Author: Peter Burchard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American soldiers
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Story of Shaw's life and his heroic command of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first Negro unit raised in the North in the Civil War.
Author: Peter Burchard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American soldiers
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Story of Shaw's life and his heroic command of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first Negro unit raised in the North in the Civil War.
Author: Peter Burchard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American soldiers
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Story of Shaw's life and his heroic command of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first Negro unit raised in the North in the Civil War.
Author: Peter Burchard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American soldiers
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Story of Shaw's life and his heroic command of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first Negro unit raised in the North in the Civil War.
Author: Peter Burchard
Publisher: Saint Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 9780312039035
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Simply written, factually sound, this is the story of the first black regiment, the courageous Massachusetts Fifty Fourth, and of its commander, Robert Gould Shaw.
Author: Robert Gould Shaw
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820342777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
On the Boston Common stands one of the great Civil War memorials, a magnificent bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It depicts the black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry marching alongside their young white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. When the philosopher William James dedicated the memorial in May 1897, he stirred the assembled crowd with these words: "There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback among them, in the very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune." In this book Shaw speaks for himself with equal eloquence through nearly two hundred letters he wrote to his family and friends during the Civil War. The portrait that emerges is of a man more divided and complex--though no less heroic--than the Shaw depicted in the celebrated film Glory. The pampered son of wealthy Boston abolitionists, Shaw was no abolitionist himself, but he was among the first patriots to respond to Lincoln's call for troops after the attack on Fort Sumter. After Cedar Mountain and Antietam, Shaw knew the carnage of war firsthand. Describing nightfall on the Antietam battlefield, he wrote, "the crickets chirped, and the frogs croaked, just as if nothing unusual had happened all day long, and presently the stars came out bright, and we lay down among the dead, and slept soundly until daylight. There were twenty dead bodies within a rod of me." When Federal war aims shifted from an emphasis on restoring the Union to the higher goal of emancipation for four million slaves, Shaw's mother pressured her son into accepting the command of the North's vanguard black regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. A paternalist who never fully reconciled his own prejudices about black inferiority, Shaw assumed the command with great reluctance. Yet, as he trained his recruits in Readville, Massachusetts, during the early months of 1963, he came to respect their pluck and dedication. "There is not the least doubt," he wrote his mother, "that we shall leave the state, with as good a regiment, as any that has marched." Despite such expressions of confidence, Shaw in fact continued to worry about how well his troops would perform under fire. The ultimate test came in South Carolina in July 1863, when the Fifty-fourth led a brave but ill-fated charge on Fort Wagner, at the approach to Charleston Harbor. As Shaw waved his sword and urged his men forward, an enemy bullet felled him on the fort's parapet. A few hours later the Confederates dumped his body into a mass grave with the bodies of twenty of his men. Although the assault was a failure from a military standpoint, it proved the proposition to which Shaw had reluctantly dedicated himself when he took command of the Fifty-fourth: that black soldiers could indeed be fighting men. By year's end, sixty new black regiments were being organized. A previous selection of Shaw's correspondence was privately published by his family in 1864. For this volume, Russell Duncan has restored many passages omitted from the earlier edition and has provided detailed explanatory notes to the letters. In addition he has written a lengthy biographical essay that places the young colonel and his regiment in historical context.
Author: Russell Duncan
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820321362
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
On July 18, 1863, the African American soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry led a courageous but ill-fated charge on Fort Wagner, a key bastion guarding Charleston harbor. Confederate defenders killed, wounded, or made prisoners of half the regiment. Only hours later, the body of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the regiment's white commander, was thrown into a mass grave with those of twenty of his men. The assault promoted the young colonel to the higher rank of martyr, ranking him alongside the legendary John Brown in the eyes of abolitionists. In this biography of Shaw, Russell Duncan presents a poignant portrait of an average young soldier, just past the cusp of manhood and still struggling against his mother's indomitable will, thrust unexpectedly into the national limelight. Using information gleaned from Shaw's letters home before and during the war, Duncan tells the story of the rebellious son of wealthy Boston abolitionists who never fully reconciled his own racial prejudices yet went on to head the North's vanguard black regiment and give his life to the cause of freedom. This thorough biography looks at Shaw from historical and psychological viewpoints and examines the complex family relationships that so strongly influenced him.
