From Soldier to Saint: Robert Gould Shaw and the Rhetoric of Racial Justice

FROM SOLDIER TO SAINT: ROBERT GOULD SHAW AND THE RHETORIC OF RACIAL JUSTICE Gary Scharnhorst ". . . how fondly his image will be retained in after days, as a type to inspire American genius. Sculptors, painters, and poets will delight to reproduce that beautiful vision of undying and heroic youth. . . . And when the history of these dark, tragic, but most honourable days comes to be written, there is nothing . . . that will fasten itself more closely on the popular memory than the storming of Fort Wagner by the Fifty-fourth, with their colonel falling on the rampart, sword in hand, cheering on those despised blacks to deeds of valor." —J. Lothrop Motley to Sarah Sturgis Shaw, 8 September 18631 ". . . everything softened and made poetic and unreal by distance, poor little Robert Shaw erected into a great symbol of deeper things than he ever realized himself." —William James to Henry James, Jr., 5 June 18972 On May 28, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteers under the command of Robert Gould Shaw embarked for South Carolina to join the battle against the rebellion. Six weeks later, the colonel and nearly half of his troops were dead, killed during a foolhardy assault on the Confederate stronghold at Fort Wagner. At first glance, the short happy life of Robert Shaw scarcely seems the stuff of legend. Eldest child of New England Brahmins, an indifferent 1 Memorial RGS, ed. Sarah Sturgis Shaw (Cambridge: University Press, 1864), 157-58; rpt. in "The Hero," Century, 54 (June 1897): 314. 2 The Selected Letters of William James, ed. Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy, 1961), 168. Civil War History, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4, © 1988 by the Kent State University Press THE RHETORIC OF RACIAL JUSTICE309 scholar at Harvard, Shaw lived with his parents and worked in the family business for two years before enlisting as a private in the Union army in early 1861. In one respect only does he command attention: the Massachusetts 54th was the first regiment of black soldiers recruited in the North. Unlike the remains of the other white officers killed at Fort Wagner, Shaw's corpse was desecrated—stripped of its uniform and interred without regard for rank or station in a common trench beneath the bodies of black soldiers. "We have buried him with his niggers," the commander of the fort reportedly remarked. More than any act of courage , this comment sealed Shaw's reputation as a martyr to the cause of abolition. By the close of the nineteenth century, he would be canonized a saint in the pantheon of American heroes. In retrospect, his fame seems less deserved than an accident of history. His modern reputation ought to be measured against this baseline: Robert Gould Shaw was not particularly enlightened on the issue ofrace. He was not an abolitionist. When invited to assume command of the 54th Volunteers, he at first refused. Later, accused of abusing his men, he claimed he had treated Irish soldiers even more harshly.3 (To his credit, Shaw campaigned for better pay for his men—that is, a military allowance equal to that of white soldiers—though his requests were ignored. The War Department finally granted his petition over a year after his death.)4 Shaw also doubted the combat-readiness of his regiment even after it was ordered to the front. He apparently shared the popular suspicion that black troops under fire were liable to break lines and run. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the leader of a so-called "contraband" black guerrilla unit, often described later his first meeting with Shaw in the field: [H]e said that while I had shown that negro troops were effective in bushfighting , ithad yet to be determined how they would fight in line of battle; and I expressing no doubt on this point, he suggested that it would always be possible to put another line of soldiers behind a black regiment, so as to present equal danger in either direction. I was amazed, for I never should have dreamed of being tempted to such a step. The young colonel "did not sufficiently consider that in this, as at all other points, they were simply men," Higginson elsewhere allowed.5 3...