The 54th Massachusetts

Look up at the bronze relief on Beacon Street, across from the State House. Fourteen feet wide. Fourteen years in the making. A column of men, faces turned slightly toward the viewer, a white officer on horseback above them. The sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, made the faces of the Black soldiers as portraits, distinct and individual, not as the generic types that dominated public sculpture of the era. He did this deliberately, and it was not common. Most monuments of its day rendered Black figures as symbols. This one rendered them as people.

The men depicted were members of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first Black regiment raised in the North during the Civil War. They were recruited from free Black men across the country in the spring of eighteen sixty-three, commanded by a white officer corps led by twenty-five-year-old Robert Gould Shaw, the son of a prominent Boston abolitionist family.

On July eighteenth, eighteen sixty-three, the regiment led a frontal assault on Fort Wagner, a Confederate fortification guarding the entrance to Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. Shaw was killed in the assault, shot at the parapet. Confederate commanders, intending the act as an insult to his memory, buried him in a mass grave with his enlisted men.

Shaw's family, when they heard what had happened, declined to request his body back. His father wrote to the War Department that his son could have no better burial companions. What the Confederates had meant as degradation, the Shaws refused to reverse, and in refusing they gave the gesture a different meaning.

The regiment suffered severe losses in the assault: about thirty men were killed outright, including Shaw, roughly two dozen more later died of wounds, and dozens were captured or never accounted for, leaving only a few hundred of the original regiment standing afterward. The memorial that Saint-Gaudens completed in eighteen ninety-seven, after fourteen years of work, stands as the most careful public acknowledgment of what those men were owed. Booker T. Washington addressed the crowd that day. Frederick Douglass, who had championed the regiment decades earlier, had died two years before the ceremony and did not live to see it.