Library of Congress

Robert Gould Shaw

On March 17, 1863, Robert Gould Shaw wrote his mother with an update on his new assignment as colonel of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, a regiment of black enlisted men and white commissioned officers being raised in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s recently enacted Emancipation Proclamation, which had authorized African-American military service. “The regiment continues to flourish,” he wrote from their training camp outside Boston. “Men come in every day.” Shaw, who had served as an officer in the Union army since May 1861, was clearly proud of the impression his recruits were making on his fellow veteran soldiers: “Yesterday we had several officers out to take a look at the men; they all went away very much pleased. Some were very skeptical about it before, but say, now, that they shall have no more doubts of negroes making good soldiers.”

Shaw’s mother no doubt greeted her son’s report with great pleasure. A staunch abolitionist, she had been thrilled the previous month to learn of his decision to lead the pioneering unit. “God rewards a hundred-fold every good aspiration of his children…. Now I feel ready to die, for I see you willing to give y[ou]r support to the cause of truth that is lying crushed and bleeding,” she wrote him.

In the years since his death in July 1863 at the Battle of Battery Wagner on Morris Island, South Carolina, Shaw has been celebrated as a martyr to the cause of emancipation, a trailblazing young white man whose willingness to lead the first regiment of black soldiers raised in the North was a natural extension of his abolitionist upbringing. Yet, as Kevin M. Levin writes in this issue’s cover story, “Road to Glory” (page 26), Shaw’s path to commanding the 54th was uneven, marked by sharp disagreements with his parents and siblings about the Lincoln administration’s emancipation policies. In short, Shaw’s early war letters home reveal a young man who was not the committed abolitionist his family expected him to be.

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