Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment

Robert Gould Shaw, colonel of the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry, was born in Boston on 10 October 1837 and was killed while leading the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on 18 July 1863. The regiment’s white officers cast in their lot with men of a despised race, unproved in war, and risked death if taken prisoner as inciters of a servile insurrection, in addition to the common perils of camp, march, and battle. Its black rank and file volunteered when disaster clouded the Union cause, served without pay for eighteen months until granted the pay of white troops, faced threatened enslavement if captured, and were brave in action, patient under heavy and dangerous labors, and cheerful amid hardships and privations. Together they gave the nation and the world proof that Americans of African descent possessed the pride, courage, and devotion of the patriot soldier. One hundred and eighty thousand such Americans enlisted under the Union flag from 1863 to 1865. The memory of Shaw, the other officers killed in battle, and the sixty-two soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment who died during the assault on Fort Wagner is honored in verses by James Russell Lowell, Governor Andrew, Mrs. Robert C. Waterston, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States