Robert Gould Shaw, the 54th Massachusetts, and the Story We Wanted

From Burchard's biography to Glory, we remade Battery Wagner into a redemption tale. The history is more interesting.

First up. Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson for the opportunity to talk about Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts as part of her 250 to 250 series.

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One hundred and sixty-three years ago today, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw led the men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry across a narrow strip of sand on Morris Island, South Carolina, and up the slope of Battery Wagner. Shaw died on the parapet alongside dozens of his men and was buried with them in a mass grave on the beach.

The assault failed as a military operation, but the story of what happened there has never really been about the fort. It has always been about what we want that moment to mean.

In his 1965 biography of Shaw, Peter Burchard offered the following assessment of the legacy of Shaw’s final act:

To New Englanders of his own time, Shaw in his youthful Victorian innocence, seemed a kind of saint. In the last few months of his life, in his latter days and final hours, he had drawn on his forefathers’ deep convictions and sense of duty and his own devotion to the cause which had rekindled the imaginations of New England’s poets and scholars, preachers and teachers and practical men. In his last hours, Shaw had indeed caught fire and to those who had devoted their lives to the breaking of the back of the American shame, his death was an evening and a dawn.

It is a comforting narrative, and it is easy to see why it resonated among liberal white readers at the height of the civil rights movement.

(Source: Internet Archive)

In Burchard’s telling, Shaw discovered his true purpose in life in his final hours by embracing the Black men under his command and the cause of freedom. He died a martyr to abolition, a young white New Englander redeemed by his willingness to fight and fall beside Black soldiers.

The story asked little of its readers beyond admiration, and it offered a great deal in return, a usable past in which the nation’s deepest sin could be answered through individual sacrifice and moral awakening.

It should come as no surprise that Burchard’s book became the basis for the script of the Hollywood movie Glory.

The film tells the story of Shaw and the 54th within a white savior framework. Shaw gradually comes to embrace his men, first through the painful scene in which Tripp is flogged, and later in the more celebratory moment when Shaw joins his men in tearing up his pay voucher to protest unequal wages. His transformation is complete only in the final assault on Battery Wagner and in his burial with his men on the beach.

The closing image is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s beautiful relief sculpture on Boston Common, Shaw on horseback in lockstep with his men, marching together into memory as if they had always shared a single purpose.

(Source: CommonWealth Beacon)

It became clear early in my research on Shaw that this picture was more myth than history. Shaw’s understanding of the war certainly evolved over the course of three years, but he never fully embraced the cause of his abolitionist parents. He cared more about promotion, honor, and playing a role in preserving the Union. His letters home reveal heated exchanges with his parents, especially his mother, over the merits of emancipation.

When Governor John Andrew offered him command of a Black regiment, Shaw hesitated before accepting, and those doubts remained with him up to his final days. The man who died at Wagner was not the man Burchard imagined, ignited at last by the righteousness of the cause.

He was a talented and ambitious young officer still working out what the war meant, and what his men meant to him, when a bullet ended the process.

(Source: Library of Congress)

None of this means that Shaw’s command of the 54th, or his place in the broader narrative of how the war destroyed slavery, should be ignored or minimized. It means we need a different perspective.

I ended up thinking about Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts as a coalition, one that helped bring the nation a giant step closer to emancipation and the end of slavery. The men in the ranks did not need their colonel to share their understanding of the war for their collective action to matter. Many of them grasped the stakes in ways Shaw never could. They fought for citizenship, for families still enslaved, and for recognition of a manhood the nation refused to acknowledge.

Shaw fought for his own reasons. What they built together was not a communion of purpose but a working alliance, and it proved powerful enough to help transform Northern opinion about Black soldiers and to push the war further down the road toward freedom

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Looking at the relationship this way frees us from assuming common ground that was not there, and that perhaps did not have to be there, for their actions to matter to the course of the war and to us today.

Burchard’s assumption that Shaw had “caught fire” and the narrative arc of Glory tell us a great deal about how later generations have chosen to understand this story and what they have needed it to mean.

They tell us much less about the relevant history. Every generation refashions the men on that beach to answer its own questions, which is precisely why the history underneath the memory is worth recovering.

What Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts did on that sandy beach 163 years ago mattered. It mattered without the myth, and it still matters all these years later.