Tweet
The reluctant abolitionist
Monday, February 26, 2007
By BOB RAIMONTO
ADVANCE STAFF WRITER
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Robert Gould Shaw had led a charmed life -- on and off the battlefield.
He was the son of wealthy parents from Staten Island's North Shore. He was educated in Europe and at Harvard. And after joining the Union Army at the outset of the Civil War, he didn't see combat for a year.
At first he enlisted in the 7th New York National Guard as a private. That exclusive, high-society unit was credited with being the first regiment to march into Washington after President Abraham Lincoln's call for troops in the wake of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, S.C., in April 1861.
When his enlistment in the 7th lapsed, Shaw applied for a commission in the 2nd Massachusetts and was made a lieutenant, thereby vaulting a couple of ranks to officer status.
In May 1862, at Front Royal, Va., Shaw's regiment did get into a street-by-street brawl with Confederate forces. He received a minie ball in the chest. It pierced his coat, went through his vest -- and hit his gold watch. The valuable timepiece was shattered. But all Shaw got was a bruise.
"The watch saved his life," Shaw's fellow officer and friend, Charles Morse, marveled in a letter home.
BLOODIEST DAY OF WAR
At Antietam in September of the same year, the 2nd Massachusetts and the rest of the Army of the Potomac had a tremendous fight on Maryland soil with Robert E. Lee's invading Army of Northern Virginia. In reputedly the bloodiest day of the war, with about 12,500 northerners and almost 11,000 southerners killed or wounded, Shaw escaped again with only a bruise. A spent ball struck him in the neck and bounced away.
"It did not break the skin," he informed his parents and four sisters after sleeping soundly that night of Sept. 17 amid 20 corpses bedecked in blue and gray.
But Shaw's considerable luck would run its course on July 18, 1863, when the 54th Massachusetts, the first African-American regiment organized in the North, mounted a suicidal, frontal assault against Fort Wagner on Morris Island. The fort was located near Fort Sumter, which itself was in Charleston Harbor. The 25-year-old Shaw was now a colonel, he was commanding this unit from the front, and he was killed.
Shaw's bold leadership and his men's steely resolve under highly concentrated cannon and musket fire were graphically depicted in the 1989 movie "Glory," starring Matthew Broderick as Shaw. The performance of both commander and soldiers also has been chronicled by participants on the opposing sides.
"About sundown," recounted Sgt. George Stephens of the 54th, "we were ordered to advance at the double-quick, cheering as if on some mirthful errand. The Rebs waited until we reached within 50 yards of the work, when jets of flame darted from every corner and embrasure, and even Fort Sumter poured solid shot and shell on our heads."
Lt. Col. Edward Hallowell, Shaw's second in command, caught sight of his colonel amid the ear-splitting chaos and carnage.
"I saw him, again, just as he sprang into the ditch," Hallowell said. "His broken and shattered regiment was following him."
Shaw now scaled the earthwork, standing on the parapet, waving his sword and yelling, "Come on, follow me!"
Almost instantly, he received a fatal chest wound, his body dropping into the fortification. At this time, the color-bearer with Shaw also fell. William Carney, a Norfolk, Va., native and New Bedford, Mass., resident, who joined the 54th as a private, seized the flag and planted it defiantly on the parapet. (For his bravery, he became the first black to earn the Medal of Honor, the country's highest military honor.)
The regiment's men pushed on. Confederates shot them from the front. And from a different direction came another withering attack -- friendly fire.
Stephens said the Union force found the inside of Fort Wagner lined with Rebel soldiers and fought them, hand-to-hand, for an hour before being re-enforced.
"And when the regiment reached us, the 3rd New Hampshire, which was presumed to be our reinforcements, they, to a man, emptied their rifles into us," Stephens said. "Thus, we lost as many men by the bullets of our presumed friends as by those of our known enemies."
The 54th, finally, had had enough. With Shaw dead and Hallowell now wounded, Capt. Luis Emilio ordered the battered remnants of the command to fall back to the opposite end of Morris Island. The other Federal units were forced to withdraw as well. The Confederates, triumphant, remained entrenched in Battery Wagner.
The 54th, numbering about 600 at the beginning of the engagement, lost almost 50 percent of its strength. A total of 272 were listed as killed, captured and missing. Additional losses suffered by the white regiments who participated in the attack escalated casualties to 1,515. The Rebels, by contrast, lost only 154 men. They had sheltered in the fort's bombproof during the pre-assault shelling by Union naval and land batteries, and then used the dense earthwork to their advantage as protection in the fight itself.
