"Sacred in History and in Art": The Shaw Memorial

Abstract

OF all the monuments designed to preserve the memory and meaning of the Civil War, probably the most famous is the Shaw Memorial. Unveiled on Boston Common in 1897, the Augustus Saint-Gaudens bas-relief depicts the fall of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the defeat at Fort Wagner of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, the black regiment he commanded. Less than a century later, graffiti had been scrawled on the monument's back, green and white corrosion streaked its figures, and the blade of the colonel's sword had broken off just below the hilt. With the support of John D. O'Bryant, the black president of the Boston School Committee, and others, $125,000 was raised to restore the memorial and to inscribe on it the names of the black soldiers who fought and died at Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863. At a fundraising meeting at the Boston Athenaeum in 1981, one black intellectual objected to the new inscriptions, arguing that their omission should serve as a reminder of the racial prejudice that had characterized the late nineteenth century.1 Even though the anonymity of the black troops was finally lifted, his charge was accurate. It is precisely here, in the tension between the sacrifice the statue depicts and subsequent insensitivity to the implications of that martyrdom, that the Shaw Memorial assumes a significance beyond its aesthetic grandeur, for no other sculpture inspired by the fratricide was so successful in