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Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment = Commissioned from the celebrated American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the early 1880s and dedicated as a monument in 1897, the Shaw Memorial has been acclaimed as the greatest American sculpture of the nineteenth century. The memorial commemorates the valor of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the men of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment, the first Civil War unit of African Americans enlisted in the North. On May 28, 1863, the largest crowd in Boston's history assembled to send off the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment to fight in the Civil War. Many onlookers had purchased a souvenir of the day containing a quote from the English poet Lord Byron: "Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." = Marching past onlookers into the conflict that would end slavery, were 1,000 black soldiers on parade -- the fifth African-American troop to be organized in the war between the states. Recruited from the Northeast, Midwest, and Canada by abolitionist leaders including Frederick Douglass, the regiment included Douglass' two sons Lewis and Charles, James Caldwell, the grandson of Sojourner Truth, and William H. Carney, the first African-American to win the Medal of Honor. = Robert Gould Shaw, their commander, led the military procession on a black horse. In front of his mother's family home at 44 Beacon Street, the 25-year-old Shaw stopped and, in salute to his family including his bride of less than one month, raised his sword to his lips. = Two months later, Shaw and one-third of his men would be dead, many of them on the earth rampart of Fort Wagner, one of the forts protecting Charleston, South Carolina, the bastion of Confederate secession. But even in defeat the brave 54th legitimized the idea of blacks in the military and, according to President Lincoln, was a turning point in the war. = Colonel Shaw and his regiment were remembered almost thirty-five years later in a monument of enormous emotional power and artistry, unveiled on the Boston Common on Memorial Day, 1897. Its sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, had taken more than a dozen years to create it. His work started off with the idea of a single equestrian statue of the young Colonel Shaw, following a long tradition in military statuary. Soon, however, it became a procession of black soldiers and their white leader, moving together toward the goal of emancipation. = Over the last century, the large bronze relief sculpture dedicated to Shaw and his regiment, as well as the plaster from which it was cast, have drawn international attention. The bronze stands on the Boston Common across from the State House, the plaster -- until recently -- at the sculptor's home in Cornish, New Hampshire. = Saint-Gaudens Biography

The biography of Augustus Saint-Gaudens includes the sculptor's formative years as a cameo maker's apprentice and his first collaborations in the 1870s. His first public commission was for the Farragut Memorial in New York. The Standing Lincoln memorial of 1885 and the Adams Memorial of 1886 are among his best-known works. His Shaw Memorial, an extraordinary relief monument, is considered by many to be among the best scultural works of the nineteenth century. Saint-Gaudens continued to work at Cornish, New Hampshire, during the last decade of his life.

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