Week 6

Our meeting this week had me thinking. While we were discussing some various tasks, David brought up how he was curious about why history remembers Olustee the way it is. We believe that there are still soldiers left forgotten at Olustee. We then talked about the information we have about the aftermath and the monuments that are at Olustee. Since much of the conversation includes the Reconstruction, I’ve been mulling it over. We have sources that show that swept Olustee under the rug. Originally there was a Union cross placed by Grossman and his men who I discussed in Week Four’s post. However, after a few years, they found it destroyed. A Confederate monument is the oldest one on the field and later the recreated of the Union cross. There push back against a Union monument being placed at all.

Now, why did this get me thinking? These are all things I was already aware of. This work is focusing on the fallen of Olustee, but with this discussion in my head. I simply wonder how many other battlefields from the civil war may have a similar story. Olustee was a battle I had never heard about before Doctor Gannon and I have lived in Florida my whole life. So If I have lived in this state, my entire life, and had never heard about this, how many other battlefields have a similar story. While there are many battlefields around the world. I am talking about Civil War battlefields. Olustee was one of the first major battles African Americans fought in, yet that has gone unrecognized.

When I was working on my AA, I took an American history class to fulfill my requirements. Now my professor was a lawyer who enjoyed teaching. Now, this class had deviated from what I had previously learned. Since this week in our team meeting we discussed reconstruction, it brought me back to a paper he had us write. He asked, “Did Reconstruction fail or succeed?”. It was a failure. One of my biggest reasons I wrote about was how they allowed how many Confederate leaders to once again have power. Which fixed little and enabled them to continue to oppress African Americans. The war freed African Americans, they were treated horribly and oppressed in the aftermath. Afterwards, many wanted to forget the civil war, and the fallen of Olustee weren’t left out.