Shaw, Robert Gould (1837–63)

Union Army Colonel

Robert Gould Shaw was the most famous of several Boston Brahmin abolitionist Union officers who fought in the Civil War. His wealthy and cultivated parents, Francis and Sarah Shaw, both participated actively in antebellum reform movements devoted to female education, temperance, and the abolition of slavery. Shaw's parents even participated in the famous Brook Farm commune experiment fictionalized in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance(1852). Shaw counted among his friends such New England establishment figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Jr., William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Sen. Charles Sumner, Gov. John Andrew, the Lowell family, and the family of William and Henry James.

Shaw's parents had five children, but Robert was the only son. He thus received special, sometimes unwanted attention. Educated at elite American and European boarding schools, Shaw became a cosmopolitan gentleman. He spoke five languages, played the piano and violin, and traveled extensively overseas.

Before the Civil War, Shaw demonstrated little ambition and seemed to be casting about for a purpose in life. He entered Harvard University but dropped out in 1859 in his third academic year, bored with scholarship. He tried working in the family trading business but, despite doing well, he became bored with that as well. Shaw even dreamed of seeking adventure in the West.

The Civil War gave Shaw a purpose. He enlisted in the elite 7th New York “Silk Stocking” Regiment for three months as a private in 1861 but saw no action. Then Shaw enlisted as an officer in the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry. The bored pre-war playboy discovered he was a more than competent soldier while fighting in the Shenandoah Valley, at Cedar Mountain, and at Antietam. Shaw served as both a general's aide and a company commander.

Shaw was not a loner; he was close to several other Boston Brahmin Harvard students who achieved Civil War fame and who came to symbolize the commitment of a certain class of Bostonians to the war for the Union, and more particularly, the war against slavery. These friends included John Quincy Adams and Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who were the sons of Ambassador Charles Francis Adams and brothers of Henry and Brooks Adams; Charles Russell, Jr. and James Russell Lowell II, both nephews of the poet and editor, James Russell Lowell; Garth Wilkinson and Robertson James, brothers of William and Henry James; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the future Supreme Court Justice; and Shaw's Harvard tutor, Francis Channing Barlow. Barlow, who married Shaw's sister Ellen, became a superb infantry division general. Charles Russell Lowell, Jr. married Shaw's sister Josephine and served as a cavalry brigade commander admired by Gen. Philip Sheridan and writer Herman Melville. Henry Lee Higginson served as a fine cavalry officer. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was wounded twice while serving as an infantry officer. Holmes [Page 785]later wrote of himself and these Civil War veterans that “our hearts were touched with fire.”

After first scoffing at the notion, in September 1862 Shaw publicly advocated arming black men as soldiers to help win the war. His wartime encounters with runaway slaves compelled him to see black people as fellow humans deserving full dignity and citizenship. But when his father visited him in Virginia with Gov. John A. Andrew's February 1863 written offer to command the 54th Massachusetts, Shaw hesitated. The reasons for this may be suggested from William James’ memorial oration for Shaw: “In this new negro-soldier venture, loneliness was certain, ridicule inevitable, failure possible, and Shaw was only twenty-five; and although he had stood among the bullets of Cedar Mountain and Antietam, he had till then been walking socially on the sunny side of life” (Shaw, 25).

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