Robert Gould Shaw Memorial/54th Massachusetts Regiment Memorial

(dedicated 1897)

Patinated plaster version on display in the National Gallery of Art

Sculptor: Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907)

Explanatory note

The most famous version of  this memorial, cast in bronze, is located on the Boston Common on Beacon Street, directly across from the Massachusetts State House, in Boston, Massachusetts. The piece is generally considered the preeminent  U.S. sculpture of the 19th century, and sometimes spoken of as the nation’s leading work of public memorial art. The plaster version on display in the National Gallery of Art, created while the Boston version was being cast in metal, is slightly transformed from the Boston bronze monument.  The plaster version was exhibited in Paris, France, in 1898 and 1900. and later at  the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, the World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York, before being transferred to a local museum, then to the National Park Service and then loaned to the National Gallery of Art. 

The monument was known for decades as the “Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, :but in more recent years is generally referenced  in more inclusive terms as “The Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial,
  or “The Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment.”

Location

National Gallery of Art, West Wing. Main Floor, Gallery 66.

 6th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington DC. (Long term loan from the National Park Service’s Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire.

Admission to the National Gallery is always free. Check in advance for hours. 

Access

Closest Metro Station is Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Quarter

 on the Green and Yellow lines.

Subject and Visual description

As a memorial, the work honors the death of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and 29 men of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment killed in action on July 18, 1863, during the United States Army  assault on Confederate fortifications near Charleston, South Carolina.  The 54th Massachusetts was the first all African American military regiment raised during the Civil War. The work also recognizes  the approximately 300 ultimate casualties of the attack and more broadly, the roughly 200,000 African Americans who served in the Union military during the Civil War.

The sculpture is usually said to depict the moment on May 28, 1863  that  the regiment  marched down Beacon Street past the Massachusetts State House, as they headed off to the naval vessels that would take them to the war front in the Carolinas. (It is also at times perceived as depicting the soldiers as they marched towards their deaths on July 18, 1863 near Fort Wagner)  About  twelves heads of the Black soldiers, and about twenty rifles and two banners, along with the legs of about 23 soldiers, are visible in the piece, representing the 29 men of the regiment killed in action. In the center of the work, dominating the visual field, the twenty- five year old white officer Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the regiment, is depicted mounted on horseback. Shaw and his men march from left to right, all gazing straight ahead.  Above t he marching male figures floats a large horizontal female figure in classical robes, partially shrouded. Her right hand holds poppies, often associated with sleep, death, and remembrance. All the male soldiers look directly forward, while the angelic figure looks downwards towards them.

Below the outstretched arm of the angel and above the head of Colonel Shaw’s horse is inscribed a Latin inscription OMNIA RELINQVIT / SERVARE REMPVBLICAM ("He left behind everything to save the Republic”, which is the motto of the Order of the Cincinnati, an organization of descendants of Revolutionary Army officers.

Historical Background

Although African Americans had served in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, there was widespread opposition in the white North to arming African Americans in the Civil War for the first two years of the conflict. Frederick Douglass and his antislavery allies vigorously campaigned forby Black military service from the war’s beginning. Following the Union victory at Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln resolved to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, to become effective on January 1, 1863, formally declaring that all enslaved people held in bondage within the Confederacy were forever free. (The Proclamation did not free enslaved people held in States loyal to the Union). A clause in the Proclamation authorized the service of Black men in Union army and navy formations.

The Governor of Massachusetts was authorized to raise the first Black combat regiment, known as the 54th Massachusetts, which enlisted Black men from many states as well as Canada. Frederick Douglass played an active role in recruiting for the regiment, which included two of his sons, and its companion formation, the 55th Massachusetts. By the end of the war 175  African American regiments had been formed, known collectively as United States Colored Troops or the USCT. Tens of thousands of African Americans also served in the United States Navy.

