Your Excellency, your Honor, Soldiers, and Friends: In these unveiling
exercises the duty falls to me of expressing in simple words some of
the feelings which have actuated the givers of St. Gaudens' noble work
of bronze, and of briefly recalling the history of Robert Shaw and of
his regiment to the memory of this possibly too forgetful generation.
The men who do brave deeds are usually unconscious of their
picturesqueness. For two nights previous to the assault upon Fort
Wagner, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment had been afoot, making
forced marches in the rain; and on the day of the battle the men had
had no food since early morning. As they lay there in the evening
twilight, hungry and wet, against the cold sands of Morris Island, with
the sea-fog drifting over them, their eyes fixed on the huge bulk of
the fortress looming darkly three-quarters of a mile ahead against the
sky, and their hearts beating in expectation of the word that was to
bring them to their feet and launch them on their desperate charge,
neither officers nor men could have been in any holiday mood of
contemplation. Many and different must have been the thoughts that
came and went in them during that hour of bodeful reverie; but however
free the flights of fancy of some of them may have been, it is
improbable that any one who lay there had so wild and whirling an
imagination as to foresee in prophetic vision this morning of a future
May, when we, the people of a richer and more splendid Boston, with
mayor and governor, and troops from other States, and every
circumstance of ceremony, should meet together to celebrate their
conduct on that evening, and do their memory this conspicuous honor.
How, indeed, comes it that out of all the great engagements of the war,
engagements in many of which the troops of Massachusetts had borne the
most distinguished part, this officer, only a young colonel, this
regiment of black men and its maiden battle,--a battle, moreover, which
was lost,--should be picked out for such unusual commemoration?
The historic significance of an event is measured neither by its
material magnitude, nor by its immediate success. Thermopylae was a
defeat; but to the Greek imagination, Leonidas and his few Spartans
stood for the whole worth of Grecian life. Bunker Hill was a defeat;
but for our people, the fight over that breastwork has always seemed to
show as well as any victory that our forefathers were men of a temper
not to be finally overcome. And so here. The war for our Union, with
all the constitutional questions which it settled, and all the military
lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but
one meaning in the eye of history. And nowhere was that meaning better
symbolized and embodied than in the constitution of this first Northern
negro regiment.
Look at the monument and read the story;--see the mingling of elements
which the sculptor's genius has brought so vividly before the eye.
There on foot go the dark outcasts, so true to nature that one can
almost hear them breathing as they march. State after State by its
laws had denied them to be human persons. The Southern leaders in
congressional debates, insolent in their security, loved most to
designate them by the contemptuous collective epithet of "this peculiar
kind of property." There they march, warm-blooded champions of a
better day for man. There on horseback, among them, in his very habit
as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy
youth every divinity had smiled. Onward they move together, a single
resolution kindled in their eyes, and animating their otherwise so
different frames. The bronze that makes their memory eternal betrays
the very soul and secret of those awful years.
Since the 'thirties the slavery question been the only question, and by
the end of 'fifties our land lay sick and shaking with it like a
traveller who has thrown himself down at night beside a pestilential
swamp, and in the morning finds the fever through the marrow of his
bones. "Only muzzle the Abolition fanatics," said the South, "and all
will be well again!" But the Abolitionists would not be muzzled,--they
were the voice of the world's conscience, they were a part of destiny.
Weak as they were, they drove the South to madness. "Every step she
takes in her blindness," said Wendell Phillips, "is one more step
towards ruin." And when South Carolina took the final step in
battering down Fort Sumter, it was the fanatics of slavery themselves
who called upon their idolized institution ruin swift and complete.
What law and reason were unable to accomplish, had now to be done by
that uncertain and dreadful dispenser of God's judgments, War--War,
with its abominably casual, inaccurate methods, destroying good and bad
together, but at last able to hew a way out of intolerable situations,
when through man's delusion of perversity every better way is blocked.
Our great western republic had from its origin been a singular anomaly.
