May the Living Profit by the Example of the Dead

Greetings, this week the interns were tasked with reviewing the current literature surrounding the Lost Cause narrative and, more specifically, the Battle of Olustee.

The Lost Cause, named after Edward A. Pollards book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (1866), twists the narrative of the Confederacy to include States' Rights as the focus of the Civil War, rather than the preservation of slavery. Additionally, the Lost Cause has come to include chivalric imagery regarding Confederate soldiers and generals, which distorts and whitewashes their memory.

In modern times the Lost Cause appeared forcefully around the turn of the twentieth century. Founded in 1894, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) chartered themselves as a "Historical, Benevolent, Educational, Memorial and Patriotic" organization seeking to preserve the "shared" memory of the Civil War.

While this is appealing in writing, the UDC has acted contrary to its statements. Since its founding, the UDC has acted as the de facto women's chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, including publishing children's books with excerpts such as, “During the Reconstruction period, sturdy white men of the South, against all odds, maintained white supremacy and secured Caucasian civilization, when its very foundations were threatened within and without." - Laura Martin Rose, UDC Historian (1914).

Not only has this organization produced and defended numerous Confederate monuments (including memorials) but it has also funded monuments for the KKK, which has been designated as a terrorist organization by the US since the 1870s passage of the Enforcement Acts. These monuments, numbering over 700, have left tangible marks on the memory of the Civil War and spread untold harm throughout the Jim Crow policies of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

With all of this being said we have finally arrived at the present. No battlefield monuments to Union Soldiers and Regiments exist at Olustee today. Instead, the battlefield has three monuments honoring the rogue Confederacy on State-owned property. These monuments feature Confederate General Colquitt, Confederate General Finegan, and a memorial to the Confederate Soldiers and Regiments, which was paid for with State funds. All of these were erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. 

While battle reenactments have happened for the last 40 years, no official monument or memorial is in place to describe the conflict, the subsequent massacre of retreating Union troops (colored and white), and the depraved conditions in which they were left on the field or buried in a mass grave. Instead, we have markers honoring and acknowledging the CSA - an undeniable spit in the face of our Union troops. This is the impetus for our project as we seek the restitution of honor for the Union dead (including proper burial), a clarification on the history of the battlefield, and the diminution of the Lost Cause and its influence in our state parks.