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Congressional Medal of Honor
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the part he played in
African Americans receiving the Medal of Honor
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, May 1863, photograph, Boston Athenaeum
Robert Gould Shaw was a young Bostonian with impeccable family connections, strongly abolitionist parents, and battle experience. Born 10 October 1837, he was the only son of Francis Gould and Sarah Sturgis Shaw. Socially conscious and deeply devoted to intellectual and spiritual pursuits, the Shaws counted among their friends and associates such thinkers, writers, and reformers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
From 1856 until March 1859, Shaw attended Harvard University, but he withdrew before receiving his degree, entering his uncle's business in New York instead. After Lincoln's election and the secession of several southern states, Shaw joined the Seventh New York Regiment and marched with it to the defense of Washington in April 1861. The unit served only thirty days, but in the army Shaw at last found a vocation that commanded his enthusiasm and respect. In May he joined the Second Massachusetts Infantry as First Lieutenant.
During nearly two years of service in the Second, in which he rose to the rank of captain, Shaw was wounded at Antietam and saw some of his closest comrades fall in battle. But his resolve grew only firmer with each fight. In February 1863, Francis Shaw personally delivered Governor John Andrew's offer of command of the new Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment to his son Robert, then at Stafford Court House, Virginia. Not certain he was "equal to the responsibility of such a position," and no doubt reluctant to leave the regiment to which he was devoted, the younger Shaw at first declined the offer. But his strong sense of duty prevailed. "Now," his mother wrote after he had accepted the colonelcy, "I feel ready to die, for I see you willing to give y[ou]r support to the cause of truth that is lying crushed and bleeding." Although Shaw supported the idea of blacks in the military , his connection with African Americans had been more theoretical than actual, and he seems, at first, to have been surprised by the impressive soldiering abilities of his enlistees. The men's accounts reveal that respect and understanding grew steadily between this very demanding commander and his troops during their weeks of training.
Shaw died at age 26 with his troops on the parapet of Fort Wagner , South Carolina, on July 18, 1863.
The Shaw Memorial commemorates the brave African American regiment that fought "themselves" to "strike the blow" against slavery in the Civil War. The 54th became famous for its audacious attack on the heavily protected Fort Wagner, which guarded the port of Charleston, South Carolina.
On May 28, 1863, the largest crowd in Boston's history assembled to send off the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment to fight in the Civil War. Many onlookers had purchased a souvenir of the day containing a quote from the English poet Lord Byron:
"Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow."
Marching past onlookers into the conflict that would end slavery, were 1,000 black soldiers on parade -- the fifth African American troop to be organized in the war between the states. Recruited from the Northeast, Midwest, and Canada by abolitionist leaders including Frederick Douglass, the regiment included Douglass' two sons Lewis and Charles, James Caldwell, the grandson of Sojourner Truth, and William H. Carney , the first African American to win the Medal of Honor.
Robert Gould Shaw, their commander, led the military procession on a black horse. In front of his mother's family home at 44 Beacon Street, the 25-year-old Shaw stopped and, in salute to his family including his bride of less than one month, raised his sword to his lips.
 Two months later, Shaw and one-third of his men would be dead, many of them on the earth rampart of Fort Wagner, one of the forts protecting Charleston, South Carolina, the bastion of Confederate secession. But even in defeat the brave 54th legitimized the idea of blacks in the military and, according to President Lincoln, was a turning point in the war.
Colonel Shaw and his regiment were remembered almost thirty-five years later in a monument of enormous emotional power and artistry, unveiled on the Boston Common on Memorial Day, 1897. Its sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, had taken more than a dozen years to create it. His work started off with the idea of a single equestrian statue of the young Colonel Shaw, following a long tradition in military statuary. Soon, however, it became a procession of black soldiers and their white leader, moving together toward the goal of emancipation.
Over the last century, the large bronze relief sculpture dedicated to Shaw and his regiment, as well as the plaster from which it was cast, have drawn international attention. The bronze stands on the Boston Common across from the State House, the plaster -- until recently -- at the sculptor's home in Cornish, New Hampshire.
In honor of the memorial's dedication a century ago, the full-scale plaster from Cornish has been restored and placed on display at the National Gallery of Art (right image) through a joint effort by the National Gallery and the National Park Service, which oversees the sculptor's home as a national historic site. A duplicate bronze (left image) was cast from the original plaster and is displayed at Cornish.
Related Resources http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html This Library of Congress site includes digitized Civil War photographs and is part of the library's American Memory series of digitized images on the Internet. http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/american_originals/54thmass.html The National Archives holds the records of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment. The American Originals section of the Web site includes information about the original documents of the Regiment.
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