The 54th's performance won respect on both sides. Indeed, a Confederate lieutenant made this assessment in scanning the fort's grounds and the decapitated and dismembered bodies that littered them:
"One pile of Negroes numbered 30. Numbers of both white and black were killed on top of our breastworks as well as inside. The Negroes fought gallantly and were headed by as brave a colonel who ever lived. He mounted the breastworks waving his sword, and at the head of his regiment, and he and a Negro orderly sergeant fell dead over the inner crest of the works. The Negroes were as fine-looking a set of men as I ever saw -- large, strong, muscular fellows."
Shaw himself did not fit that description. He was only 5-foot-5, self-conscious in life about his height. Now, in death, he seemed even smaller.
"In the morning following the battle, his body was carried through our lines," said another Rebel officer, "and I noticed he was stripped of all his clothing save under-vest and drawers."
Shaw's body was cast in a common grave with his men, a display of contempt by his enemies for a white officer who led blacks in battle.
But in the North, during and after the Civil War, Shaw was viewed differently. So was the treatment given his remains.
"It can only be said that what was intended for a disgrace will in the light of history be regarded as a monumental honor," declared Harper's Weekly in its history of the war, published in New York in 1868.
That opinion would be shared in the Staten Island home of Francis George and Sarah Shaw. They decided their son's corpse would remain at Morris Island, whose northern portion, including Fort Wagner, would over the years be washed over by the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, the Shaws placed a memorial stone to the colonel over what would become a family plot in Moravian Cemetery, New Dorp. The words on the stone: "Buried with his men."
"The poor benighted wretches thought they were heaping indignities upon his dead body, but the act recoils upon them," the press was told by the elder Shaw, who, with his wife, his daughters Anna and Ellen, his son-in-law George Curtis and several grandchildren, have their own gravestones around the younger Shaw's cenotaph.
"They buried him with his brave, devoted followers who fell dead with him and around him. ... We can think of no holier place than that in which he is ... nor wish him better company. What a bodyguard he has!"
Shaw, as author Russell Duncan has pointed out, did not at first join the army to save the Union or end slavery, the North's two primary goals in the Civil War. Instead, he wanted to do his duty and amass martial bragging rights in an era when such things were especially prized.
Nonetheless, Shaw has been hailed as a martyr to the causes of preserving the United States and destroying an accursed institution. For this transformation into crusader, he was primarily responsible and widely hailed, both in prose and verse. But to a significant degree, Shaw's men also effected the remarkable change in him, and they are largely nameless and forgotten.
"What Shaw had was courage and loyalty," Duncan says. "He was responsible enough to give black troops a fair trial. He did his duty to his men, his mother and himself."
The 54th's performance at Fort Wagner vindicated the opinions of the abolitionists. "It proved," said the late borough historian, Richard Dickenson, "that blacks would fight." And then, after the Fort Wagner action, even more African-Americans joined the service, helping make it possible for the Union to overcome a resilient Confederacy.
The 54th was there when Fort Wagner finally fell to siege on Sept. 6, 1863, and, after Fort Sumter was taken in February 1865, elements of the regiment marched into captured Charleston on the 27th of that month to the joy of the city's black inhabitants. The regiment would remain in the coastal areas of the South, fighting in a number of battles before the war ended in April 1865 and being mustered out of service in August of that year.
ON BOSTON COMMON
Shaw himself received additional recognition decades later, when a portion of Davis Avenue, Livingston, was renamed in his honor. But a greater tribute to the colonel, as well as his men, is not to be located here. It is instead on Boston Common, opposite the State House.
In a bronze monument created by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Shaw rides a horse as his troops stride smartly and determinedly alongside. On May 31, 1897, Memorial Day, this artistic and historic triumph was dedicated, and survivors of the 54th marched past. Shaw's mother, Sarah, was overcome. She said to Saint-Gaudens: "You have immortalized my native city; you have immortalized my dear son; you have immortalized yourself."
William James, philosopher and psychologist and brother of novelist Henry James, made his own observation at the ceremony:
"There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback among them, in his very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune."
And of glory. A glory shared by -- and ensured by -- his men.
-- End of a two-part series
Bob Raimonto is a copy editor for the Advance. He can be reached at raimonto@siadvcance.com.
