Hello, I am Dr. David Jamison
I am an Activist and Public Educator
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The Existential Duality of
the Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park
Entrance Sign
The Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park in Olustee, Florida, honors a February 20, 1864 battle between Union and Confederate forces in which Confederate forces turned the Union back and kept them from taking Tallahassee. Jacksonville had already been taken by the Union, but this victory symbolized the end of the Union advance; the point at which the Confederate troops finally Held Their Ground. At least, that is what it meant to those members of Jacksonville’s United Daughters of the Confederacy who, in 1897, began a movement to erect a monument to mark the site of the battle.
The Olustee Battlefield Monument was designed to resemble a fortified tower, like prominent monuments in Gettysburg at the time. Publicity around the Olustee monument, dedicated in 1912, was even used to convince the United Confederate Veterans to hold their annual reunion in Jacksonville in 1914. This convention, billed as “The Capture of Jacksonville 1912,” was part of a larger effort to counter the rhetoric of New Negro leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Since 1895, leaders like this had been claiming that the black community should be self-sufficient. And with that came a new sense of pride in black culture and its production. And so too did Confederate events and monuments show white Southerners that they had a cultural heritage to be celebrated as well . . . despite the propaganda from the Negroes. In this movement, when most Confederate monuments in America were built, Lost Cause apologists demanded that their veteran grandfathers and uncles received the same kind of respect that Union vets did, so they created an infrastructure of memorialization to those men who, alas, lost. And so memorials like the Olustee Battlefield State Monument were made, parks like the Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park were established, and children were taught that the Confederacy was . . . not that bad.
But sometimes the best intents of regional memorialization come face to face with the old tattered concepts of history. And I literally mean to face-to-face. Because this essay is not about the monument the park was built to enshrine. It is instead about the entrance sign to the park itself. The entrance sign to the Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park is more a monument to American history than the intended battlefield monument ever could be.
Above is a picture of the Entrance Sign to the park, one view coming from the Southwest, and one view coming from the Northeast. Check out its sleek depiction of an action scene. And check out the clever way the artist has created the Union army on one side and the Confederate army on the other side, so that depending which way you are coming from that is the side that you are seeing.
But therein lies the enigma that lays bare the Existential Duality of the Olustee Battlefield State Historic Park Entrance Sign.
I am not kidding. Check this out: Since the Union army consisted of both black and white troops, the Entrance Sign Artist put one black soldier and one white soldier on the Union side. Genius. And to stay true to history, the Artist put two white solders on the Confederate side.
And therein lies the duality.
Instead of having two sides face off in a diametrically opposed sculpture, the Artist instead has depicted them forever locked in an unwinnable lateral battle, forever unjoined, forever joined.
It is a masterful piece of existential rumination. Because the truth of the matter is that, at the heart of it, no matter what side they are facing, most soldiers are mostly only ever fighting for their brothers on the battlefield, not for any particular political “side.” And so portraying the Union Army and Confederate Army as two sides of the same face, an American Janus Bellum, really speaks to how soldiers really see themselves – not as fighting each other, but rather as protecting their brothers. In the posture the artist has put them, both the Union and the Confederate soldiers are forever protecting their brothers bringing up the rear. It is touching and apt.
But there is a racial duality here that is even more poignant, even more humane. More brotherly even.
Tighten your focus from the four soldiers to just the two soldiers occupying the lead positions. One is black, and one is white.
And so the anterior white Confederate soldier is also forever locked as the mirrored obverse of the sole black soldier. I wonder what he would think about this. I wonder how he would feel about this equivalence. On this Entrance Sign, the Confederate Soldier is forever equated with a man who his superiors told him he was fighting to keep in slavery because he was inferior. Would the lead Confederate soldier object to being put on the same level as the black solider? If there were any Confederate soldiers who were white supremacists, they might object. It was similar to how during the American revolution, a few of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention compared how King George treated them to the status of being his slaves. Thomas Jefferson even called the colonists slaves to King George in the Declaration of Independence. When it came down to it, many of them were very offended to even be considered the same in any way as slaves. During the discussion on the 3/5 Compromise, some senators objected to slaves being counted as a whole person because it made them seem equivalent to white people.
But that was 1776. Would it have still been the case in 1864? Would this soldier have any problem with being put on an equal footing with the black soldier? So much so that they shared a profile? Or would his consciousness have been more in alignment with 2025? Is it possible that he would have seen himself like most Confederate soldiers saw themselves, as poor men with no connection to slavery, but who valued a job in the Confederate Army because it was a steady paycheck you could send home? Would he, like most soldiers, see the black soldiers as a soldier first and a black man second? Would he maybe even have recognized in his equivalence with the black man the fallacy of race? Would he have known and seen that the rhetoric about white superiority only works if one could distinguish black people as a discreet biological category? But since there is no such thing as a “black” gene, we cannot? Would he reason that since blacks and whites were 99.9% identical at the DNA level, that it was actually appropriate that he shared space with the black man because, after all, we are all just people? Would he have looked at this Entrance Sign with pride, supportive of this representation to usher people into this park of American history?
I like to think yes. I like to think that this Confederate soldier would have been proud of being forever locked in this battle dance of destiny with a black man. But this soldier of my imagination never really existed. Real history is far more messy.