Robert Gould Shaw, the 25 year old son of a prominent Boston abolitionist family. was selected to lead the regiment. (Only white officers led the Black USCT regiments during the Civil War).  Shaw campaigned for his regiment to be deployed in front line combat, and in July 1863, they were deployed in a mass assault on the heavily defended Fort Wagner, one of several Confederate fortifications guarding Charleston, South Carolina (Charleston, an important port where the first shots of the Civil War had been fired upon Fort Sumter, was of enormous symbolic and material importance to the Union).   

The regiment led by Colonel Shaw marched heroically into direct enemy fire, which mortally wounded Shaw and 29 of the regiment’s men. All told, about half of the 600 men of the regiment were either immediately killed, died of wounds, declared missing, or captured that day. One Black soldier, who safeguarded the regimental banner, became the first Black soldier awarded the Medal of Honor. The heroic sacrifice of the men of the 54th helped to shift white public opinion in the North about African Americans serving in combat, and directly catalyzed mass service by around 200,000 Black men in the Union military effort, playing a significant role in the ultimate Union victory over the Confederacy. 

Colonel Gould’s family and supporters campaigned for a public memorial honoring his service, insisting that the work should equally honor the men Shaw led into battle. Augustus Saint -Gaudens, the nation’s leading sculptor, was commissioned to create the work, and labored on it for over a decade, terming it is a “labor of love,’  until it was finally dedicated in Boston on Memorial Day (“Decoration Day”) in May 31, 1897.  Saint-Gaudens based his rendition of the marching soldiers on about 40 Black male live models.

Following its unveiling, this memorial on the Boston Common was an important site of BlackAfrican American civil rights activity, including anti0lynching gatherings  in the early 20th century. It has had a complex history across the decades, and was featured in the film Glory (1989). Some protesters have critiqued the prominent emphasis in the memorial given to a white man on horseback. The work has been vandalized both by white racist and by anti-racist activists. It is the centerpoint of the National Park Service’s Boston Black Heritage Trail at Beacon Hill.

The alternate, slightly refined, patinated plaster version of the memorial by Saint-Gaudens, now on display in the National Gallery of Art, was displayed in Paris, France and at the 1901 Pan American Exposition world’s fair in Buffalo New York. It was acquired by the National Park Service and then placed on long term loan to the National Gallery of Art, where it remains visible to the public on a full time basis (Unlike many other art works on display in the Gallery, it is not regularly rotated off view).

Interpretive Notes:  

• The work is a complex transformation of the classical motif of the equestrian memorial, which traditionally honors military service by celebrating mounted military leaders who died or served in battle. (Saint- Gaudens had initially conceived of such a memorial for Shaw alone, and only later agreed to include Black members of the regiment). Numerous such mounted memorials of heroic military leaders are visible in public space throughout Washington DC. In contrast, this hybrid memorial equally honors regular soldiers.  

  
  

• It should be noted that in striking contrast to the proliferation of racist caricatures of Black people in late 19th century white American public culture, here the artist has worked carefully to emphasize the dignity, determination, and individuality of his Black male subjects here.

  
  

• Saint-Gaudens remarked that designing the female angelic figure was the most difficult challenge in this work and was, more than anything else, responsible for the extensive delay in the memorial’s completion. It is far from clear what precisely she represents. Is she a rendition of the spirit of Death that awaits the heroes? Is she the spirit of memory?  Does she evoke a nation in mourning for the Fallen? Is she perhaps the animating principle of democracy or of the republic, which is enlivened through the sacrifice of those who give their lives for her?   Does her outstretched left arm protect the soldiers, prophesize their death, or point towards eternity?

  
  

• The gendered and generational symbolism of the work is complex. The male figures are all shown as resolute and vigorous.  Colonel Shaw holds a downward pointed sword, out of its scabbard, emphasizing his virile commitment to battle.  Shaw  and his (evidently male) horse are flanked by two bearded Black soldiers, and the bearded man in front of him is likely to be decades older than the young white officer. The upright rifles and banners carried by the soldiers point upwards vertically, towards the horizontal allegorical female figure, suggesting a kind of gendered unity of energies constituting the nation that has evolved out of the mass blood-letting of the Civil War. Although these men died and in many cases did not leave physical children behind, an implication may be that through their sacrifice they have left a collective posterity of the nation, re-founded on principles of equality. 

