Silent Sam, that monument of an anonymous Confederate soldier that stood sentinel on a corner of the campus at the University of North Carolina for 106 years, bothering mostly those who ceded to it that power, has claimed a significant victim.

Carol Folt, the chancellor of the state’s flagship university, announced on Monday she would be stepping down from that position at the end of the school year, but the next day the Board of Governors hastened a messy divorce, and moved Folt’s departure day to Jan. 31. Folt also used her announcement to say the pedestal upon which Sam stood all those years would be removed, leaving no evidence of the memorial that honors the Confederate soldiers who attended the nation’s oldest public university before dying in the Civil War — our ancestors, whose crime was bravely answering a call to duty.

That removal happened within hours, done under the cover of night.

In pairing her resignation with the news on the pedestal, Folt, who became chancellor in 2013, left little doubt that her departure, forced or voluntary, is a result of the Silent Sam tug-of-war — although she delivered a half-hearted attempt to separate the two.

There will be opinions now on what kind of chancellor Folt was, but label us a fan. During her tenure, UNC raised an incredible $2 billion, and for those of you whose love for the Tar Heels is confined to the sports arena, understand that this diminutive dynamo stood hard and fast against a gang that included the NCAA that tried to toss the athletic program onto a scrap pile. She deserves a lot of credit for their whiff.

Folt’s fate was likely sealed in late August when vandals — and that is the correct characterization — took the law into their own hands and toppled the statue, doing so as law enforcement officers watched without intervening. The university was heavily criticized for the standing down of the officers, and to some Folt was a co-conspirator.

But when it came to Sam, her hands were tied by an initiative by Republican legislators that made illegal the removal of such monuments without the approval of the North Carolina Historical Commission and the General Assembly.

Folt and the UNC trustees offered a plan on Dec. 3 to build a $5.3 million museum on campus where Sam could rest in peace, but that satisfied no one, not the Board of Governors that wanted it back at McCorkle Place, nor the offended, who wanted it gone from the campus.

The removal of the pedestal left no trace of Sam, but that could be temporary as the Board of Governors has been clear that it wants the statue to rise again.

We opined previously that we wished the statue could be given sanctuary in a museum in Chapel Hill, where it could continue to provoke memories of this nation’s darkest time, and do so without fear of being soiled or ambushed. It was, retrospectively speaking, a naive position as we sought a compromise where none is possible.

So the feeble attempt to rewrite history by sanitizing it continues, an effort that requires presumptuously assigning today’s mores to yesteryear. Those who came before us should not be judged for their society’s shared position because we live in more enlightened times, but that is just how things are now.

Folt said she wanted the pedestal gone for safety reasons, and there is no doubt it triggered emotions on both sides. The irony is that Folt is gone most likely because those who wanted it removed, as she clearly did, went rogue, putting an ally in a position from which she was unable to recover.

Chancellor Carol Folt, by falling on this sword, becomes one more Civil War casualty for UNC.

— The Robesonian