Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty
Fourth Regiment
Sculpture
Considered greatest American sculpture of the 19th century
Aftermath of Civil War- huge interest in honoring heroes through public and permanent
sculptures, wanted to create grand and moving monuments to nation’s heroes
Artist
Saint Gaudens of Irish ancestry , did many portrait sculptures, 200 commissions, 75%
portraits
Gaudens created Diana sculpture at Philadelphia Art Museum
Background on 54th
Efforts made to enlist men from the NE states , Mass had small AA population
54th not the first black regiment
most recruits were free blacks
Frederick Douglass’ two sons enlisted
Officers for regiment chosen from families with strong antislavery convictions
Willing to lend moral and financial support
Robert Gould Shaw
Only son
Friends with great thinkers of the day including Harriet Beecher Stowe
Attended Harvard
Left before graduation , worked for uncle in NY
Found vocation in the Army
Wounded at Antietam
At first declined offer to lead the 54th
Married one month when parade for 54th occurred
Wrote to federal government protesting less pay of blacks in regiment, 18 month protest
before blacks received full back pay
Battles
James Island 250 Union soldiers held ground against 900 Confederate soldiers
Morris Island
Shaw asked to lead attack on Fort Wagner- shot through the heart at Wagner
William Carney held the flay despite wounds, first AA to win Medal of Honor
Union casualties- 1500, 10x that of Confederacy
600 in the 54th
½ captured, wounded or killed
Order for Shaw’s body to be buried with 20 of his men
Parents requested that body not be moved
Survivors successfully took Ft. Wagner and served until the end of the war
Irrefutable example of valor and military skill
Blacks in the military during the Civil War
180,000 AA men fought
25% of sailors were AA
Contribution of AA troops tipped scales towards Union victory
Attempts to build memorial
Survivors of 54th raised funds for memorial on Morris Island, never built
Joshua Smith, 1865, AA business man , had worked for Shaws, led committee to build
monument in Boston, committee of 21
Quote: “…not only to mark the public gratitude to the fallen hero, who at a critical
moment assumed a perilous responsibility , but also to commemorate the great event,
wherein he was a leader , by which the title of colored men as citizen-soldiers was fixed
beyond recall.”
Process in creating monument
Saint Gaudens used forty models, 16 heads in sculpture
Tableau of variation, energy and activity
Shaw- straight posture-seriousness of endeavor, moral rectitude, acceptance of civic
responsibility
Troops-pushing forward, action/silence of death-blank area of men in front
Allegorical figure above-olive branch=peace, poppy=sleep, death and remembrance
Originally going to use a palm branch instead of olive branch to signify martyrdom
Allegorial figure above troops shows differences- past v. present, actionv. Remembrance,
real v. ideal
Latin quote means: “He forsook all to preserve the public weal.”
Key to sculpture: expressive modeling of infantrymen’s faces- intense determination and
seriousness of purpose, each face is different reminding us that war is fought by
individuals with “full lives, families, hopes and dreams.”
Mistake on sculpture battle date reads July 23, actually July 18
Influenced by sculptures he saw in Rome and Paris
Memorial
Dedicated May 1897
Veterans of 54th at dedication along with governor and Booker T. Washington among
others
Many poems and songs written about statue
“Robert Gould Shaw” by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Why was it that the thunder voice of Fate
Should call thee, studious, from the classic groves,
Where calm-eyed Pallas with still footstep roves,
And charge thee seek the turmoil of the state?
What bade thee hear the voice and rise elate,
Leave home and kindred and thy spicy loaves,
To lead th' unlettered and despised droves
To manhood's home and thunder at the gate?
Far better the slow blaze of Learning's light,
The cool and quiet of her dearer fane,
Than this hot terror of a hopeless fight,
This cold endurance of the final pain,-Since thou and those who with thee died for right
Have died, the Present teaches, but in vain!\
For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell
Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes
breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble.
he waits
for the blessèd break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
Henrietta Cordelia Ray- Robert G. Shaw
When War's red banners trailed along the sky,
And many a manly heart grew all aflame
With patriotic love and purest aim,
There rose a noble soul who dared to die,
If only Right could win. He heard the cry
Of struggling bondmen and he quickly came,
Leaving the haunts where Learning tenders fame
Unto her honored sons; for it was ay
A loftier cause that lured him on to death.
Brave men who saw their brothers held in chains,
Beneath his standard battled ardently.
O friend! O hero! thou who yielded breath
That others might share Freedom s priceless gains,
In rev'rent love we guard thy memory.
Charles Ives
The "Saint Gaudens" in Boston Common
The first movement was initially inspired by the Augustus Saint-Gaudens' bas-relief on
Boston Common in Boston, Massachusetts. The sculpture depicts the 54th Massachusetts
Volunteer Infantry and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. (The 54th was an African-American
unit of soldiers who fought in the Civil War.)
Ives included the following poem (which he composed himself) with the score:
Moving,-Marching-Faces of Souls!
Marked with generations of pain,
Part-freers of a Destiny,
Slowly, restlessly-swaying us on with you
Towards other Freedom . . .
You images of a Divine Law
Carved in the shadow of a saddened heart-Never light abandoned-Of an age and of a nation.
Above and beyond that compelling mass
Rises the drum beat of the common-heart
In the silence of a strange and
Sounding afterglow
Moving,-Marching-Faces of Souls!
Additional information
www.nps.gov/boaf/historyculture/shaw.htm
http://www.jstor.org/pss/274405
http://webcas.cas.suffolk.edu/richman/Eng481/Lowell.htm
http://www.nga.gov/feature/shaw/s6151.shtm
National Gallery of Art
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and Unveiling 1865-1897. Boston, 1897.
Blight, David. "The Meaning or the Fight: Frederick Douglass and the Memory of the
Fifty-fourth Massachusetts." The Massachusetts Review 36 (Spring 1995): 141-153.
Burchard, Peter. One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment.
New York, 1965.
Burkhardt, J. Peter. All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing.
New Haven, 1995.
Coffin, William; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. "The Shaw Memorial and the
Sculptor St. Gaudens." Century Magazine 54 (June 1897): 176-200.
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