Yesterday I sent off my manuscript to The University of North Carolina Press to begin the peer review process. To say that I am relieved would be an understatement. It’s always a strange feeling in the wake of finishing a project that has taken years to complete and one that, at times, has been be both incredibly exhilarating and frustrating. There is still a good deal of work to do. I will eventually have to respond to the two anonymous reviewers, who will read the manuscript for UNC Press. In addition, I need to finalize a list of illustrations and photographs and possibly secure one or two maps for the book.
Thanks to all of you who have supported me along the way. Writing can feel incredibly isolating. Hopping on this site to read your comments and to see the subscription list gradually expand is incredibly satisfying.
As as way of saying thank you I am sharing the introduction to the book. It is very likely to change depending on how the manuscript is reviewed, but hopefully it will give you a sense of where I am going with it. More importantly, I hope it excites those of you who already know something about Shaw as well as those of you who know very little to want to read it.
If all goes as planned, the book should be available by Fall 2025.
Enjoy.
Introduction
On July 18, 1863, Col. Robert Gould Shaw died while leading the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry—the first regiment of Black soldiers raised in the North during the American Civil War—in an assault against Confederates at Fort Wagner on Morris Island, located at the entrance of Charleston harbor. In the weeks that followed, family friend and fellow reformer Lydia Maria Child penned a tribute for the young officer in the pages of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Like many of the other memorials published at this time, Child traced Shaw’s bravery, while in command of Black soldiers, and his willingness to give his life to the cause of freedom and racial equality, to his mother and father. “With moral courage beyond all praise,” Child wrote, “they stood side by side with a despised band of reformers” for “the cause of Freedom.” Child included a story in her tribute that she believed constituted a formative moment in the martyred colonel’s short life.
In this story the young Shaw, along with one of his many cousins, sits with his grandfather and namesake shortly before his death in 1853. “My children,” the elder Robert Gould Shaw informed his two grandchildren, “I am leaving this stage of action, and you are entering upon it.” “I exhort you to use your example and influence against intemperance and slavery.”[1] Child’s message was clear. The young man’s embrace of abolitionism and willingness to fight for it on battlefields far from home and ultimately sacrifice his life in the process was no accident, but was nurtured and encouraged at a young age.
It is unclear where Child picked up this family story, but given their close relationship, it is likely that Shaw’s mother, Sarah Blake Sturgis Shaw, shared it with her. This comforting family story aligned Robert Gould Shaw and the rest of his family with the decades-long fight among abolitionists to rid the nation of slavery. Unfortunately, given the timing of his grandfather’s death and the fact that Shaw was, at that time, studying overseas in Europe, it is very unlikely that this intimate and revealing scene between grandfather and grandson ever took place.[2]
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