Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty Fourth Regiment

Sculpture

Considered greatest American sculpture of the 19th century

Aftermath of Civil War- huge interest in honoring heroes through public and permanent sculptures, wanted to create grand and moving monuments to nation’s heroes

Artist

Saint Gaudens of Irish ancestry , did many portrait sculptures, 200 commissions, 75% portraits

Gaudens created Diana sculpture at Philadelphia Art Museum

Background on 54 th

Efforts made to enlist men from the NE states , Mass had small AA population

54th not the first black regiment

most recruits were free blacks

Frederick Douglass’ two sons enlisted

Officers for regiment chosen from families with strong antislavery convictions

Willing to lend moral and financial support

Robert Gould Shaw

Only son

Friends with great thinkers of the day including Harriet Beecher Stowe

Attended Harvard

Left before graduation , worked for uncle in NY

Found vocation in the Army

Wounded at Antietam

At first declined offer to lead the 54th

Married one month when parade for 54th occurred

Wrote to federal government protesting less pay of blacks in regiment, 18 month protest before blacks received full back pay

Battles

James Island 250 Union soldiers held ground against 900 Confederate soldiers

Morris Island

Shaw asked to lead attack on Fort Wagner- shot through the heart at Wagner

William Carney held the flay despite wounds, first AA to win Medal of Honor

Union casualties- 1500, 10x that of Confederacy

600 in the 54th

? captured, wounded or killed

Order for Shaw’s body to be buried with 20 of his men

Parents requested that body not be moved

Survivors successfully took Ft. Wagner and served until the end of the war

Irrefutable example of valor and military skill

Blacks in the military during the Civil War

180,000 AA men fought

25% of sailors were AA

Contribution of AA troops tipped scales towards Union victory

Attempts to build memorial

Survivors of 54th raised funds for memorial on Morris Island, never built

Joshua Smith, 1865, AA business man , had worked for Shaws, led committee to build monument in Boston, committee of 21

Quote: “…not only to mark the public gratitude to the fallen hero, who at a critical moment assumed a perilous responsibility , but also to commemorate the great event, wherein he was a leader , by which the title of colored men as citizen-soldiers was fixed beyond recall.”

Process in creating monument

Saint Gaudens used forty models, 16 heads in sculpture

Tableau of variation, energy and activity

Shaw- straight posture-seriousness of endeavor, moral rectitude, acceptance of civic responsibility

Troops-pushing forward, action/silence of death-blank area of men in front

Allegorical figure above-olive branch=peace, poppy=sleep, death and remembrance

Originally going to use a palm branch instead of olive branch to signify martyrdom

Allegorial figure above troops shows differences- past v. present, actionv. Remembrance, real v. ideal

Latin quote means: “He forsook all to preserve the public weal.”

Key to sculpture: expressive modeling of infantrymen’s faces- intense determination and seriousness of purpose, each face is different reminding us that war is fought by individuals with “full lives, families, hopes and dreams.”

Mistake on sculpture battle date reads July 23, actually July 18

Influenced by sculptures he saw in Rome and Paris

Memorial

Dedicated May 1897

Veterans of 54th at dedication along with governor and Booker T. Washington among others

Many poems and songs written about statue

“Robert Gould Shaw” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Why was it that the thunder voice of Fate
Should call thee, studious, from the classic 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' unlettered and despised droves
To manhood's home and thunder at the gate?

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 with thee died for right
Have died, the Present teaches, but in vain!\

For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell



Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes
breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble.
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

Henrietta Cordelia Ray- Robert G. Shaw

When War's red banners trailed along the sky,
And many a manly heart grew all aflame
With patriotic love and purest aim,
There rose a noble soul who dared to die,
If only Right could win. He heard the cry
Of struggling bondmen and he quickly came,
Leaving the haunts where Learning tenders fame
Unto her honored sons; for it was ay
A loftier cause that lured him on to death.
Brave men who saw their brothers held in chains,
Beneath his standard battled ardently.
O friend! O hero! thou who yielded breath
That others might share Freedom s priceless gains,
In rev'rent love we guard thy memory.

Charles Ives

The "Saint Gaudens" in Boston Common

The first movement was initially inspired by the Augustus Saint-Gaudens' bas-relief on Boston Common in Boston, Massachusetts. The sculpture depicts the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. (The 54th was an African-American unit of soldiers who fought in the Civil War.)

Ives included the following poem (which he composed himself) with the score:

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

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

Above and beyond that compelling mass
Rises the drum beat of the common-heart
In the silence of a strange and
Sounding afterglow
Moving,-Marching-Faces of Souls!

Additional information

www.nps.gov/boaf/historyculture/shaw.htm

or.org/pss/274405

.suffolk.edu/richman/Eng481/Lowell.htm

.gov/feature/shaw/s6151.shtm

National Gallery of Art

Atkinson, Edward, ed. The Monument to Robert Gould Shaw: Its Inception, Completion and Unveiling 1865-1897. Boston, 1897.

Blight, David. "The Meaning or the Fight: Frederick Douglass and the Memory of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts." The Massachusetts Review 36 (Spring 1995): 141-153.

Burchard, Peter. One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment. New York, 1965.

Burkhardt, J. Peter. All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing. New Haven, 1995.

Coffin, William; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. "The Shaw Memorial and the Sculptor St. Gaudens." Century Magazine 54 (June 1897): 176-200.

Craven, Wayne. Sculpture in America. Newark, 1984.

Dryfhout, John H. The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Hanover, N.H. and London, 1982.

Duncan, Russell, ed. Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Robert Gould Shaw. Athens, Ga. and London, 1992.

Emilio, Luis F. History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863-1865. New York, 1968.

Gooding, James Henry. Edited by Virginia Adams. On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier's Civil War Letters from the Front. New York, 1992.

Greenthal, Kathryn. Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master Sculptor. Boston, 1985.

Griffin, Edward M. "Cincinnatus and the 'Shaw Memorial': Monument as Emblem in Saint Gaudens, Dunbar, and Lowell." In Bagley, Ayers L.; Griffin, Edward M.; and McLean, Austin J., ed. The Telling Image: Explorations in the Emblem. New York, 1996.

Hansen, Chadwick. "The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Black Infantry as a Subject for American Artists." The Massachusetts Review 15 (1975): 745-759.

Janson, H.W. 19th-Century Sculpture. New York, 1985.

Kaplan, Sidney. "The Sculptural World of Augustus Saint-Gaudens." The Massachusetts Review 30 (Spring 1989): 17-64.

Kirstein, Lincoln. Lay this Laurel. New York, 1973.

Lowell, Robert. For the Union Dead. New York, 1956.

Marcus, Lois Goldreich. "'The Shaw Memorial' by Augustus Saint-Gaudens: A History Painting in Bronze." Winterthur Portfolio 14 (Spring 1979): 1-24.

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus. Edited by Homer Saint-Gaudens. The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. New York, 1913.

Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in 19th-Century America. Princeton, 1997.

Schwarz, Gregory; Brigid Sullivan; and Ludwig Lauerhass, Jr. The Shaw Memorial: A Celebration of an American Masterpiece. Cornish, N.H., 1997.

Swafford, Jan. Charles Ives: A Life with Music. New York, 1996.

Taft, Lorado. Modern Tendencies in Sculpture. New York, 1921.

Taft, Lorado. The History of American Sculpture. New York, 1903.

Tharp, Louise Hall. Saint-Gaudens and the Gilded Era. Boston, 1969.

Wilkinson, Burke. Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. San Diego, 1985.