robert shaw memorial, 1884–1897

Robert Shaw Memorial, 1884–1897

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS [1848–1907]

Augustus Saint Gaudens

• Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1848.

• The son of a shoemaker, Saint-Gaudens moved with his family to New York when he was an infant.

• Growing up in New York City, he became interested in art, and after turning thirteen he left school to apprentice with a cameo cutter.

• While an apprentice, Saint-Gaudens took classes at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design.

• When he was nineteen he moved to Europe, where he continued his studies in both Paris and Rome.

• Studying classical art and architecture, Saint-Gaudens began to work as a professional sculptor.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens by Kenyon Cox

• Returning to America, Saint-Gaudens received his first major commission in New York City.

• Still considered one of his important works, “Admiral Farragut” (1881) stands in New York’s Madison Square Park.

Admiral Farragut

• Combining the technical proficiency

learned in Europe with a free and flowing hand, Saint-Gaudens created bronze statues that represented the complexity and grandeur of the American heroes he portrayed.

• Saint-Gaudens was a master of the human form, perfectly representing the physical while bringing to life the personality of his subjects.

• By the late 1880s and 1890s, Saint-Gaudens had produced some of his greatest work including a copper statue of Diana and the first of his bronze monuments to President Abraham Lincoln.

• Throughout his career, he would continue to work closely with architects, creating most of his work specifically for specific sites.

• Saint Gaudens’ work ranged from the smallest, exquisite cameos to magnificent outdoor memorials.

• He did portraits in low relief, high relief and in the round, (the Robert Louis Stevenson relief is a well known example;)

• He was commissioned by the rich, and did loving portraits of intimate friends.

• He modeled in clay, cast in bronze, worked in plaster, carved in stone.

The Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-fourth Regiment Memorial,

• A monumental bronze relief sculpture standing at the edge of Boston Common, was begun twenty years after the end of the Civil War and not completed for another fourteen.

• It was an unusually complex project, but the sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, came to regard it as a labor of love.

• The memorial had been commissioned by a group of Bostonians to honor

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the privileged son of abolitionist parents, who had given his life fighting for the Union cause.

• Robert Gould Shaw was just 25 years old when he was killed leading a regiment of black soldiers into battle during the American Civil War.

• Shaw was born into a wealthy Boston family and attended Harvard University before enlisting in the U.S. Army early in the Civil War.

• After distinguishing himself in battle, Shaw was picked to lead the 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of black soldiers raised following Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

• Orator Frederick Douglass was instrumental in helping to form the 54th Massachusetts, and his own sons Lewis and Charles joined the regiment.

• Shaw was made a colonel at age 25 and given command of the 54th in February 1863.

• Five months later he and many of his men were killed while storming Fort Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina.

October 10, 1837 – July 18, 1863 (age 25)

• Robert Gould Shaw was not at first eager to head this regiment;

• He declined the offer.

• After pressure from his mother, an ardent abolitionist, and after some deep reflection, he accepted the commission.

• Saint-Gaudens originally envisioned an equestrian statue—the traditional hero on horseback—but Shaw’s family objected to the format as pretentious.

• The revised design presents the officer riding beside a company of foot soldiers marching toward their destiny.

• Saint Gaudens deals with the conflict in war, and the ethics of a nation.

• The Shaw Memorial commemorates the first black regiment of the Civil War, and their white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.

Did you see the movie…?

• The movie Glory is about this regiment and the ethical struggles between black and whites as well as North and South.

• The movie also portrays the change in Shaw from superiority and aloofness toward his men, to tremendous feeling and bravery, as he led them into battle and where he died alongside many of them.

• When the monument was at last unveiled in 1897, the philosopher William James observed that it was the first American “soldier’s monument” dedicated to a group of citizens united in the interests of their country, rather than to a single military hero.

• It was the first regiment of African Americans recruited in the North for service in the Union Army.

• Many of the volunteers had enlisted at the urging of the black orator Frederick Douglass, who believed (mistakenly, as it turned out) that former slaves and others of African descent would never be denied the full privileges of citizenship if they fought for those rights alongside white Americans.

Frederick Douglass

• Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman.

• After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining renown for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing.

• He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens.

• He became a major speaker for the cause of abolition.

• In addition to his oratory, Douglass wrote several autobiographies, eloquently describing his life as a slave, and his struggles to be free.

• His first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was published in 1845 and was his best-known work, influential in gaining support for abolition.

• He wrote two more autobiographies, with his last, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published in 1881 and covering events through and after the Civil War.

• After the Civil War, Douglass remained very active in America's struggle to reach its potential as a "land of the free".

• Douglass actively supported women's suffrage.

• Following the war, he worked on behalf of equal rights for freedmen, and held multiple public offices.

• Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant.

• He was fond of saying, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."

• Arming black soldiers in defense of the Republic proved to be controversial and the Fifty-fourth bore the additional burden of having to prove its value.

• Frederick Douglass two sons, Lewis and Charles were member of the Fifty-fourth.

• When war came in 1861, Shaw seemed to find a purpose, and he immediately enlisted in the 7th New York Infantry, and served in the defense of Washington, DC for 30 days, after which the regiment was dissolved. In May of that year, Shaw joined the 2nd Massachusetts as a second lieutenant, serving for two years and attaining the rank of Captain.

•  

• Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, a strong abolitionist, recruited Shaw in March of 1863 to raise and command one of the first regiments of African American troops in the Union army, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. Initially taking the command to appease his mother, Shaw eventually grew to respect his men and believed that they could fight as well as white soldiers.

• He was eager to get his men into action to prove this. When he learned that black soldiers were to receive less pay than whites, Shaw led a boycott of all wages until the situation was changed.  

• On May 28, 1863, Shaw led the 54th in a triumphant parade through Boston to the docks, where the regiment departed for service in South Carolina.

• Shaw had married Annie Kneeland Haggerty just 26 days before.

• Initially assigned to manual labor details, the 54th did not see real action until a skirmish with Confederate troops at James Island on July 16.

• In the summer of 1863, Shaw’s regiment led an audacious assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina.

• That fortress on Morris Island guarded Charleston Harbor, the principal port of the Confederacy, and was built on earthen parapets that rose thirty feet above the beach.

• It had only one land-facing side, which was bordered with a water-filled ditch ten feet wide.

• Shaw’s battalions were already weakened and exhausted when they approached Fort Wagner on July 18, after a grueling two-day march through driving rain.

• And as their commanding officer would have known, the attack was doomed before it began, for the Union troops were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Confederates.

• Nevertheless, Shaw rode into battle flourishing his sword and shouting, “Forward, Fifty-fourth!”

• Two days later, Shaw and his men were among the units chosen to lead the assault on Battery Wagner, part of the defenses of Charleston. Shaw was killed in the charge, bravely urging his men forward, but the 54th had proven that they were as brave as anyone, black or white.

• As he crested the ramparts, three enemy bullets shot him down.

• His body was later stripped and thrown with those of his troops into a mass grave.

• In the end, 281 soldiers and officers from the unit were lost at Fort Wagner—killed or never accounted for—and countless others were injured.

• Confederate General Johnson Hagood refused to return Shaw’s body to the Union army, and to show contempt for the officer who led black troops, Hagood had Shaw’s body buried in a common trench with his men.

• Rather than considering this a dishonor, Shaw’s father proclaimed “We would not have his body removed from where it lies surrounded by his brave and devoted soldiers....We can imagine no holier place than that in which he lies, among his brave and devoted followers, nor wish for him better company – what a body-guard he has!”

• The victorious Confederates buried him in a mass grave with many of his men, an act they intended as an insult.

• Following the battle, commanding Confederate General Johnson Hagood returned the bodies of the other Union officers who had died, but left Shaw's where it was.

• Hagood informed a captured Union surgeon that "had he been in command of white troops, I should have given him an honorable burial; as it is, I shall bury him in the common trench with the negroes that fell with him."

• Although efforts were made to recover Shaw's body (which had been stripped and robbed prior to burial), Shaw's father publicly proclaimed that he was proud to know that his son was interred with his troops, befitting his role as a soldier and a crusader for social justice.

In a letter to the regimental surgeon, Lincoln

Stone, Frank Shaw wrote: • We would not have his body removed from

where it lies surrounded by his brave and devoted soldiers....We can imagine no holier place than that in which he lies, among his brave and devoted followers, nor wish for him better company – what a body-guard he has!

• Despite that dramatic defeat, the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth had successfully “established its reputation as a fighting regiment.”

• In the words of one of its surviving officers, Frederick Douglass’ son Lewis:

“Not a man flinched.”

• Reports of their extraordinary courage rallied African Americans to the cause, and Abraham Lincoln later surmised that the additional manpower they supplied had made the critical difference to the outcome of the war.

• Like Shaw, Saint Gaudens also struggled with his ethics even as he worked on this sculpture.

• Years later, he admitted that initially he took the commission for this monument, not out of deep feeling for the subject, but to make money and further his career.

• The future sculptor as a young boy in New York, during the Civil War, had seen race riots and he could not forget them.

• His own father had also been an abolitionist.

• He worked on this monument for more than 17 years with an intense desire to be fair to these men, their meaning and their individual courage.

• The dignity of every man is respected.

Allegory

• Saint-Gaudens symbolized this paradoxical military episode in which defeat gives rise to victory with the winged figure that hovers in low relief above the soldiers;

• she carries poppies, traditional emblems of death and remembrance, and an olive branch for victory and peace.

• Apart from that concession to allegory, Saint-Gaudens worked in a realistic style.

• If the portrait of Shaw appears idealized, his rigid posture and resolute gaze nonetheless accord with contemporary accounts of his brave demeanor as he entered battle like a sacrificial lamb.

• More remarkable is the stoic procession of soldiers, portrayed not as cogs in the machinery of war but as individuals participating in a moral crusade.

• In a time when African Americans were usually depicted as generic types, Saint-Gaudens searched out models and produced some forty portrait-heads in clay, even though he used only sixteen in the sculpture itself.

• The ragged uniforms of the recruits are each disheveled in a different way—not to undermine the soldier’s gallantry, as some have argued, but to recall their long and dreary trudge to Charleston Harbor.

• “There they march,” said William James, “warm-blooded champions of a better day for man.”

• Their baggy uniforms, and the horse are weighty, substantial. But there is lightness too, even gaiety, in the spiky guns rising up.

• The drama of opposing diagonals—the forward moving legs of the men and horse and the backward thrust of the guns—work to move the men forward; and their faces are thoughtful as they go into battle.

• Unlike most heroic sculpture, this monument is placed close to the earth and walking by, you cannot help but become part of the march to justice. Saint Gaudens, visually, enlists us in the army of ethics.

• Your eyes cannot skim across this procession of sameness and difference; you go up and down with man and animal, white and black—all in bronze.

• Each face is given individuality.

• Located on Boston Commons, St. Gaudens’ bronze relief sculpture, in a setting designed by architect Charles McKim, is eleven feet high by fourteen feet wide.

• With an angel above pointing the way and Shaw riding a horse, the group of men, portrayed almost life size, march proudly along, carrying their guns on their shoulders—not in behalf of cruelty but to fight the injustice of slavery.

• In 1982, sixty-two names of African American soldiers who gave their lives at Fort Wagner were inscribed on the base of the Shaw Memorial.

Other work of August Saint Gaudens

Robert Louis Stevenson

American Eagle gold bullion coins that were instituted in 1986

The Adams Memorial

Marian "Clover" Hooper Adams

• Adams advised Saint-Gaudens to contemplate iconic images from Buddhist devotional art. One such subject, Kwannon (also known as Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of compassion), is frequently depicted as a seated figure draped in cloth.

• find a drum

• Where are the flags?

• The drum is on the far right.

• The flags are on the left, behind the rifles.

• look closely at the individual faces.

• Which ones wear mustaches and beards?

• How are the foot soldiers dressed?

• What do they carry on their backs?

• What else do they carry?

• Compare the foot soldiers’ dress with Colonel Shaw’s.

• What does Shaw hold?

• They wear caps, long-sleeve shirts, shoes, and long pants, and they carry canteens.

• They shoulder bed rolls and packs. They also carry rifles.

• Both wear caps with visors, but the foot soldiers’ hats are more wrinkled. Shaw wears a long jacket and boots.

• What does Shaw hold? He holds a sword in one hand and his horse’s reins in the other.

• Discuss how artists can create rhythm in works of visual art.

• How did Saint-Gaudens create a sense of rhythm in this relief?

• He repeated the slant of leg and body lines and shapes at regular intervals across the sculpture.

• (Even the horse’s legs match the slant of the marching soldiers’ legs.)

• The repeated rifles create a steady rhythm in the top half of the sculpture.

• Only Shaw’s upright form and his horse’s neck interrupt the steady march across the sculpture.

• How did Saint-Gaudens create a sense of depth in this sculpture?

• Soldiers who are closer to us stand out farther from the background; they are in greater relief.

• How do you know that some soldiers are closer to viewers than others?

• The soldiers at the back are in low relief.

• The closer forms also overlap the more distant ones.

• Which figure is closest to the viewer in highest relief?

• Colonel Robert Shaw

Essay Question 1

• Who is in command?

• How do you know?

Essay Question 2

• This was commissioned to honor and remember Robert Shaw, but who else does it commemorate?

Essay Question 3

• Why was this monument made of bronze rather than marble or wood?

Essay Question 4

• What does the winged figure in the sky hold?

• What do you think this figure in the sky represents? Why?