A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw by Kevin M. Levin published by University of North Carolina Press (2026)
I have read nine books on the 54th Massachusetts and its colonel Robert Gould Shaw. I also read several books by contemporaries of Shaw who reflected on his life. His death has haunted many Civil War students since the movie Glory was released more than forty years ago.
When I heard several years ago that Kevin M. Levin was working on a new biography of the colonel who had become a paragon of the armed anti-slavery struggle, I thought that Levin was well-positioned to detail the life of America’s most famous Civil War colonel. He is the historian who investigated the creation of the “Black Confederate” myth as a 20th Century justification of the Confederacy in his book Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. He also wrote an examination of the killing of United States Colored Troops in his book Remembering The Battle of the Crater: War as Murder. Both of these books rescued the service of African Americans who, in the 1860s, were not even considered “Americans” among many of the white population. He also beat back the so-called “Lost Cause” distortion of Civil War history. He has crafted essays on how museums and schools can tell the 99% of us who are not historians the real story of Blacks of the Civil War Era in scholarly journals and his book Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites. Levin has also reached out to the general public with his blog posts at his site Civil War Memory. He is now working on a history of Blacks during the Battle of Gettysburg.
Levin has devoted years of effort to researching Robert Gould Shaw’s life, his ideas, and how he is remembered at different points over the last 163 years. Unlike the popular view of Shaw in which he is a New Englander brought up as a staunch abolitionist who quickly saw the outbreak of war as a divine opportunity for Emancipation, Levin lays out a more detailed, and somewhat contradictory path in his twenty five years of life.
First, of course, is that Shaw spent most of his early life in Staten Island, not Boston. Living in New York there was a remarkable difference of opinion on national issues including chattel slavery. His parents were ardent Abolitionists, but he was less devoted to the cause of human freedom. Sure he favored the abolition of slavery, but did he want to see thousands of young men lose their lives for his parents’ cause?
Shaw is often depicted as a loyal Harvard graduate, particularly by that university. In fact, he entered the New York Catholic college now known as Fordham University. He later continued his studies at Harvard, but he never graduated.
Levin also makes clear that Shaw was brought up to oppose slavery, but he had other things that were more important in the years before his death at Battery Wagner outside of Charleston. Shaw was trying to complete his education. He spent a lot of time seeing the sites of Europe. He was tormented by his inability to set a clear occupational goal. And he fell in love! Not all that different from today’s youth. We become interesting people because we are not beset by a monomaniacal obsession even with a good cause.
Levin makes the case by using the letters Shaw wrote to his family and friends. They were not full of ardent abolitionism. You can read some of Shaw’s letters in the book Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune. Since most of these letters were written to committed Abolitionists, I do wonder if his audience might have depressed his willingness to expose his feelings. He was not trying to convince his readers to oppose slavery since they were already there. I recall my own letters written while I was working on a human rights project. In missives to my family I would discuss food, travel, love, and the Buffalo Bills, not massacres. I wonder if Shaw was doing the same.
Levin does a good job of organizing Shaw’s story. Most of what is focused in other works is his life after he was given command of the Black 54th Massachusetts. That period that is an object of widespread fascination only lasted five months. He had 24 other years of life that made him into the young man who won so much fame through his demise.
A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw tells us about Shaw’s upbringing by his parents. Both father and mother were Unitarians who committed to the cause of Abolition before Shaw was born. Unlike many religiously evangelical abolitionists, they were also politically liberal with some attraction for the Fourierist Brook Farm commune headed by Boston transcendentalists. Levin uses Shaw’s mother’s correspondence to illustrate his parents’ trying to “raise him right,” in other words to be a younger version of themselves.
That may be understandable, but what is more questionable was his parents’ maneuvering to have him appointed to command the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first regiment of Black infantry from the North. They did this without permission from Shaw and then they put pressure on Robert to accept the command even though he seems not to have wanted it.
The book does a good job of relating Shaw’s efforts to recruit African Americans for his unit. Many Black leaders in Boston questioned whether young Black men should join the regiment since the United States would not guarantee that they would be treated equally with whites. Shaw’s recruiters had to travel to New Bedford, Buffalo, New York City, Philadelphia, and dozens of other places outside of Boston to get men. To organize and train his regiment, Shaw sometimes reproduces techniques used to control Blacks under slavery. And, while Shaw is clearly proud of the regiment he takes South, he seems to have very little individual contact with the Black men he commands.
