In Boston: Aid and Comfort for "the Shaw"

By Otto Friedrich

Frozen in bronze, the black infantrymen trudge forever forward, their rifles scraping the metaled sky. On horseback alongside them, stern, proud, aristocratic, rides their young colonel, Robert Gould Shaw. Here, just across from the gold-domed statehouse, Shaw led the North's first black regiment down Beacon Street and off to war. "The very flower of grace and chivalry," John Greenleaf Whittier wrote of Shaw's departure, "he seemed to me beautiful and awful, as an angel of God come down to lead the host of freedom to victory."

After nearly a century of New England wind and rain, the colonel's face is now as black as those of his soldiers. But beneath his cap a streak of bright green flows, like blood from a saber wound, down the temple, blinding the right eye, grazing the mustache. His naked sword is fastened to his knee, but someone has broken it off just below the bolt.

The frieze's granite back, originally inscribed with the pieties of Harvard President Charles Eliot ("The white officers taking life and honor in their hands cast in their lot with men of a despised race ..."), has been reinscribed with an indignant black crayon: "Stop the genocide of the abortionist degenerates! Stop abortion holocaust! Stop capital punishment for the innocent unborn!" That in turn has been covered, like buried layers of forgotten civilizations, by orange spray paint: "John Lennon lives on forever."

To command the first black regiment in the war against slavery was an ambiguous honor, particularly since slavery was still legal. Only after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 could Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts recruit a black regiment, and though he promised equal pay of $13 a month, the War Department voted only $10. The Confederates reacted by announcing that any black soldiers taken prisoner would be treated as runaway slaves, and their white officers considered guilty of incitement to insurrection, both subject to the death penalty.

No true martyr seeks martyrdom. Robert Gould Shaw loved music and drawing, spoke German and Spanish easily, dropped out of Harvard to try his hand at business (the Shaws had grown rich in the China trade). He was a serious youth but no zealot. Before the first Confederate shell hit Fort Sumter, however, Shaw had already enlisted. When Andrew offered him command of the black 54th, he wrote back saying he lacked experience. He was only 25. Then he sent a countermanding telegram of acceptance. "Now I feel ready to die," said his proud mother, a dedicated abolitionist, "for I see you willing to give support to the cause of truth that is lying crushed and bleeding."

Less than two months after the march down Beacon Street, the cause of truth brought Shaw and his men to the beach beneath Fort Wagner, which guarded the harbor entrance to Charleston. Shaw volunteered to lead the attack. Perhaps he was rash. Perhaps his commanders regarded his troops as fodder, expendable. Intelligence reports claimed that Shaw's 600 men outnumbered the defenders 2 to 1. Exactly the reverse was true. Even after a heavy Union bombardment, Confederate soldiers remained strongly entrenched behind their palmetto barriers. As darkness fell on July 18, 1863, Shaw spoke quietly to his troops: "I want you to prove yourselves. The eyes of thousands will look on what you do tonight."

Shaw went first, marching silently into the night. When he was about 200 yds. from the fort, the Confederates opened a withering fire. Shaw kept marching. Just behind him, men began to stumble and fall. By the light of the explosions, Shaw's men saw him vault onto the parapet of the fort, saw his sword held high, saw him crumple.

The black soldiers who followed their young colonel fought fiercely, hand to hand, but they were hopelessly outnumbered, driven back, slaughtered. Next morning, the dead and wounded were strewn over three-quarters of a mile. The Confederates stripped Shaw's body and threw it into a mass grave. When the Union forces finally captured Fort Wagner, the Army wanted to retrieve Shaw's body, but his family objected. They wanted him to remain with his men.

But Boston had to have a memorial. A committee was formed. Blacks donated pennies. As the war receded, however, the momentum died. The pennies --$7,511 in all--were invested. In 1883 one of the few surviving committeemen, Edward Atkinson, noted that the pennies had grown to $16,656.21. He and three other Brahmins formed a new committee and commissioned the young Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a memorial. Saint-Gaudens envisioned a giant equestrian statue. The Shaws objected. They wanted their son portrayed together with his men. Saint-Gaudens designed a relief of the regiment on the march, but the press of other commissions was so great that he took 14 years more to complete what Bostonians call "the Shaw."

It was a grand moment in 1897 when the memorial stood unveiled. No fewer than 65 veterans who had fought with Shaw stood at attention. "Many of them were bent and crippled, many with white heads, some with bouquets," wrote Saint-Gaudens. Cannon on the Common fired a salute. William James, the philosopher, declared that the casualties' common grave "bore witness to the brotherhood of man." Booker T. Washington, who was a seven-year-old on a Virginia plantation when Shaw died, rose to say that the "real monument" to Shaw "is being slowly but safely builded among the lowly."

That same spirit echoed through Beacon Hill's venerable Athenaeum one snow-swept evening this past winter as more than 500 Bostonians gathered to launch a campaign to raise $125,000 to "save the Shaw." John D. O'Bryant, black president of the Boston school committee, quoted Washington's 1897 speech and added: "In all truth, we have been slow to learn the lesson of that day."

The learning of lessons has always been a Boston industry. February was decreed Black History Month, with an exhibition of "Black Images" at the public library, lectures on black genealogy and even a special showing of the all-star 1943 musical film Cabin in the Sky.

But $125,000 just to remove some rust and graffiti? No restoration campaign is ever that simple. It will cost $12,000 to clean-the Saint-Gaudens bronze and to provide a new sword, plus a few extra swords in anticipation of future vandalism. About $21,000 is needed to repair the chipped and cracked masonry. It will take $22,000 more to engrave the names of the black soldiers who died--only the white officers are now named. There are various other items, including $15,000 to restore the memorial's fountain and $50,000 for a permanent endowment.

Even though more than $40,000 has been raised, support has not been unanimous. One black intellectual opposes adding the names of black soldiers because, he says, their absence reflects the prejudices of the time. "But that isn't true--there were always differences of opinion," protests Henry Lee, assistant headmaster of the Dexter School and great-grandson of one of the 1897 committeemen. Lee, reading aloud from a letter he has discovered, notes that Shaw's sister wanted all the slain blacks' names inscribed "in order to leave no excuse for the feeling that it is only men with rich relations and friends who can have monuments."

A more important obstacle is that Boston is going broke. Proposition 2 1/2, which voters approved last November, requires more than a 50% cut in the budget for parks and recreation areas by July 1. There is talk of shutting off the water in the Public Garden and grounding its celebrated swan boats. School Committee President O'Bryant, who wears an Africa-shaped pin in his lapel, supports the Shaw refurbishing, but acknowledges that the memorial "is not very well known to the black people." His real problem is that with the cuts, his whole school system may soon have to close.

Has it come to this, then, that Boston is raising money to teach the legend of its dead heroes when it has no money for its schools? Will it rebuild the Shaw fountain just as other fountains are turned off? In a cluttered office in Faneuil Hall, Mary Shannon of Boston's Art Commission sighs at the question. "One of our previous commissioners," she says gently, "once got a letter from a housewife who told him, 'Every act of housekeeping is an act of hope.'"

--By Otto Friedrich

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