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Blue-eyed Child of Fortune - Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Paperback, New edition)
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Blue-eyed Child of Fortune - Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Paperback, New edition)
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On the Boston Common stands one of the great Civil War memorials, a
magnificent bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It depicts
the black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry
marching alongside their young white commander, Colonel Robert
Gould Shaw. When the philosopher William James dedicated the
memorial in May 1897, he stirred the assembled crowd with these
words: "There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day
for man. There on horseback among them, in the very habit as he
lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune." In this book Shaw
speaks for himself with equal eloquence through nearly two hundred
letters he wrote to his family and friends during the Civil War.
The portrait that emerges is of a man more divided and
complex--though no less heroic--than the Shaw depicted in the
celebrated film Glory. The pampered son of wealthy Boston
abolitionists, Shaw was no abolitionist himself, but he was among
the first patriots to respond to Lincoln's call for troops after
the attack on Fort Sumter. After Cedar Mountain and Antietam, Shaw
knew the carnage of war firsthand. Describing nightfall on the
Antietam battlefield, he wrote, "the crickets chirped, and the
frogs croaked, just as if nothing unusual had happened all day
long, and presently the stars came out bright, and we lay down
among the dead, and slept soundly until daylight. There were twenty
dead bodies within a rod of me." When Federal war aims shifted from
an emphasis on restoring the Union to the higher goal of
emancipation for four million slaves, Shaw's mother pressured her
son into accepting the command of the North's vanguard black
regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. A paternalist who never
fully reconciled his own prejudices about black inferiority, Shaw
assumed the command with great reluctance. Yet, as he trained his
recruits in Readville, Massachusetts, during the early months of
1963, he came to respect their pluck and dedication. "There is not
the least doubt," he wrote his mother, "that we shall leave the
state, with as good a regiment, as any that has marched." Despite
such expressions of confidence, Shaw in fact continued to worry
about how well his troops would perform under fire. The ultimate
test came in South Carolina in July 1863, when the Fifty-fourth led
a brave but ill-fated charge on Fort Wagner, at the approach to
Charleston Harbor. As Shaw waved his sword and urged his men
forward, an enemy bullet felled him on the fort's parapet. A few
hours later the Confederates dumped his body into a mass grave with
the bodies of twenty of his men. Although the assault was a failure
from a military standpoint, it proved the proposition to which Shaw
had reluctantly dedicated himself when he took command of the
Fifty-fourth: that black soldiers could indeed be fighting men. By
year's end, sixty new black regiments were being organized. A
previous selection of Shaw's correspondence was privately published
by his family in 1864. For this volume, Russell Duncan has restored
many passages omitted from the earlier edition and has provided
detailed explanatory notes to the letters. In addition he has
written a lengthy biographical essay that places the young colonel
and his regiment in historical context.
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