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F O R E W O R D In the fall of 1856, two great American educations glanced across one another. Robert Gould Shaw was a freshman at Harvard, Henry Brooks Adams a junior. As there were only 382, students at the college, the two must have met, although there isno record that either made much of an impression on the other. The upperclassman, traveling far, went on to record the better part of his eighty-year struggle with knowing himself and his world in one of the classicsof our literature, TheEducation of Henry Adams.The freshman, who only remained in college for two-and-a-half years—but long enough to read Thucydides on war—was dead and thrown in a trench dug in Carolina sand when he was twenty-six. Shaw's was an education for a short life. Henry Adams's education has instructed generations of his countrymen and women in our twentieth century. It contains a famous apostrophe on the evils of slavery; Adams learned that you could reach the seat of the nation's greatness, George Washington's Mt. Vernon, only over the dusty rutted roads of slavery. But America's slavery was but one of the world's failings he so perceptively recorded in the vast breadth of the Education. Adams told his fellow European Americans nothing of the people who had been slaves. In 1856, although his parents were far more ardent antislavery people than were Adams's, Shaw could have told us even less about African Americans than his fellow student. When he died at Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, he had taught allAmericans a lesson of incalculable value,one that for long years languished, but has never been forgotten. Like any teacher who is honest, his command of his subject was less than perfect, as his letters show. But he was groping to know the black men who had enlisted in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts , a regiment of freeborn Northern Negroes organized by Governor John A. Andrew after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January i, 1863. Shaw, at his mother and father's urging, reluctantly accepted the regiment's colonelcy aware that he was ignorant of the men he would be leading. Much as did Shaw,white Americastill gropes to know; we can learn from his life and his death. The pupils, of course, taught the teacher. The men recruited into the regiment had to take only one look to know that their world-traveled young Harvard lord had a lot to learn. Black citizens who had long been eager for black men to be allowed to fight in the Civil Warparticipated actively in the organiXI zation of the regiment; late in January (before the training camp at Readville was open) Shaw wrote his mother: "At the meeting Richard Hallowell said it would please the coloured population to have some influential darkey on the committee and cousin John told him he would like to take in a nigger and turn him (H[allowell].) out, which naturally caused some merriment." This was the level of discourse in which Shaw began to learn, but, in the same letter , he added: "Some of the influential coloured men I havemet [perhaps the first he had met] please me very much. They are really so gentlemanlike and dignified." In March, as the recruits were training, Shaw reported, "My regiment is making pretty good headway. Wehavenearly150 men in camp, and they come in pretty fast. There are several among them, who have been well drilled, & who are acting sergeants.They drill their squads with a good deal of snap, and I think we shallhavesome good soldiers. Thirty four came up from New Bedford this afternoon, and marchedwith a drum &fifecreating the greatest enthusiasm among the rest. We have them examined," he continued, "sworn in, washed & uniformed assoon asthey arrive—and when they get into their buttons they feel about as good as a man can." He was amused—and fascinated —by the black sergeants; as they "explain the drill to the men . . . they use words long enough for a Doctor of Divinity." Later that month, recalling conditions he had observed during his earlier service with the Army of the Potomac, he noted that the "company from New Bedford are a very fine body of men, and out of forty, only two cannot read and write. Their barracks are in better order, and more cleanly, than the quarters of any volunteer regiment I have seen in...

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