PATTI Armanini

Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial (1897) on Boston Common commemorates the sacrifice of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his Fifty-fourth infantry. Consisting of white officers and black soldiers, the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth became the first of several Northern black regiments to serve in the Civil War. It is best remembered for its doomed attack on Charleston’s Fort Wagner, during which Shaw himself and nearly half of his regiment died.

Because of its realistic depiction of African-American figures, the Shaw Memorial has recently become a subject of art-historical debate. Scholars have turned their attention from aesthetic issues to social ones, focusing especially on the Shaw's representation of race. This essay aims to enrich the discussion by taking a fresh look at the worldview of the sculpture's commissioners. Boston’s “Brahmin caste,” to which Shaw belonged, operated within a milieu that did not recognize “race” as a permanent social category. In fact, Boston's Brahmins viewed environment and cultivation as productive of predestined social roles. And they viewed themselves as the natural leaders of a genuinely free, though organically stratified, society. Their ideals are embodied both in the form of the Shaw Memorial and in the rhetoric surrounding its commissioning and unveiling.