A land of freedom, boastfully so-called, with human slavery enthroned
at the heart of it, and at last dictating terms of unconditional
surrender to every other organ of its life, what was it but a thing of
falsehood and horrible self-contradiction? For three-quarters of a
century it had nevertheless endured, kept together by policy,
compromise, and concession. But at the last that republic was torn in
two; and truth was to be possible under the flag. Truth, thank God,
truth! even though for the moment it must be truth written in hell-fire.
And this, fellow-citizens, is why, after the great generals have had
their monuments, and long after the abstract soldier's-monuments have
been reared on every village green, we have chosen to take Robert Shaw
and his regiment as the subjects of the first soldier's-monument to be
raised to a particular set of comparatively undistinguished men. The
very lack of external complication in the history of these soldiers is
what makes them represent with such typical purity the profounder
meaning of the Union cause.
Our nation had been founded in what we may call our American religion,
baptized and reared in the faith that a man requires no master to take
care of him, and that common people can work out their salvation well
enough together if left free to try. But the founders had not dared to
touch the great intractable exception; and slavery had wrought until at
last the only alternative for the nation was to fight or die. What
Shaw and his comrades stand for and show us is that in such an
emergency Americans of all complexions and conditions can go forth like
brothers, and meet death cheerfully if need be, in order that this
religion of our native land shall not become a failure on earth.
We of this Commonwealth believe in that religion; and it is not at all
because Robert Shaw was an exceptional genius, but simply because he
was faithful to it as we all may hope to be faithful in our measure
when the times demand, that we wish his beautiful image to stand here
for all time, an inciter to similarly unselfish public deeds.
Shaw thought but little of himself, yet he had a personal charm which,
as we look back on him, makes us repeat: "None knew thee but to love
thee, none named thee but to praise." This grace of nature was united
in him in the happiest way with a filial heart, a cheerful will, and a
judgment that was true and fair. And when the war came, and great
things were doing of the kind that he could help in, he went as a
matter of course to the front. What country under heaven has not
thousands of such youths to rejoice in, youths on whom the safety of
the human race depends? Whether or not they leave memorials behind
them, whether their names are writ in water or in marble, depends
mostly on the opportunities which the accidents of history throw into
their path. Shaw recognized the vital opportunity: he saw that the
time had come when the colored people must put the country in their
debt.
Colonel Lee has just told us something about the obstacles with which
this idea had to contend. For a large party of us this was still
exclusively a white man's war; and should colored troops be tried and
not succeed, confusion would grow worse confounded. Shaw was a captain
in the Massachusetts Second, when Governor Andrew invited him to take
the lead in the experiment. He was very modest, and doubted, for a
moment, his own capacity for so responsible a post. We may also
imagine human motives whispering other doubts. Shaw loved the Second
Regiment, illustrious already, and was sure of promotion where he
stood. In this new negro-soldier venture, loneliness was certain,
ridicule inevitable, failure possible; and Shaw was only twenty-five;
and, although he had stood among the bullets at Cedar Mountain and
Antietam, he had till then been walking socially on the sunny side of
life. But whatever doubts may have beset him, they were over in a day,
for he inclined naturally toward difficult resolves. He accepted the
proffered command, and from that moment lived but for one object, to
establish the honor of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth.
I have had the privilege of reading his letters to his family from the
day of April when, as a private in the New York Seventh, he obeyed the
President's first call. Some day they must be published, for they form
a veritable poem for serenity and simplicity of tone. He took to camp
life as if it were his native element, and (like so many of our young
soldiers) he was at first all eagerness to make arms his permanent
profession. Drilling and disciplining; interminable marching and
counter-marching, and picket-duty on the Upper Potomac as lieutenant in
our Second Regiment, to which post he had soon been promoted; pride at
the discipline attained by the Second, and horror at the bad discipline
of other regiments; these are the staple matter of earlier letters, and
last for many months. These, and occasional more recreative incidents,
visits to Virginian houses, the reading of books like Napier's
"Peninsular War," or the "Idylls of the King," Thanksgiving feats, and
races among officers, that helped the weary weeks to glide away. Then
the bloodier business opens, and the plot thickens till the end is
reached. From first to last there is not a rancorous word against the
enemy,--often quite the reverse,--and amid all the scenes of hardship,
death, and devastation that his pen soon has to write of, there is
unfailing cheerfulness and even a sort of innermost peace.
