Robert Gould Shaw

Robert Gould Shaw (born October 10, 1837, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died July 18, 1863, Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina) was a Union army officer who commanded a prominent regiment of African American troops during the American Civil War.

Shaw was born into an immensely wealthy Boston family. His merchant father retired from business to take up translating literature and moved his family to West Roxbury, Massachusetts, near the utopian community Brook Farm, with whose famous residents the Shaws interacted. Both Shaw’s father and mother were early ardent abolitionists (Shaw’s playmates included William Lloyd Garrison’s children). Shaw was educated in private schools in New York and Switzerland and then by tutors in Italy and Hannover, Germany. Following a period of hedonistic self-indulgence, he returned to the United States. After nearly three years of failing to distinguish himself as a student at Harvard University, Shaw worked at an uncle’s mercantile firm in New York City.

In 1861 Shaw enlisted as a private in a New York regiment and later was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 2nd Regiment of the Massachusetts infantry. He saw action in the Battles of Cedar Creek and Antietam and was wounded twice. Although having previously rebelled against authority, Shaw seemed to find himself in the army, rising to the rank of captain. When Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew sought to form one of the Union army’s first African American regiments from a Northern state (other units had been formed of emancipated slaves in the South), he offered the command of that regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, to Shaw. Initially Shaw turned down the offer (which had been personally delivered by his father), partly because of loyalty to the 2nd Regiment. Moreover, although he had wrestled intellectually with the issue of slavery and opposed the Southern slave system, Shaw never shared his parents’ fervent moral indignation with slavery. Ultimately, however, Shaw changed his mind and accepted the command, perhaps to please his mother.

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Promoted to colonel, Shaw oversaw the recruitment and training of the 54th, then led it into combat. After the 54th had been commanded to torch a defenseless Georgia port town, an action to which Shaw had objected, the regiment distinguished itself in responding to a Confederate surprise attack at James Island, South Carolina, on July 16, 1863. The regiment’s shining hour came on the evening of July 18, when it heroically assaulted Fort Wagner, an earthwork that defended Charleston. Approaching along the ocean, the 54th assailed the fort’s embankment and after fierce fighting temporarily held it before being forced to retreat. Nearly half of the regiment’s troops were casualties—including Shaw, who was killed—but the attack had proved to the world the mettle of black soldiers.

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The Confederates buried Shaw in a mass grave with his black troops, believing they were dishonouring him, but Shaw’s father discouraged later efforts to recover his son’s body, saying that the most appropriate burial place for a soldier was “on the field where he has fallen.” A monument to the 54th and Shaw, by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was erected on the Boston Common. The story of the 54th Massachusetts and Shaw is recounted in the motion picture Glory (1989).