The American Jesuits: A History

6 A Nation and Faith Divided

6 A Nation and Faith Divided “Glory” In October 1850, 13-year-old Robert Gould Shaw, son of a wealthy Boston antislavery family, sat at his desk day after day in the study hall at Fordham, as the former St. John’s College was already called, and wrote angry, whining letters home with one dominant theme. He hated the school and wanted to come home. The other boys, he complained , are lazy louts and troublemakers. They disrupt study hall with foot stomping and yelling just to intimidate the young Jesuit prefect who does not know how to intimidate bad boys. The other boys broke his violin, and he was attacked by a neighborhood dog. He and his 114 fellow students, which include some well-behaved seminarians and many from the Deep South and Latin America, live under a French and Victorian discipline, which includes whippings, intended to build character but builds resentment as well. Robert was not even Catholic. He was stuck in the Bronx because his uncle, Coolidge Shaw, who joined the Jesuits after converting to Catholicism, convinced his parents to send him here. In January his parents gave in and sent him to a boarding school in Switzerland, where he read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and grew to the height of five feet, five inches. Unlike his parents, he was neither an abolitionist nor religious; and he never forgave the Jesuits, who, he was convinced, never forgave him for not converting to Catholicism like his uncle. He went to Harvard, from which he sent home letters that read much like his letters from Fordham. “I hate Cambridge,” he moaned. As the Civil War loomed, he was indifferent to the fate of slaves. Let the Union split; that way slavery would be a Southern, not a national, disgrace. But when Fort Sumter fell, Robert Shaw joined the renowned Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard. In his letters home he complained about the Irish troops who “seem sometimes utterly 77 unable to learn or understand anything.” But, by February 1863, the governor of Massachusetts offered young Robert a commission as colonel and commander of the new Massachusetts 54th Colored Regiment of volunteers. He turned it down, then changed his mind. He wanted to prove that Negroes could be good soldiers. Shaw knew little about black people and referred to them as niggers and darkies and was surprised to find some of them “gentlemanlike.” By March, however , he was bragging about them to his mother. Later that year, in an event portrayed in the film Glory, Shaw and his regiment were ordered to lead the assault on Fort Wagner, which defended the entrance to Charleston Harbor. As expected, the first wave of the assault was wiped out. Half the regiment was killed, and Shaw fell with a bullet in his heart. When the Union Army asked for his body, a Confederate officer replied, “We buried him with his niggers.” “They Know How to Die” Most likely, Shaw never knew that among the Jesuits who collectively made his life miserable two had, as chaplains, followed the Union troops into battle. Michael Nash, at 20, had been one of the vanguard of six Jesuits to arrive at Fordham on August 9, 1846. He had come to America from Ireland with his father in 1825 and remained here, the ward of Jesuits in Kentucky, whom he ultimately joined when his father returned to Ireland. At Fordham they worked him to the point of exhaustion, until he was diagnosed as suffering from consumption and was sent to France in 1856 to die. Rather than die, he saw a better doctor, got ordained, returned to America, and in 1861 was ordered by superiors—though he still felt sick—to join the Union Army as chaplain. Assigned to the Sixth Regiment of Infantry, the “Zouaves,” who wore colorful baggy-pants uniforms modeled on those of African tribesmen, he sailed in mid-June with sometimes rebellious troops, sons of Catholic families who knew nothing about their religion, to Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa, an island off rebel-held Pensacola in the Gulf of Mexico. For summer months they endured the blazing sun, torrential rains, mosquitoes, alligators, and poisonous snakes. Jesuits had ac78 A Nation and Faith Divided companied the troops during the Mexican War and, given no training, saw themselves as missionaries, determined to risk their lives to administer the basic sacraments—baptism...