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.
Nope. And don’t you think it’s a shame that conservatives from all over the country can’t unite to honor all our brave ancestors, both Blue and Gray? This isn’t about North or South, Lincoln or Davis, Lee or Grant, but brave ordinary Americans who died for what they thought right. This is so far from trolling as it is an honoring of the common heritage of the brave American citizen soldier no matter what part of the country he came from.
A lot of those weren’t fighting for what they thought was right, they were conscripted. I think that was mostly in the North.
This shouldn’t be an issue. Florida has been occupied for decades by Yankees who are regularly reinforced by invading Canadians every winter.
Conscription started in the Confederacy.
From the wikipedia:
The vast majority of troops were volunteers; however, of the 2,100,000 Union soldiers, about 2% were draftees, and another 6% were substitutes paid by draftees.
And one more thing about conscription, my dad and a lot of other soldiers from World War II and other wars were conscripts and I do not accept the fact that those conscripts who faithfully served, bled and died are not worthy of honor or were not inspired by patriotic feeling to accept their duty.
I can’t speak to their motivations, but why did they wait to be conscripted?
That’s a very low percentage of Union soldiers who were drafted or paid substitutes.
From www.civilwarhome.com:
Conscription (Military Draft) In The Civil War
There was no general military draft in America until the Civil War. The Confederacy passed its first of 3 conscription acts 16 April 1862, and scarcely a year later the Union began conscripting men. Government officials plagued with manpower shortages regarded drafting as the only means of sustaining an effective army and hoped it would spur voluntary enlistments.
But compulsory service embittered the public, who considered it an infringement on individual free will and personal liberty and feared it would concentrate arbitrary power in the military. Believing with some justification that unwilling soldiers made poor fighting men, volunteer soldiers despised conscripts. Conscription also undercut morale, as soldiers complained that it compromised voluntary enlistments and appeared as an act of desperation in the face of repeated military defeats.
Conscription nurtured substitutes, bounty-jumping, and desertion. Charges of class discrimination were leveled against both Confederate and Union draft laws since exemption and commutation clauses allowed propertied men to avoid service, thus laying the burden on immigrants and men with few resources. Occupational, only-son, and medical exemptions created many loopholes in the laws. Doctors certified healthy men unfit for duty, while some physically or mentally deficient conscripts went to the front after sham examinations. Enforcement presented obstacles of its own; many conscripts simply failed to report for duty. Several states challenged the draft's legality, trying to block it and arguing over the quota system. Unpopular, unwieldy, and unfair, conscription raised more discontent than soldiers.
Under the Union draft act men faced the possibility of conscription in July 1863 and in Mar., July, and Dec. 1864. Draft riots ensued, notably in New York in 1863. Of the 249,259 18-to-35-year-old men whose names were drawn, only about 6% served, the rest paying commutation or hiring a substitute.
The first Confederate conscription law also applied to men between 18 and 35, providing for substitution (repealed Dec. 1863) and exemptions. A revision, approved 27 Sept. 1862, raised the age to 45; 5 days later the legislators passed the expanded Exemption Act. The Conscription Act of Feb. 1864 called all men between 1 7 and 50. Conscripts accounted for one-fourth to one-third of the Confederate armies east of the Mississippi between Apr. 1864 and early 1865.
Source: "Historical Times Encyclopedia of the Civil War" Edited by Patricia L. FaustThis Page last updated 02/15/02
Unless we have volunteered to fight in our recent foreign wars, I think it’s presumptuous to question the motivation of those who did answer the call and sometimes suffered and died for our nation.
I thought the subject of this thread was Civil War Memorials.
"A lot of those weren’t fighting for what they thought was right, they were conscripted. I think that was mostly in the North."
As long as this Union monument is a memorial and not an in your face display, I don't see it as incompatible with the spirit of national unity.
The ironic thing is that most of the Union soldiers, being largely rural and conservative, of the Civil War era had more in common with today’s Southerners than they do with today’s stereotypical coastal urban leftist.
Only one nation erects statues to generals and political leaders that lose wars.
I say they negotiate and agree to put up a marker honoring the Union soldiers if the rest of the country will quit trying to remove every image and use of the Confederate battle flag.
You are missing the point. The South is not real interested in putting up Yankee monuments for reconciliation and national unity. Thats the kind of rhetoric you hear spouted from the Left wing Dems every time they want to force something on the rest of us.
Date: Friday, Saturday & Sunday, February 14, 15 & 16, 2014. 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Description:
150TH ANNIVERSARY OF CIVIL WAR BATTLE
Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park, Florida’s first state park, will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and host the 38th Annual Reenactment of the Battle of Olustee on February 14-16, 2014. Throughout the weekend, more than 2,000 demonstrators will present living history impressions of military and civilian life at the time of Florida’s largest Civil War battle.
The Battle of Olustee was fought on February 20, 1864. Full-scale artillery, mounted cavalry and three African American regiments, took part in the battle that ended with 2,807 casualties and a Confederate victory. The 54th Massachusetts was among the African American troops that fought at Olustee.
You are missing the point. The South is not real interested in putting up Yankee monuments for reconciliation and national unity. Thats the kind of rhetoric you hear spouted from the Left wing Dems every time they want to force something on the rest of us.
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Exactly. Then you’d have to see the southern monuments in a context you cannot have.
Those who had excess of dignity and honor, and yet, tried and failed. While the ones you apparently despise were victorious. I wouldn’t want to be reminded of this fact either.
I really do get the hatred, especially in Georgia, where the CSA had its complete inability to defend itself writ large.
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