Product Review

This book draws together the Civil War correspondence of Robert Gould Shaw, the young colonel who led the North's vanguard black regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry. Killed in 1863 while leading his men in an assault on a fort protecting Charleston Harbor, Shaw was memorialized in numerous poems, in a magnificent sculpture on Boston Common, and in the Oscar-winning film Glory. Yet, as this book reveals, he accepted command of the Fifty-fourth with great reluctance, and he remained a much more divided and complex—if no less heroic—figure than his legend would have it.