Content area
Full Text
Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Ed. by Russell Duncan. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. xxviii, 421 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8203-1459-5.)
On July 18, 1863, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, composed of black soldiers, assaulted Fort Wagner, South Carolina, as part of Union operations against Charleston. The regiment was well stocked with the offspring of great men, white and black, including two sons of Frederick Douglass (one of whom was absent that day) and Garth Wilkinson James, brother of William and Henry. Its commander, Col. Robert Gould Shaw, led the assault; he, along with many of his black comrades, fell as the Confederates repulsed the attack, then buried Shaw and his slain comrades in a mass grave.
The burial was but the first of several efforts to make Shaw a symbol of the war's meaning....