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Dbert Gould Shaw A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY On the Boston Common, Robert Gould Shaw rides his horse in step with his regiment marching Southward forever with straight backs, forward eyes, and long strides. In Augustus Saint-Gaudens's greatest sculpture, Shaw,white, and his men, black—and allbronze—recall that eight and twentieth day of May in 1863 when one thousand men strode with swaying steps and swingingflagsthrough the streetsof Boston and into glory. The drummer boys tapped out the beat and the men's lusty voices sang out their vow that while John Brown's body might be a-mouldering in the grave, they would carry forward his vision of black men redeeming themselves from 250 years of slavery. In their right hands and on their right shoulders gleamed a thousand Enfield rifles that had been supplied them from an armory they had not had to break open to obtain.1 The largest crowd in the city's history assembled on Essex and Beacon streets, leaned from balconies, waved from windows, ran out to touch or praise, and surrounded the reviewing stands around the State House and in the Common to cheer and gape at the pride of abolitionist Boston. Hundreds of wives and sweethearts smiled and fretted over their men. Frederick Douglass , a formidable man in stature, stood even taller and bigger as he watched his eldest son, Lewis, march past. Douglass surely recalled his own words as he saw each black soldier with "an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder" and wassure that this would earn them "the right to citizenship in the United States." William Lloyd Garrison wept openly ashe rested against a bust of John Brown at WendellPhillips's home overlooking the parade route. Pacifist John Greenleaf Whittier, who attended the paradeof no other unit for fear that doing so would encourage and give "a new impulse to war," could not keep away from the line of march. RunawayGeorgia slave Thomas Sims, who had been dragged back to slavery in 1851 under the authorityof the Fugitive Slave Act, to be sold downriver to Mississippi, and finally freed in 1863 to return to Boston, trembled with satisfaction as he watched armed black I N T R O D U C T I O N R 1 men tread over the same ground where he had been chained and returned to bondage. The family of Colonel Shaw,commander of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, watched and hugged each other as their son, brother, and husband saluted them by briefly stopping his horse and raising his sword to his lips in front of the house at 44 Beacon Street. When this day passed, they would see his youthful figure again only when the statue found its place on the Common in 1897? Sixty years before the unveiling, Shaw was born into one of the nation's richest families. He had all the advantages of the fortunate—the easy life, famous friends,the best schools, finest clothes, widest travels,ripest food, and richest drink the world could offer. Yet, he died with sand in his mouth and sword in hand face down among the sons of the unfortunate and despised. Shaw never attained the scholarly insight of his father, the reform conviction of his mother and sisters, or the business acumen of his grandfathers and uncles. He did not join the army in 1861 to fight for the Union or to free the slaves, but simply to do his duty. He did want to avenge the name of his country and to revengewhat he considered years of bullying by Southern slaveholders. He did not particularly careifthe South wasforced back into the Union; he had merelygrown tired of the atmosphere of sectional tension that pervaded his daily life. Shaw craved a nation freed from this disorderly opprobrium so that he could get on with the pleasuresof living. Eight hundred days of war barely changed his outlook before it spilt his lifeblood into the sand of South Carolina. Friends and family, poets and philosophers, Northerners and Southerners, and blacks and whites eventually would praise him and make him a martyr to a cause he neither fully understood nor dedicated himself to. Born in Boston on October 10, 1837, Shaw attended the kindergarten of "Miss Mary Peabody." He played with older sister Anna and younger sisters Susanna, Josephine, and Ellen in the homes of his many uncles and aunts. His father, Francis George Shaw, was the eldest of eleven...

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