After he left it, Robert Shaw's heart still clung to the fortunes of
the Second. Months later when, in South Carolina with the
Fifty-fourth, he writes to his young wife: "I should have been major of
the Second now if I had remained there and lived through the battles.
As regards my own pleasure, I had rather have that place than any other
in the army. It would have been fine to go home a field officer in
that regiment! Poor fellows, how they have been slaughtered!"
Meanwhile he had well taught his new command how to do their duty; for
only three days after he wrote this he led them up the parapet of Fort
Wagner, where he and nearly half of them were left upon the ground.
Robert Shaw quickly inspired others with his own love of discipline.
There was something almost pathetic in the earnestness with which both
the officers and men of the Fifty-fourth embraced their mission of
showing that a black regiment could excel in every virtue known to man.
They had good success, and the Fifty-fourth became a model in all
possible respects. Almost the only trace of bitterness in Shaw's whole
correspondence is over an incident in which he thought his men had been
morally disgraced. It had become their duty, immediately after their
arrival at the seat of war, to participate, in obedience to fanatical
orders from the head of the department, in the sack and burning of the
inoffensive little town of Darien on the Georgia coast. "I fear," he
writes to his wife, "that such actions will hurt the reputation of
black troops and of those connected with them. For myself I have gone
through the war so far without dishonor, and I do not like to
degenerate into a plunderer and a robber,--and the same applies to
every officer in my regiment. After going through the hard campaigning
and the hard fighting in Virginia, this makes me very much ashamed.
There are two courses only for me to pursue: to obey orders and say
nothing; or to refuse to go upon any more such expeditions, and be put
under arrest and probably court-martialled, which is a very serious
thing." Fortunately for Shaw, the general in command of that
department was almost immediately relieved.
Four weeks of camp life and discipline on the Sea Islands, and the
regiment had its baptism of fire. A small affair, but it proved the
men to be staunch. Shaw again writes to his wife: "You don't know what
a fortunate day this has been for me and for us all, excepting some
poor fellows who were killed and wounded. We have fought at last
alongside of white troops. Two hundred of my men on picket this
morning were attacked by five regiments of infantry, some cavalry, and
a battery of artillery. The Tenth Connecticut were on their left, and
say they would have had a bad time if the Fifty-fourth men had not
stood so well. The whole division was under arms in fifteen minutes,
and after coming up close in front of us, the enemy, finding us so
strong, fell back. . . . General Terry sent me word he was highly
gratified with the behavior of our men, and the officers and privates
of other regiments praise us very much. All this is very gratifying to
us personally, and a fine thing for the colored troops. I know this
will give you pleasure for it wipes out the remembrance of the Darien
affair, which you could not but grieve over, though we were innocent
participators."
The adjutant of the Fifty-fourth, who made report of this skirmish to
General Terry, well expresses the feelings of loneliness that still
prevailed in that command:--
"The general's favorite regiment," writes the adjutant,[2] "the
Twenty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, one of the best that had so far
faced the rebel foe, largely officered by Boston men, was surrounding
his headquarters. It had been a living breathing suspicion with
us--perhaps not altogether justly--that all white troops abhorred our
presence in the army, and that the Twenty-fourth would rather hear of
us in some remote corner of the Confederacy than tolerate us in advance
of any battle in which they themselves were to act as reserves or
lookers-on. Can you not then readily imagine the pleasure which I felt
as I alighted from my horse before General Terry and his staff--I was
going to say his unfriendly staff, but of this I am not sure--to report
to him, with Colonel Shaw's compliments, that we had repulsed the enemy
without the loss of a single inch of ground. General Terry bade me
mount again and tell Colonel Shaw that he was proud of the conduct of
his men, and that he must still hold the ground against any future
sortie of the enemy. You can even now share with me the sensation of
that moment of soldierly satisfaction."
