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Civil War History 48.2 (2002) 173-175



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Book Review

Hope and Glory:
Essays on the Legacy of the


Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Eds. Martin H. Blatt, Thomas J. Brown, and Donald Yacovone. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Pp. 336. $34.95.)

Thanks largely to the 1989 film Glory, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry epitomizes the African American military experience during the Civil War. Throughout the brief but eventful existence of the regiment, the twin specters of fame and failure attended its every move. As the fine essays in Hope and Glory demonstrate, that notoriety itself has a history, shaped as much by events after Appomattox as before.

The unit's ill-starred assault on Battery Wagner in June 1864 produced a martyr in Col. Robert Gould Shaw. Commemorating his sacrifice and that of his fallen comrades proved challenging, but on Memorial Day 1897 officials in Boston unveiled a monument by the noted sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens that achieved the long-sought objective. The memorial depicted Shaw on horseback against a backdrop of enlisted men marching in formation. Over the course of the twentieth century, the luster faded from both the monument and its subjects. This volume derives [End Page 173] from the centennial rededication ceremony; General Colin L. Powell's speech on the occasion provides the forward.

The first of the book's three sections surveys the soldiers' world. Informative essays by James Oliver Horton, Edwin S. Redkey, and Donald Yacovone examine, respectively, the political background of the soldiers' struggle for "manhood rights" (15), the demographics of the enlisted men who served, and the grueling but ultimately successful campaign for equal pay. Joan Waugh's careful treatment of Robert Gould Shaw's relationship with his family, particularly his mother Sarah, provides a fresh perspective on his initial misgivings about commanding the regiment and her role in memorializing Shaw.

The second section considers late-nineteenth-century commemorative efforts. David W. Blight offers a lyrical meditation on what Americans remembered and forgot about slave emancipation during the post-Civil War years. Marilyn Richardson discusses two African American artists, painter Edward Mitchell Bannister and sculptor Edmonia Lewis, whose work honored Shaw and the regiment's other heroes. While crediting Saint-Gaudens for his lifelike rendition of Shaw, Richardson criticizes the artist for having failed to use the black veterans or their likenesses as models for the enlisted men. In contrast, Kirk Savage views Saint-Gaudens's representation of the physical and facial diversity of the men as both a fascinating solution to complex compositional challenges and a bold counter-statement to prevailing racial stereotypes of the 1890s. Kathryn Greenthal carefully traces Saint-Gaudens's changing artistic sense of the project as it gestated in his mind and his studio over the years. James Smethurst examines the impact of the 54th regiment on the work of late-nineteenth-century poets. Thomas J. Brown's superb essay sketches three waves of monument building in post-Civil War Boston, noting how the Shaw Memorial synthesized the transcendental, the antislavery, and the militaristic, even as William James's dedication speech aimed to reaffirm the values of New England's English founders.

The third part of the book treats artistic representation of the 54th regiment in music, poetry, film, and historical reenactment during the twentieth century. Denise Von Glahn analyzes Charles Ives's musical composition on the memorial through the lens of a companion poem that he wrote. Using John Berryman's 1942 poem as a foil, Helen Vendler praises Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" (1960) as a work whose evocative images offered a "resurrection rite" for Shaw and the memorial (207). In the two essays on Glory, Martin H. Blatt compares the aims of its creators with the particulars of the unit's history and the film's effects on the general public, and Thomas Cripps situates it within twentieth-century film history. The concluding essay by Cathy Stanton and Stephen Belyea describes the culture of Civil...

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