, hinting at, without yet fully explaining, the pain and anger it would come to represent in modern times.