Posted on 01/25/2014 6:38:12 PM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
Florida’s first state park has become ground zero for a raging political fight to establish a monument honoring Union Army soldiers who died during the Civil War.
The three-acre Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park currently includes three monuments honoring Confederate soldiers who died fighting to secede from the country.
The park, first established in 1912, was the site of Florida’s largest and bloodiest Civil War battle that killed 3,000 Union and 1,000 Confederate soldiers. It occurred on February 20, 1864, and raged on for four hours.
With no marker respecting the sacrifice of so many northern men, the Florida chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War asked the state parks department last year for permission to place an obelisk to honor Union soldiers.
State officials agreed that the park needed some historic balance. They held a public hearing about the new monument and chose a location within the park for it.
But those actions angered the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which called the proposed monument a “Darth Vader-esque obscene obsidian obelisk.”
Opponents enlisted the help of key politicians, like State Representative Dennis Baxley, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to stop the addition to the park. “There is a sacred trust that's being violated when you go in and change an historic site from the way it was commemorated by those who established (it),” Baxley told the News Service of Florida.
“Putting a Union monument at Olustee would be like placing a memorial to Jane Fonda at the entrance to the Vietnam memorial,” added Leon Duke, a wounded veteran.
Longtime historical park exhibitor Mike Farrell, who is a descendent of a Union soldier who died at Olustee, said that park visitors often seek out a Union memorial at the site. “I always have the visiting public approach me and ask me where the Union monument is on the battlefield, and I often tell them, ‘There isn't any,’” he told the News Service. “I'm not talking about…a cemetery marker to the dead. What I'm talking about is a battlefield monument.”
Ancestors of Charles Custer fought on both sides of the war, and he favors a Union monument. “There were twice as many Union casualties there as Confederate,” he told The New York Times. “They fought. They bled. And they are really not recognized anywhere.”
The battle of Olustee is reenacted each year, making it one of the Southeast’s largest Civil War re-enactments.
Although it was not nearly as large as many other Civil War battles, the Olustee one was significant because the South’s victory denied the North from establishing a government in Florida and cutting off supplies to the Confederate army.
Do you think that had there been a Confederate invasion of Minnesota that had been routed by the Minnesotans, that there would be a memorial at the battle grounds memorializing the Confederates?
Nope. The war at root was all about white southerners protecting their liberty to own other human beings.
That IS a liberty, though not one I have much sympathy for.
I don’t think he would have minded either. It’s a shame that people are too petty to honor the brave ordinary soldiers on both sides. Too many want to use the memories of the common soldier as a vehicle for their disdain for Lincoln or Jeff Davis.
It appears there is already a Union monument at Olustee, or at least at the Cemetery. Has been since 1991.
I have no idea where this is in relation to the battlefield or the proposed site.
http://www.flpublicarchaeology.org/civilwar/monuments/olustee-battlefield/unity-and-peace-monument
Good find!
I guess it may be as much a matter of semantics, than of realities. This is considered to be a grave marker, rather than a battlefield memorial. Apparently, it’s located at a distance from the battlefield. For me, it works fine as a monument, but the proprietorial attitude of the SCV gets under some people’s skins.
Unions are protectionists, aren't they?
If you want to look at it like that it started with George Washington at the Whiskey Rebellion, then after that Andrew Jackson said he was going to go to South Carolina and hang those who wanted secession. The real loss of freedom is when we let non-Americans take over, and that happened in 1913.
Wilson’s doing led Germany into world war 2. What I don’t get is, U.S. Troops were barely there before the war was won. The Commonwealth had already broken Germany’s back, so why did the president get to set the rules. I think even then higher powers were at work.
Oh yeah. Wilson let them in with the Federal Reserve, he was their guy. The League of Nations and then the UN stem from Wilson and his sucking up to the internationals.
Yes and so are the millions of non union MANUFACTURING workers that compromise 90% of those same workers.
You would be wrong there. About six percent of the United States army was conscripts. The confederate conscripts were about double that.
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