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Preface
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
P R E F A C E Robert Gould Shaw was merely a competent officer, but he was not an ordinary soldier. Coming from great wealth and advantage, Shaw stood among the high profile regiments of the war: Seventh New York National Guard, Second Massachusetts Infantry, and Fifty-fourth Massachusetts (Colored ) Infantry. The Seventh distinguished itself by being the first regiment to arrive in Washington after Lincoln's call for troops. The Second was Boston 's own and many Brahmin sons officered its men. The Fifty-fourth, the vanguard unit that became the most watched regiment of the war, filled its ranks with the cream of the Northern black population. Shaw joined to fight for the North, to do his duty, and to prove his courage and manhood. In that, he was a very average soldier. His letters home reveal hisself-reflection on the meaning of the war and the constant widening of the gap between his expectations and the actualities of the conflict. Shaw's letters convey the change wrought by battlefield casualties, camp life, commitment, and homesickness upon the sensibilities of youth. His soldiering experience was as common as it was distinctive. He joined to win a quick war, but committed to fight to the end. He "saw the elephant" at Cedar Mountain, Antietam, and Fort Wagner, made wearying marches, and spent days in tedious boredom awaiting orders to the front, orders to anywhere. Like others, he wanted wounds—and got them. The adrenaline of life and death on the field of battle brought Shaw closer to his comrades in a male world than he had ever been to his classmates at Harvard or to his boyhood companions. This universe of maleness helped him to pull at the strings of his female-dominated family, and helped him mature even though he had not been able to break free of his mother's dominance by the time of his death. In that sense, Shaw never got past his mother; the monument on Boston Common is much more representative of her ambition than of his. Shaw's letters enwrap his background in the antislavery community and convey his wrenching struggle within and without to make sense of a war among brothers. Shaw's upper-classeducation and influentialfamily inform his letters, written in what may be the most eloquent prose any soldier wrote home during anywar. Military and social historians and readerswill learnfrom Shaw's descriptive insights into camp conditions and battle manuevers. His letters are open and XV trustworthy. After his father published excerpts from his August 12., 18621, letter home in the aftermath of the battle of Cedar Mountain, Shaw warned, "I can't write what I want to, if my letters are to be put in the papers" (October 5, i86z, collected herein). Shaw's family kept subsequent correspondence private until after his death. In return, they receivedhonest accounts of hisexperiences and sincere expressionsof his thoughts. His letters are a celebration of life in an environment of death. The pathway of Shaw's experience in the war is a microcosm of the conflict . Within a week of Fort Sumter he marched into Washington and swore before Lincoln that he would fight for the Union. Three months later, after training at Brook Farm and upon singing "John Brown's Body" as he strode into Harper's Ferry, Shaw began to reflect that the war was about more than nationhood. After his friends and fellows began to die, Shaw grew into a competent officer and into a man who hoped that the higher goal of freedom could be achieved by a Northern victory. Cedar Mountain brought the destructivewar to Shawin the form of Stonewall Jackson's assault and victory. Positioned in a wheatfield, Shaw's Second Infantry lost sixteen of its twenty-three officers killed or wounded. Before Shaw came fully to grips with the suffering that resulted from this Virginia battle, he fought through a bloodier slaughter in a Maryland cornfield along meandering Antietam creek.With more officers dead and the regiment at half strength, Shawknew firsthand the costs ofwar. The preliminary, then the actual, Emancipation Proclamation replaced Union with Freedom, and thereby lifted the Civil War to a moral plane that makes it worth studying and teaching. Black men enlisted as soldiers to end slavery and to prove themselves capable of citizenship.When Shaw accepted the colonelcy of the North's first black regiment and led it past the ditches and abattis up onto the parapets of Fort...