Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Massachusetts Memorial

Why is it significant?

Step up to the edge of Boston Common right opposite the State House gate, and gaze upon this colossal bronze relief carved deeply into its neoclassical granite frame.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step up to the edge of Boston Common right opposite the State House gate, and gaze upon this colossal bronze relief carved deeply into its neoclassical granite frame. You are standing before one of the finest public sculptures in American history: Augustus Saint-Gaudens' monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

Following Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Massachusetts Governor John Andrew formed the fifty-fourth as the first all-Black regiment recruited in the North. Free Black men, including two sons of great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, answered the call from across twenty states. Notice the faces of the soldiers marching in steady formation: Saint-Gaudens spent nearly fourteen years working on this bronze, hiring dozens of Black models in his studio to ensure each marching infantryman possessed distinct, noble, and deeply human facial features.

In July eighteen sixty-three, Colonel Shaw and nearly half of his courageous regiment were killed leading the desperate bayonet assault against Confederate fortifications at Fort Wagner in South Carolina. Confederate officers threw Shaw's body into an unmarked trench with his fallen Black comrades as an intended insult. When Union officials offered to recover his remains, Shaw's father replied proudly: We can imagine no holler or nobler grave for him than surrounded by his brave and devoted soldiers.

Touch the cool granite coping of the balustrade before turning down into the quiet gaslit alleys of Beacon Hill.