Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw [Paperback]

Robert Gould Shaw (Author)
ROBERT GOULD SHAW (1837–1863) commanded the first all-black regiment (54th Massachusetts) in the Northeast during the Civil War. He was killed at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina.

Russell Duncan (Editor)
RUSSELL DUNCAN is a professor of history in the English Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of several books, including First Person Past: American Autobiographies, Freedom's Shore: Tunis Campbell and the Georgia Freedmen (Georgia), and Entrepreneur for Equality: Governor Rufus Bullock, Commerce, and Race in Post-Civil War Georgia (Georgia).

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 flÓV