Incredibly, super-belated, end-of-the-line field trip post
December 10th, 2009 -- Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »So, in the waning minutes of this semester, I realized that I had not yet written about our first field trip.
Since I did my final project on a revolutionary, Jose Marti, the memory of standing behind the wall on Sunken Road that the Confederate soldiers used has been on my mind a lot. Just imagining thousands of young soldiers lying dead was a very powerful image and really brought Whitman’s post-battle descriptions home to me. And it would not have been those whom we consider “the good guys” lying on the ground in front of Sunken Road. It was a deathtrap for Union soldiers. For me, that contributed to an already very powerful image that can easily be applied to a revolution and, in light of my recent research and writing, made the weight of Jose Marti’s ideas apparent.
During his life, Marti was calling his fellow countrymen to revolt against Spanish rule over Cuba. Even though Spain was weak compared to the other major European powers at that time, they far outstripped the military strength of the Cuban forces. When he said that he wanted his people to fight with him, Marti knew that he was potentially putting them in the same situation as the Union soldiers were in at Fredericksburg. They were the people who we consider the ‘good guys.’ They were fighting against colonial tyranny. It just casts war in a whole new light to go to a battlefield.