Prompts for Closer Looking:

• In his famous dedication speech of the Memorial on May 31, 1897, the philosopher William James said of the sculpted figures, “one can almost hear them breathing as they march”  (see “https://college.holycross.edu/faculty/sluria/william_james_speech.html" )   How does thetha artist accomplish this effect?

  
  

• As a memorial, this relief sculpture is dedicated to the Dead, but like all memorial artists, Saint-Gaudens faces the challenge of evoking the lives lived by those who who are no longer present, and also of evoking that which endures beyond the grave, conveying an emotional sense of those aspects of the Dead, which, paradoxically, never die.   How well do you think he accomplishes these goals?  In what ways is the looming death of hundreds of men of the regiment foreshadowed in the sculpture? In what respects can they, or their spirit, be said to be marching on and still “breathing,” long after their physical deaths?

  
  

• In this three dimensional relief, the figures extend as far as three feet out into surrounding space. How does your perception of the work change as you regard it from different angles, standing close to and at a distance from the various subjects?

  
  

• Many critics have been troubled that so much space is given to the white officer on a horse, in comparison to the marching Black soldiers on foot. How well do you think the artist has balanced representations of a white military leader and the Black soldiers of the regiment he commanded?

  
  

• Compare the allegorical female shrouded female figure developed by Saint- Gaudens to the shrouded “Spirit of Freedom” image in Ed Hamilton’s sculpture at the African American Civil War Memorial, located about two miles north of the National Gallery. How are these two spiritual figures like and unlike one another, and what does that suggest about the two artist’s different understandings of history, race, and power?   (You may also wish to compare both works with Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, discussed elsewhere in this guide,  which also considers the legacies of the ending of slavery.)

  
  

• Consider the Latin inscription on the relief,  OMNIA RELINQVIT / SERVARE REMPVBLICAM , “He left behind everything to save the Republic.” Why has the artist positioned this inscription in the empty space in the far right of the relief, below the angel’s outstretched arm and just beyond the head of the horse?

  
  

• In his famous poem inspired by the memorial, “For the Union Dead,” Robert Lowell translates the Latin quote as “They left behind everything to save the Republic.” What is accomplished by the shift in this case from “he” to “they”?  

  
  

• Consider the ways in which this piece is rather unlike other works of art in the National Gallery of Art. It clearly has a sacred or ceremonial function and is treated with a kind of solemnity by visitors and by those who protect it.  You may want to talk to the security guards and with visitors about their emotional reactions to the piece in its actual presence.  Observe as well how the museum contextualizes the work with interpretive commentary and places it in relationship to other works of art, including by Black artists.

  
  

• Although the artist may not have been conscious of the fact, many modern onlookers are deeply fascinated and moved by the violent death of many thousands of horses and mules in war in combat. What do you notice about how the artist has depicted the horse?  In what respects can this work be conceived of as a memorial for animals conscripted into the war effort as well as to the humans lost in the conflict?

Learning Resources:

See the YouTube sequence on the Memorial, from a PBS documentary, at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t8K7Aisx8U

William James’ dedication speech in 1897 for the unveiling of the Memorial

https://college.holycross.edu/faculty/sluria/william_james_speech.html

National Gallery overview;

https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.102494.html

Teaching packet:

https://www.nga.gov/learn/teachers/teaching-packets/shaw-memorial.html

Overview of the 54th Massachusetts:

https://www.thenmusa.org/articles/the-54th-massachusetts-infantry-regiment/

Overview on US Colored Troops (USCT):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Colored_Troops

Robert Lowell’s famous poem (1960). For the Union Dead, inspired by the Memorial is at:

https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/union-dead#B