The next night but one after this episode was spent by the Fifty-fourth
in disembarking on Morris Island in the rain, and at noon Colonel Shaw
was able to report their arrival to General Strong, to whose brigade he
was assigned. A terrific bombardment was playing on Fort Wagner, then
the most formidable earthwork ever built, and the general, knowing
Shaw's desire to place his men beside white troops, said to him:
"Colonel, Fort Wagner is to be stormed this evening, and you may lead
the column, if you say Yes. Your men, I know, are worn out, but do as
you choose." Shaw's face brightened. "Before answering the general,
he instantly turned to me," writes the adjutant, who reports the
interview, "and said, Tell Colonel Hallowell to bring up the
Fifty-fourth immediately.'"
This was done, and just before nightfall the attack was made. Shaw was
serious, for he knew the assault was desperate, and had a premonition
of his end. Walking up and down in front of the regiment, he briefly
exhorted them to prove that they were men. Then he gave the order:
"Move in quick time till within a hundred yards, then double quick and
charge. Forward!" and the Fifty-fourth advanced to the storming, its
colonel and colors at its head.
On over the sand, through a narrow defile which broke up the formation,
double quick over the chevaux de frise, into the ditch and over it, as
best they could, and up the rampart with Fort Sumter, which had seen
them, playing on them, and Fort Wagner, now one mighty mound of fire,
tearing out their lives. Shaw led from first to last. Gaining
successfully the parapet, he stood there for a moment with uplifted
sword, shouting, "Forward, Fifty-fourth!" and then fell headlong, with
a bullet through his heart. The battle raged for nigh two hours.
Regiment after regiment, following upon the Fifty-fourth, hurled
themselves upon its ramparts, but Fort Wagner was nobly defended, and
for that night stood safe. The Fifty-fourth withdrew after two-thirds
of its officers and five-twelfths or nearly half its men had been shot
down or bayoneted within the fortress or before its walls. It was good
behavior for a regiment, no one of whose soldiers had had a musket in
his hands more than eighteen weeks, and which had seen the enemy for
the first time only two days before.
"The negroes fought gallantly," wrote a Confederate officer, "and were
headed by as brave a colonel as ever lived."
As for the colonel, not a drum was heard nor a funeral note, not a
soldier discharged his farewell shot, when the Confederates buried him,
the morning after the engagement. His body, half stripped of its
clothing, and the corpses of his dauntless negroes were flung into one
common trench together, and the sand was shovelled over them, without a
stake or stone to signalize the spot. In death as in life, then, the
Fifty-fourth bore witness to the brotherhood of man. The lover of
heroic history could wish for no more fitting sepulchre for Shaw's
magnanimous young heart. There let his body rest, united with the
forms of his brave nameless comrades. There let the breezes of the
Atlantic sigh, and its gales roar their requiem, while this bronze
effigy and these inscriptions keep their fame alive long after you and
I and all who meet here are forgotten.
How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this
morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and the
waves sparkling and the sea-gulls circling around Fort Wagner's ancient
site. But the great earthworks and their thundering cannon, the
commanders and their followers, the wild assault and repulse that for a
brief space made night hideous on that far-off evening, have all sunk
into the blue gulf of the past, and for the majority of this generation
are hardly more than an abstract name, a picture, a tale that is told.
Only when some yellow-bleached photograph of a soldier of the 'sixties
comes into our hands, with that odd and vivid look of individuality due
to the moment when it was taken, do we realize the concreteness of that
by-gone history, and feel how interminable to the actors in them were
those leaden-footed hours and years. The photographs themselves
erelong will fade utterly, and books of history and monuments like this
alone will tell the tale. The great war for the Union will be like the
siege of Troy; it will have taken its place amongst all other "old,
unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago."
