Robert Gould Shaw and the Politics of Martyrdom
Why Frank and Sarah Shaw left their son buried with his men on Morris Island.
Today I am sharing some ideas that I am working through in the final chapter of my biography of Robert Gould Shaw. This chapter focuses on how Shaw was remembered following his death while leading the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts against Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863. I am trying to find a way to keep the focus as much as possible on his parents, especially his mother Sarah.
The Shaw family huddled together in their Staten Island home hoping for the best, but fearing the worst as they awaited news of Rob’s fate. Family and friends gathered around the Shaws to comfort and help them deal with waves of grief and uncertainty. Back in Lenox, Annie’s parents did their best to shield her her from the often contradictory newspaper reports about the assault on Fort Wagner and the fate of her husband of less than two months.
Despite reports that their son had been only “slightly wounded, while inside the rebel works” and taken prisoner, within a week it had become increasingly clear to Frank and Sarah that their son had not survived the assault. By then condolence letters began to pour in from close friends and family. Senator Charles Sumner could hardly believe that Shaw had been killed, but insisted in a letter to his parents that his “heroism is enhanced by the cause in which he fell and the companions by whom he was surrounded.” “I mistake much,” Sumner predicted, “if this incident does not take a place in history and also in art.”
Charles A. Dana encouraged Sarah to remember that her son was destined to “fill a bright place among the martyrs of liberty.” Francis Shaw’s niece, Alexander Agassiz, took comfort in knowing that her cousin “died in a noble cause.” “His grave,” she predicted, “will be to him a monument such as few men have.”
These sentiments were echoed throughout the abolitionist press, which quickly turned Shaw into a martyr for the cause of emancipation and racial equality by emphasizing the fact that he had been buried with his Black soldiers. The National Anti-Slavery Standard predicted that the “wide grave on Morris Island will be to a whole race a holy sepulchre.” “Neither death nor the grave have divided the young martyr and hero from the race for which he died, and a whole people will remember in the coming centuries, when its new part is to be played in the world’s history, that ‘he was buried with his niggers!’”