Guest AuthorAlmost 150 years after the guns fell silent at the Battle of Olustee, it seemed as if the Civil War never quite ended, that the lessons of the past have been lost on those who claim the legacy of that American misadventure.
Just look at the brewing controversy over plans to erect a Union monument on the site of the biggest Civil War battle in Florida in time for the sesquicentennial in February.
In 1899 the state Legislature created a commission to select a site and build a monument to honor the dead and celebrate the Confederate victory. Located in the Osceola National Forest west of Jacksonville and east of Lake City, the Olustee Battlefield Confederate monument was completed in 1912. A monument to honor the blood spilled by soldiers from the Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York regiments who fell on Feb. 20, 1864 is long overdue.
Some critics of the proposal simply want their ancestors to rest in peace. Others liken this proposal to putting a monument to Jane Fonda at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. Still others compare this proposal to burying Afghan Taliban fighters and Iraqi insurgents with American soldiers. You get the picture how misguided the rhetoric gets.
They are either willfully ignorant or plain ornery. At Gettysburg, the most sacred of American hallowed ground, the battlefield is adorned with monuments celebrating the memory of every Confederate state whose sons bled and died there.
Sometimes this controversy degenerates into a theater of the absurd with all the outlandish characters. A recent Department of Parks public hearing featured the singing of “Dixie” led by a Confederate flag-waving black man who called Union soldiers rapists. This wasn’t just any black man who happened to wander into the hearing with Johnny Reb’s stars and bars. He was H.K Edgerton, the Benedict Arnold of the war over Southern heritage. He is a former NAACP president turned Confederacy apologist.
The same night Edgerton was waiving his Confederate flag, I sat home watching Henry Louis Gates’ series, “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.” In the Civil War episode, I was reminded of the massacre of colored Union troops by their Confederate counterparts.
Of course, no Civil War controversy is complete unless politicians butt in. Rep. Dennis Baxley has proposed getting the Legislature involved. I’m glad that idea is being viewed skeptically by some of his Republican colleagues.
Confederates won the Battle of Olustee, but it wasn’t enough to avoid Robert E. Lee’s inevitable surrender at Appomattox Court House 14 months later. Sometimes, you get the impression that some folks keep looking for proxy wars trying to change the outcome.
The Civil War was the most bitter of American family squabbles, brother against brother, Cane vs. Abel. A Union monument at Olustee, even one 150 years late, will not dishonor the vanquished. It’s a reminder that this country, our country, won in the end.