In all such events two things must be distinguished--the moral service
of them from the fortitude which they display. War has been much
praised and celebrated among us of late as a school of manly virtue;
but it is easy to exaggerate upon this point. Ages ago, war was the
gory cradle of mankind, the grim-featured nurse that alone could train
our savage progenitors into some semblance of social virtue, teach them
to be faithful one to another, and force them to sink their selfishness
in wider tribal ends. War still excels in this prerogative; and
whether it be paid in years of service, in treasure, or in life-blood,
the war tax is still the only tax that men ungrudgingly will pay. How
could it be otherwise, when the survivors of one successful massacre
after another are the beings from whose loins we and all our
contemporary races spring? Man is once for all a fighting animal;
centuries of peaceful history could not breed the battle-instinct out
of us; and our pugnacity is the virtue least in need of reinforcement
by reflection, least in need of orator's or poet's help.
What we really need the poet's and orator's help to keep alive in us is
not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed
when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more
lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in
the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the
Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it
in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of
nations should most of all be reared, for the survival of the fittest
has not bred it into the bone of human beings as it has bred military
valor; and of five hundred of us who could storm a battery side by side
with others, perhaps not one would be found ready to risk his worldly
fortunes all alone in resisting an enthroned abuse. The deadliest
enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within
their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always
in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in
whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts
without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting
reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between
parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and
preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such
nations have no need of wars to save them. Their accounts with
righteousness are always even; and God's judgments do not have to
overtake them fitfully in bloody spasms and convulsions of the race.
The lesson that our war ought most of all to teach us is the lesson
that evils must be checked in time, before they grow so great. The
Almighty cannot love such long-postponed accounts, or such tremendous
settlements. And surely He hates all settlements that do such
quantities of incidental devils' work. Our present situation, with its
rancors and delusions, what is it but the direct outcome of the added
powers of government, the corruptions and inflations of the war? Every
war leaves such miserable legacies, fatal seeds of future war and
revolution, unless the civic virtues of the people save the State in
time.
Robert Shaw had both kinds of virtue. As he then led his regiment
against Fort Wagner, so surely would he now be leading us against all
lesser powers of darkness, had his sweet young life been spared. You
think of many as I speak of one. For, North and South, how many lives
as sweet, unmonumented for the most part, commemorated solely in the
hearts of mourning mothers, widowed brides, or friends did the
inexorable war mow down! Instead of the full years of natural service
from so many of her children, our country counts but their poor
memories, "the tender grace of a day that is dead," lingering like
echoes of past music on the vacant air.
But so and so only was it written that she should grow sound again.
From that fatal earlier unsoundness those lives have brought for North
and South together permanent release. The warfare is accomplished; the
iniquity is pardoned. No future problem can be like that problem. No
task laid on our children can compare in difficulty with the task with
which their fathers had to deal. Yet as we face the future, tasks
enough await us. The republic to which Robert Shaw and a quarter of a
million like him were faithful unto death is no republic that can live
at ease hereafter on the interest of what they have won. Democracy is
still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only
bulwark, and neither laws nor monuments, neither battleships nor public
libraries, nor great newspapers nor booming stocks; neither mechanical
invention nor political adroitness, nor churches nor universities nor
civil service examinations can save us from degeneration if the inner
mystery be lost. That mystery, as once the secret and the glory of our
English-speaking race, consists in nothing but two common habits, two
inveterate habits carried into public life,--habits so homely that they
lend themselves to no rhetorical expression, yet habits more precious,
perhaps, than any that the human race has gained. They can never be
too often pointed out or praised. One of them is the habit of trained
and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly
wins its innings. It was by breaking away from this habit that the
Slave States nearly wrecked our Nation. The other is that of fierce
and merciless resentment toward every man or set of men who break the
public peace. By holding to this habit the free States saved her life.
O my countrymen, Southern and Northern, brothers hereafter, masters,
slaves, and enemies no more, let us see to it that both of those
heirlooms are preserved. So may our ransomed country, like the city of
the promise, lie forever foursquare under Heaven, and the ways of all
the nations be lit up by its light.
[1] Oration at the Exercises in the Boston Music Hall, May 31, 1897,
upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument.
[2] G. W. James: "The Assault upon Fort Wagner," in _War Papers read
before the Commandery of the State of Wisconsin, Military Order of the
Loyal Legion of the United States_. Milwaukee, 1891.