Monday, February 26, 2007
By BOB RAIMONTO
ADVANCE STAFF WRITER
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Robert Gould Shaw had led a charmed life -- on and off the battlefield.
He was the son of wealthy parents from Staten Island's North Shore. He was educated in Europe and at Harvard. And after joining the Union Army at the outset of the Civil War, he didn't see combat for a year.
At first he enlisted in the 7th New York National Guard as a private. That exclusive, high-society unit was credited with being the first regiment to march into Washington after President Abraham Lincoln's call for troops in the wake of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, S.C., in April 1861.
When his enlistment in the 7th lapsed, Shaw applied for a commission in the 2nd Massachusetts and was made a lieutenant, thereby vaulting a couple of ranks to officer status.
In May 1862, at Front Royal, Va., Shaw's regiment did get into a street-by-street brawl with Confederate forces. He received a minie ball in the chest. It pierced his coat, went through his vest -- and hit his gold watch. The valuable timepiece was shattered. But all Shaw got was a bruise.
"The watch saved his life," Shaw's fellow officer and friend, Charles Morse, marveled in a letter home.
BLOODIEST DAY OF WAR
At Antietam in September of the same year, the 2nd Massachusetts and the rest of the Army of the Potomac had a tremendous fight on Maryland soil with Robert E. Lee's invading Army of Northern Virginia. In reputedly the bloodiest day of the war, with about 12,500 northerners and almost 11,000 southerners killed or wounded, Shaw escaped again with only a bruise. A spent ball struck him in the neck and bounced away.
"It did not break the skin," he informed his parents and four sisters after sleeping soundly that night of Sept. 17 amid 20 corpses bedecked in blue and gray.
But Shaw's considerable luck would run its course on July 18, 1863, when the 54th Massachusetts, the first African-American regiment organized in the North, mounted a suicidal, frontal assault against Fort Wagner on Morris Island. The fort was located near Fort Sumter, which itself was in Charleston Harbor. The 25-year-old Shaw was now a colonel, he was commanding this unit from the front, and he was killed.
Shaw's bold leadership and his men's steely resolve under highly concentrated cannon and musket fire were graphically depicted in the 1989 movie "Glory," starring Matthew Broderick as Shaw. The performance of both commander and soldiers also has been chronicled by participants on the opposing sides.
"About sundown," recounted Sgt. George Stephens of the 54th, "we were ordered to advance at the double-quick, cheering as if on some mirthful errand. The Rebs waited until we reached within 50 yards of the work, when jets of flame darted from every corner and embrasure, and even Fort Sumter poured solid shot and shell on our heads."
Lt. Col. Edward Hallowell, Shaw's second in command, caught sight of his colonel amid the ear-splitting chaos and carnage.
"I saw him, again, just as he sprang into the ditch," Hallowell said. "His broken and shattered regiment was following him."
Shaw now scaled the earthwork, standing on the parapet, waving his sword and yelling, "Come on, follow me!"
Almost instantly, he received a fatal chest wound, his body dropping into the fortification. At this time, the color-bearer with Shaw also fell. William Carney, a Norfolk, Va., native and New Bedford, Mass., resident, who joined the 54th as a private, seized the flag and planted it defiantly on the parapet. (For his bravery, he became the first black to earn the Medal of Honor, the country's highest military honor.)
The regiment's men pushed on. Confederates shot them from the front. And from a different direction came another withering attack -- friendly fire.
Stephens said the Union force found the inside of Fort Wagner lined with Rebel soldiers and fought them, hand-to-hand, for an hour before being re-enforced.
"And when the regiment reached us, the 3rd New Hampshire, which was presumed to be our reinforcements, they, to a man, emptied their rifles into us," Stephens said. "Thus, we lost as many men by the bullets of our presumed friends as by those of our known enemies."
The 54th, finally, had had enough. With Shaw dead and Hallowell now wounded, Capt. Luis Emilio ordered the battered remnants of the command to fall back to the opposite end of Morris Island. The other Federal units were forced to withdraw as well. The Confederates, triumphant, remained entrenched in Battery Wagner.
The 54th, numbering about 600 at the beginning of the engagement, lost almost 50 percent of its strength. A total of 272 were listed as killed, captured and missing. Additional losses suffered by the white regiments who participated in the attack escalated casualties to 1,515. The Rebels, by contrast, lost only 154 men. They had sheltered in the fort's bombproof during the pre-assault shelling by Union naval and land batteries, and then used the dense earthwork to their advantage as protection in the fight itself.
