Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Honor, duty hallmarks of 'Child of Fortune' Date: Sat, 31 Oct 92 14:00:15 EST Message-ID: \SE B;LIFE;THE CIVIL WAR \HD Honor, duty hallmarks of 'Child of Fortune' \BY Woody West \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES The name of Robert Gould Shaw is widely familiar today: The film "Glory" and the PBS Civil War series added a posthumous celebrity to the heroism of the young soldier's life - slain leading the Union's first black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in 1863. The movie was well done, the television series engaging. However, Shaw's wartime letters, edited and introduced with a rich biographical essay by Russell Duncan of Emory University, are history, not the hagiography of popular culture and, as such, are the more poignant. The letters in "Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune" are deftly annotated, with concise chapter introductions. The editor does not get in the way of a literate young man's account of his great and final adventure. His power of expression does not especially distinguish Shaw from multitudes of his fellow soldiers, North and South. That facility in expression was characteristic of the Civil War and doubtless why its participants are so recognizable to us now. Shaw does not emerge from these pages as a remarkable individual. Indeed, as Mr. Duncan writes, he became a martyr to a cause he neither fully understood nor dedicated himself to. In a preface, historian William McFeely points out that the young man whose letters we read is "a vastly different man" from the one played by Matthew Broderick in "Glory." "His reach to know his men is full of the indirections, inconsistencies, and even blindness," Mr. McFeely writes, "that have characterized the stumbling efforts of so many Americans to grasp the simple, obvious realities of the lives of other Americans." Robert Gould Shaw's background, however, wasn't ordinary; the familial and intellectual hothouse of the Boston-New York matrix that formed him represented the very core of old New England. Indeed, the title of this volume is from the reflection of William James as he viewed the monument to Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts on Boston Common. (Wilky James, the brother of William and the novelist Henry, served in the 54th and was severely wounded in the assault in which Col. Shaw was killed.) "There they march," James wrote, "warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback among them, in his very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune." Though young Shaw burned with no special brightness, he emerges as a decent young man who unqualifiedly believed in honor and duty. The role that fate and character ordained for him is what makes his life compelling - representing the American ideal of personal and civic potential. He rather flopped around in the years before the war. He was politically conventional within the context of a family dominated by a mother of passionate abolitionist views and iron influence over her son. As war came ever closer, Shaw joined the exclusive militia regiment, the 7th New York; when Lincoln called for troops after Sumter, the 7th and Pvt. Shaw were among the first to respond, as 30-day soldiers. His letters from those chaotic weeks resound with boyish bravado. "The Capitol is one of the finest buildings I ever saw," he wrote his mother. "I don't believe Davis will get it without some little trouble." After that tentative excursion - for himself and the Union - Shaw was commissioned in the 2nd Massachusetts. With that regiment he would serve through the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, during which Stonewall Jackson would tutor the Unionists in the hard soldiering that lay before them. Shaw's letters from more than a year and a half of campaigning with the 2nd Massachusetts are as diverse as one would expect: He always is anxious for news from home, provides a soldier's perspective of the war, keeps his parents abreast of his reading (heavy doses of military tactics and history, with Charles Dickens for leavening) and requests personal articles - a special tobacco, tea, flannel undergarments and so forth. Most striking, though, is his concern with learning his trade and the recognition of how bitter a war lay ahead. He was a serious soldier and evidently one of growing competence. Shaw was twice cited in dispatches for coolness under fire and, as a captain in September 1862 at Antietam, he participated in the war's bloodiest battle and suffered his second wound there - like his first, a minor one. In a letter to his father just after Antietam, he wrote: "At last, night came on, and, with the exception of an occasional shot from the outposts, all was quiet. The crickets chirped, and the frogs croaked, just as if nothing unusual had happened all day long, and presently the stars came out bright, and we lay down among the dead, and slept soundly until daylight." In January 1863, Lincoln authorized volunteer regiments of blacks, and Massachusetts quickly responded. Because this was considered so radical a progression, the selection of white officers for these formations was critical. With Shaw's military record and the family's political involvement, the offer to command as a colonel the first black regiment was not unusual. He turned it down, largely because he was reluctant to leave the regiment in which he was now a senior captain. He worried, he wrote to Annie Haggerty, with whom he had fallen in love, that his mother would think he was "shirking my duty" by rejecting the offer. He reconsidered, and a few days later accepted the fateful appointment. One advantage was that he could return to Massachusetts and, despite his mother's initial opposition, marry Annie. His letters during the spring of 1863 are concerned primarily with the details of forming the 54th and of his impending marriage, to which his mother had acceded. On May 2, the 54th mustered 1,000 troopers, and Rob, as he preferred to be called, and Annie were married. Five days into their honeymoon, the regiment got its orders - and that was all the married life Shaw was to know. In June, aboard ship with the 54th off Cape Hatteras, Shaw wrote his wife, "Truly, I ought to be thankful for all my happiness, and my success in life so far; and if the raising of coloured troops prove such a benefit to the country, and to the blacks, as many people think it will, I shall thank God a thousand times that I was led to take my share in it." Within a month the climactic events of the war occurred, Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg. By mid-July, the Union campaign to capture Charleston, S.C., provided the 54th its first major opportunity to fight alongside white troops. On July 18, Col. Robert Gould Shaw's 54th Massachusetts, at his request, was given lead position in the assault, across 600 yards of exposed beach, to assault Fort Wagner guarding the seaward approach to the city. "My men were slaughtered, but fought like demons," one of Shaw's company commanders wrote of the 54th's charge. Casualties were heavy, and among the dead was the young colonel. He was buried by the Confederates in a mass grave with the other dead of the 54th. This is an affecting collection. The symbolism Shaw and his regiment have indelibly assumed is enhanced by the intimate glimpses of the conscientious, likable young man who led them to death. Woody West is associate editor of The Washington Times. ***** BLUE-EYED CHILD OF FORTUNE: THE CIVIL WAR' LETTERS OF COLONEL ROBERT GOULD SHAW Edited by Russell Duncan University of Georgia, $29.95, 448 pages, illus. REVIEWED BY WOODY WEST This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM