The Shaw Memorial

An Example of Artistic Meanings in Multiple Genres, Across Time,

Around an Event of Significance

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Shaw Memorial, 1884-98

Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907)• Saint-Gaudens born in

Dublin, Ireland, to mixed Irish/French parentage

• Moved to US with parents while still an infant

• One of America’s best-known public sculptors in the 19th century

• Commissioned for Shaw Memorial in 1884, unveiling in Boston 1898

• St. Gaudens included the names of the white officers in the completed Shaw Memorial. There was no mention of any Negro officers.

• St. Gaudens referred to the models for the Negro soldiers as “darkeys,” and commented on their “imaginative, though simple, minds” and “amusing lies” about taking part in the assault at Fort Wagner.

• The bigotry of St. Gaudens is ironic, considering the message of his Shaw Memorial.

Augustus St. Gaudens and Racism

Slide by Nathan

Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907)

Diana

LibertyCoin

FarragutMemorial

The Puritan

Precursors and Background

• Augustus St. Gaudens depicted Shaw as an all-important figure, watched over by the divine.

• Robert Gould Shaw’s family objected to St. Gaudens’ making the memorial into an equestrian statue, calling it “pretentious.” They felt a man of Shaw’s rank was not deserving of such an honor.

– It was in response to this that St. Gaudens included the Negro soldiers in the memorial. In his words, he “reconciled [his] desire with their ideas.”

The Shaw Memorial’s Conception

Slide by Nathan

Massachusetts 54th Regiment – African-American Union Civil War Regiment – led by white officers, most notably Robert Gould Shaw (1837-1863)

54th organized in 1863, idea proposed and discussed by Union leaders, Abolitionists, and prominent African-Americans, including Frederick Douglass

In training February-May 1863In parade in Boston – May 1863 (Douglass and

John Greenleaf Whittier present)To battlefield along SC & GA coast – June 1863Assault on Fort Wagner – July 16, 1863

(Harriet Tubman & Clare Barton present)

Shaw and the 54th • Initially took position as commander of the 54th to please his mother,

who was an abolitionist.

– Originally did not share passion for abolition.

• Eventually grew to respect his men and believed they could fight as well as white soldiers.

• Fought and held boycott until his soldiers received equal pay.

• On May 28, 1863 Shaw lead his troops on a parade in Boston where they departed for South Carolina.

• 54th was originally tasked for manual labor and did not see action until July 16th at James Island.

• Shaw and the 54th was chosen to lead the assault on Battery Wagner.

– 54th regiment proved to be as brave as any white troops, but Shaw was killed in the assault.

• Shaw was buried in mass grave under his black troops.

Civil War Trust." Robert Gould Shaw. Civilwar.com, n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2012. <http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/biographies/robert-gould-shaw.html>.

Slide by: Bert Stewart

Assault on Ft. Wagner, 1863• Colonel Shaw

and many of his men killed

• Confederate soldiers buried Shaw and Black soldiers in a common grave, considering this an insult to Shaw

William Carney

• Member of Massachusetts 54th

• First African-American to receive the Medal of Honor

• Noted for rescuing the flag when Col. Shaw fell at Ft. Wagner

Edmonia Lewis(ca.1845-1911)

• Free Black father, Ojibwa mother; birth name “Wildfire”

• Among first American women to attend college, at Oberlin - first US college to admit African-Americans, and women

• Bust of Shaw from 1864

JoAnne Hileman

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman worked as a nurse at Port Royal. She cared for soldiers with dysentery and small pox. She worked with General David Hunter (a strong abolition supporter), who declared all slaves captured in Port Royal freed and he began gathering them for a regiment of black soldiers.

Harriet Tubman was on hand for the battle at Ft. Wagner. It is believed that she served Colonel Shaw his last meal.

When the battle at Ft. Wagner was over, Tubman is quoted as

saying “And then we saw the

lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the

thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the

rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and

when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”

The attack on Fort Wagner, while a military disaster, was successful in increasing the number of black enlistments in the Union army by tenfold after the battle.

Slide by Ana Bogart

JoAnne Hileman

At the beginning of the war soldiers on both sides made the same $11/month, with the exception of the black soldiers who received $10/month, minus a $3 allowance that was given to white soldiers for uniforms. In June of 1864 the Confederacy increased their pay to $18/month. The Union army raised their soldiers pay to $16/month.

The only exception to the pay increase was for the black soldiers, if they were free men before they joined the military, their pay matched the white soldiers, but if they were recently freed slaves, their pay remained $10/month-minus $3 per month that the white soldiers got as a uniform allowance.

Poets Inspired by the Events• James Russell Lowell• William Vaughn Moody• John Berryman• Thomas Bailey Aldrich• Paul Laurence Dunbar• Ralph Waldo Emerson• Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow• Robert Lowell

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,So near is God to man,When Duty whispers low, Thou must,The youth replies, I can.

Emerson - from Voluntaries

Paul Laurence Dunbar

My Hero by Benjamin Brawley

• The poem entitled “My Hero,” published in 1922, was written by a black Harlem Renaissance writer, Benjamin Griffith Brawley, in honor of the white Civil War colonel of the all-black 54th regiment, Robert Gould Shaw. The poem is noteworthy for the time period because Brawley gives homage to a white colonel who fought to give black soldiers the honor and respect due them, ultimately laying his life down for a cause he believed in.

Slide by Ana Bogart

My Heroby Benjamin Brawley April 22, 1882 - February 1, 1939

FLUSHED with the hope of high desire,He buckled on his sword,

To dare the rampart ranged with fire,Or where the thunder roared;

Into the smoke and flame he went,For God’s great cause to die—A youth of heaven’s element,

The flower of chivalry.

This was the gallant faith, I trow,Of which the sages tell;

On such devotion long agoThe benediction fell;

And never nobler martyr burned,Or braver hero died,

Than he who worldly honor spurnedTo serve the Crucified.

And Lancelot and Sir BedivereMay pass beyond the pale,

And wander over moor and mereTo find the Holy Grail;

But ever yet the prize forsoothMy hero holds in fee;

And he is Blameless Knight in truth,And Galahad to me.

Slide by Ana Bogart

Robert Gould Shaw

Glory, 1989 Movie

• Starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes, Morgan Freeman

Three Places in New England

Charles Ives (1874-1954) (1914, revised 1929,

premiered 1931)First Movement

‘The St. Gaudens in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and

his Colored Regiment)’

Charles Ives Three Places in

New EnglandDedicatory Poem

Moving, - Marching - Faces of Souls!Marked with generations of pain,Part-freers of a Destiny,Slowly, restlessly - swaying us on with youTowards other Freedom!

The man on horseback, carved fromA native quarry of the world LibertyAnd from what your country was made.

You images of a Divine LawCarved in the shadow of a saddened heart - Never light abandoned - Of an age and of a nation.

Above and beyond that compelling massRises the drum-beat of the common-heartIn the silence of a strange andSounding afterglowMoving - Marching - Faces of Souls!

Details of Shaw Memorial

Position of Colonel Shaw

Legs of Soldiers and Horses

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

• The Abolitionists, both Black and white, had imagined an anti-racist future, but the white majority society moved towards prejudice after the Civil War

• Plessy v. Ferguson was the Supreme Court decision that legalized segregation, as long as facilities were “separate but equal”

• It represented the apogee of a resurgent white supremacism, that now pretended to scientific bases for its racism

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)Excerpts from the decision

• “if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane”

• “the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument…(is) the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so…(it is) solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

• Laws upholding segregation “do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other”

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)• Lone dissenting vote on the

Plessy v. Ferguson decision, John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911) was born in Kentucky and had been a slave-holder through the Civil War, even while serving in the Union army.

• He wrote in his dissent “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

“Robert Gould Shaw”(1900) by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

Why was it that the thunder voice of Fate

Should call thee, studious, from the classical 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’ unfettered and despised droves

To manhood’s home thunder at the gate?

“Robert Gould Shaw”(1900) by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

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 died for right

Have died, the Present teaches, but in vain!

Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial

• Official name of the Memorial is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial– Also known as VVM or “The Wall”

• Not a war Memorial but a Memorial to those who served in the war, both living and dead

• The names were NOT carved by hand, but by a computerized typesetting process developed by Larry Century, specifically for the Memorial, in Memphis, Tennessee

Freya

• Founded by Jan Scruggs • On July 1, 1980, in the Rose Garden, President

Jimmy Carter signed the legislation (P.L. 96-297) to provide a site in Constitution Gardens near the Lincoln Memorial

Freya

Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial: Maya Lin

• Lin won a public design competition for the Vietnam Memorial in 1981 (21 years old)

• Unconventional design– Memorial is deep in the Earth to symbolize the gravity of loss of the soldiers

• Controversy because Lin was of Asian Decent (Chinese-American)

• Lin is now a prestigious architectural designer – won the National Medal of Arts in 2009

Danielle

The Irish Brigade-During the Civil War thousands of Irish immigrants and Irish-American fought on behalf of the Union in ethnic regiments

-Many joined the Union to assimilate into the American culture and also to alleviate the anti-Irish prejudice in the U.S.

-However, they Irish weren’t completely unsympathetic to the Confederate fight.

-They viewed the fight of the Confederacy for independence against the strong government as a representation of the Irish fight against the British.

-The Brigade was composed of 4 regiments: the 63rd and 69th from New York, and the 88th and 29th regiments from Massachusetts.

Angie Rodriguez

The Irish Brigade: Famous Battles Antietam: On September 17, 1862, the brigade lead an attack on the

Confederate army on a sunken road farm that later became known as “Bloody Lane” . They charged toward the confederate soldiers with their bayonets. However that wasn’t enough to protect them and as a result 60 percent of the New York regiments, 600 in total were killed.

-Battle of Fredericksburg, 545 men were either killed or wounded of the original 1,200.

-In the battle of Gettysburg, 320 of the brigade’s remaining 530 men were killed

-While many Irish died fighting for the Union resulting in the disbandment of the brigade, their courage, bravery and fighting spirit made them legendary among the other units.

Angie Rodriguez