The 54th's performance won respect on both sides. Indeed, a Confederate lieutenant made this assessment in scanning the fort's grounds and the decapitated and dismembered bodies that littered them:
"One pile of Negroes numbered 30. Numbers of both white and black were killed on top of our breastworks as well as inside. The Negroes fought gallantly and were headed by as brave a colonel who ever lived. He mounted the breastworks waving his sword, and at the head of his regiment, and he and a Negro orderly sergeant fell dead over the inner crest of the works. The Negroes were as fine-looking a set of men as I ever saw -- large, strong, muscular fellows."
Shaw himself did not fit that description. He was only 5-foot-5, self-conscious in life about his height. Now, in death, he seemed even smaller.
"In the morning following the battle, his body was carried through our lines," said another Rebel officer, "and I noticed he was stripped of all his clothing save under-vest and drawers."
Shaw's body was cast in a common grave with his men, a display of contempt by his enemies for a white officer who led blacks in battle.
But in the North, during and after the Civil War, Shaw was viewed differently. So was the treatment given his remains.
"It can only be said that what was intended for a disgrace will in the light of history be regarded as a monumental honor," declared Harper's Weekly in its history of the war, published in New York in 1868.
That opinion would be shared in the Staten Island home of Francis George and Sarah Shaw. They decided their son's corpse would remain at Morris Island, whose northern portion, including Fort Wagner, would over the years be washed over by the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, the Shaws placed a memorial stone to the colonel over what would become a family plot in Moravian Cemetery, New Dorp. The words on the stone: "Buried with his men."
"The poor benighted wretches thought they were heaping indignities upon his dead body, but the act recoils upon them," the press was told by the elder Shaw, who, with his wife, his daughters Anna and Ellen, his son-in-law George Curtis and several grandchildren, have their own gravestones around the younger Shaw's cenotaph.
"They buried him with his brave, devoted followers who fell dead with him and around him. ... We can think of no holier place than that in which he is ... nor wish him better company. What a bodyguard he has!"
Shaw, as author Russell Duncan has pointed out, did not at first join the army to save the Union or end slavery, the North's two primary goals in the Civil War. Instead, he wanted to do his duty and amass martial bragging rights in an era when such things were especially prized.
Nonetheless, Shaw has been hailed as a martyr to the causes of preserving the United States and destroying an accursed institution. For this transformation into crusader, he was primarily responsible and widely hailed, both in prose and verse. But to a significant degree, Shaw's men also effected the remarkable change in him, and they are largely nameless and forgotten.
"What Shaw had was courage and loyalty," Duncan says. "He was responsible enough to give black troops a fair trial. He did his duty to his men, his mother and himself."
The 54th's performance at Fort Wagner vindicated the opinions of the abolitionists. "It proved," said the late borough historian, Richard Dickenson, "that blacks would fight." And then, after the Fort Wagner action, even more African-Americans joined the service, helping make it possible for the Union to overcome a resilient Confederacy.
The 54th was there when Fort Wagner finally fell to siege on Sept. 6, 1863, and, after Fort Sumter was taken in February 1865, elements of the regiment marched into captured Charleston on the 27th of that month to the joy of the city's black inhabitants. The regiment would remain in the coastal areas of the South, fighting in a number of battles before the war ended in April 1865 and being mustered out of service in August of that year.
ON BOSTON COMMON
Shaw himself received additional recognition decades later, when a portion of Davis Avenue, Livingston, was renamed in his honor. But a greater tribute to the colonel, as well as his men, is not to be located here. It is instead on Boston Common, opposite the State House.
In a bronze monument created by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Shaw rides a horse as his troops stride smartly and determinedly alongside. On May 31, 1897, Memorial Day, this artistic and historic triumph was dedicated, and survivors of the 54th marched past. Shaw's mother, Sarah, was overcome. She said to Saint-Gaudens: "You have immortalized my native city; you have immortalized my dear son; you have immortalized yourself."
William James, philosopher and psychologist and brother of novelist Henry James, made his own observation at the ceremony:
"There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback among them, in his very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune."
And of glory. A glory shared by -- and ensured by -- his men.
-- End of a two-part series
Bob Raimonto is a copy editor for the Advance. He can be reached at raimonto@siadvcance.com.