Levin also examines Shaw’s behavior when his regiment is transferred to the Beaufort on Port Royal Island, in the Sea Islands. He is assigned to report to Colonel James Montgomery who commands the Second South Carolina Colored Infantry Regiment which was organized around the same time as the 54th Massachusetts. When Shaw and Montgomery capture Darien, South Carolina, Montgomery told Shaw his men would burn this town even though the Confederate troops had quickly run away when the saw the two regiments arrive. Shaw was troubled by the burning of civilian property. He wrote that this “is sure to bring discredit on the coloured troops if persisted in.” Shaw also felt that military units should not target civilians without justification: “If we had fought for possession of the place, and it had been found necessary to hold or destroy it, or if the inhabitants had done anything which deserved such punishment, or if it were a place of refuge for the enemy there might have been some reason for Montgomery’s acting as he did; but as the case stands, I can’t see any justification.”
Several weeks later, Shaw led his men on an attack on the heavily defended Battery Wagner guarding Charleston. The 54th made a difficult crossing of the sandy beach without any cover as ordered by his superiors. Shaw and most of his men made it to walls of the fort when a tremendous fire was directed at them. Robert Shaw was hit by several bullets and was killed instantly. The Confederates fought off the attack and the 54th left its many men dead and wounded at the walls of the fort.
According to Levin, the Union commanders had believed that the fort’s strength was significantly reduced by naval bombardment. They were wrong. Levin said that even at time observers criticized “the decision to mass troops, fully exposed, in front of a heavily fortified Confederate position. There was no chance of surprise, and the timing of the assault at dusk guaranteed that darkness would significantly decrease the chance of a successful outcome.” Despite the assaults failure, the fact that it was bravely made by Black men who had been civilians half a year earlier impressed many Union veterans near Battery Wagner. The survivors of the assault suddenly got respect and cheers from white regiments nearby. A few days later, Northern newspapers made the 54th’s story a headline. Of course, in Democratic newspapers it was a story of defeat, but in anti-slavery papers it showed the promise of accepting Black citizenship.
Because Kevin Levin is an expert on Civil War Memory Studies his post-war chronicle of ways that Americans have remembered Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts are particularly interesting. Many Black families purchased the Currier & Ives lithograph “The Gallant Charge of the 54th Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment,” illustrating the bravery of Black troops fighting to end slavery.
There were many depictions of the assault. for example this one by Thomas Nast in which William Carney, the first Black Medal of Honor winner, advancing behind Robert Gould Shaw.
These illustrations were extremely popular after the war for African Americans. Most Blacks lived in the South and after 1877 the Confederate veterans’ organizations began erecting monuments to the almost-divine Confederate leaders like Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee. lithographs of Shaw and his men reminded African Americans that Black Southerners also fought, and not for the cause of the Confederacy.
Apart from illustrations, many Union veteran organizations organized ceremonies to honor the 54th and the largest group of Union veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), had posts named after Shaw, in fact there was a Shaw G.A.R. post in Staten Island. Kevin Levin says that; “Honoring Shaw during veterans’ reunions and other commemorative events recognized his leadership and bravery but also kept alive a legacy of interracial cooperation.”
Levin also explores representations of Shaw and his men that are still with us today. In 1884, the great Irish immigrant sculpture Augustus Saint-Gaudens was commissioned to create the Shaw monument for the City of Boston.
I did wonder that the book does not examine Shaw’s impact on his siblings. For example, his sister Ellen Shaw married General Francis Barlow, who nearly died at Gettysburg. Another sister, Josephine Shaw, married Charles Russell Lowell who commanded a regiment of cavalry. He was killed just over a year after Robert was killed. I wonder what the effect of these two deaths had on Josephine. She never married again and she devoted herself to reforming New York City. If you go to Bryant Park behind the 42nd Street Library in Manhattan there is a huge fountain that honors Josephine. It was the first public monument in New York City to be dedicated to a woman. She helped form the Anti-Imperialist League, was an active feminist, and a mental health reformer.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