Author: Luis Fenollosa Emilio
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Massachusetts
Languages : en
Pages : 536
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Book Description
Author: Tom Chaffin
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 0374707006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 487
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Book Description
Assembled from hundreds of original documents, including intimate shipboard journals kept by Shenandoah officers, Sea of Gray is a masterful narrative of men at sea The sleek, 222-foot, black auxiliary steamer Sea King left London on October 8, 1864, ostensibly bound for Bombay. The subterfuge was ended off the shores of Madeira, where the ship was outfitted for war. The newly christened CSS Shenandoah then commenced the last, most quixotic sea story of the Civil War: the 58,000-mile, around-the-world cruise of the Confederacy's second most successful commerce raider. Before its voyage was over, thirty-two Union merchant and whaling ships and their cargoes would be destroyed. But it was only after ship and crew embarked on the last leg of their journey that the excursion took its most fearful turn. Four months after the Civil War was over, the Shenandoah's Captain Waddell finally learned he was, and had been, fighting without cause or state. In the eyes of the world, he had gone from being an enemy combatant to being a pirate—a hangable offense. Now fearing capture and mutiny, with supplies quickly dwindling, Waddell elected to camouflage the ship, circumnavigate the globe, and attempt to surrender on English soil. "A superb account of how the Confederate raider Shenandoah brought the American Civil War to the farthest reaches of the world." -- Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Mayflower and Sea of Glory
Author: John D. Warner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0811770869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463
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Book Description
The service of African-American soldiers during the Civil War is one of that conflict’s most stirring, if still not completely understood, aspects. In this comprehensive account—from recruitment into combat, and covering all the military, political, and social aspects of this story—John D. Warner recounts the history of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment, the only Black cavalry regiment raised in the North during the war. After Massachusetts made history with the 54th and 55th Infantry Regiments, its governor wanted to continue the experiment of training African-Americans as Union fighting men, this time as cavalry. Where the infantry regiments recruited largely free Blacks from the North, the 5th focused on escaped slaves who it was believed would be better horsemen. (But not solely: the regiment’s members included a son of Frederick Douglass and, interestingly, several Hawaiian islanders.) This gave the regiment a sharper edge: not only would the former slaves be fighting for themselves, but they would be fighting to liberate loved ones still enslaved. The 5th’s officers were drawn from Boston’s abolitionist elite, including Charles Francis Adams Jr., great-grandson and grandson of U.S. presidents, son of the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. In the spring of 1864, the regiment journeyed south and fought in Grant’s siege of Petersburg, where it joined attacks that nearly took the city in June. The 5th was then abruptly sent to Maryland to guard Confederate prisoners of war, until Col. Charles Francis Adams advocated for, and was granted, a return to combat duty. As part of the mostly Black XXV Corps, the cavalrymen found themselves at the vanguard of the Union army as it captured Richmond. On April 3, 1865, the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment was among the first units to enter the burning Confederate capital, at once a hellscape of destruction and a heaven for liberated slaves. Denied the rapid demobilization granted white regiments, the 5th ended the war in Texas on the Mexican border. In the spirit of the book One Gallant Rush and the movie Glory, Riders in the Storm covers—uncovers and indeed recovers—the story of the African-American cavalrymen of the 5th Massachusetts. Author John Warner has literal fingertip command of the primary sources, and after spending two decades researching letters, diaries, reports, newspapers, and more, he tells a story of resilience in the face of adversity, one that will resonate not just during the present moment of reckoning with race in the United States, but in the annals of American history for all time.
