ABSTRACT
In 1897, over thirty years after the end of the American Civil War, a very special monument to that war was unveiled opposite the Statehouse in Boston. Designed by the Irish-born sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, it depicted in profile the figure of Robert Gould Shaw, the twenty-five-yearold white officer of the North’s showcase African-American regiment, the Massachusetts 54th (Colored), leading his men through Boston on their way to South Carolina in 1863. It was an unusual and in many ways seminal piece of sculpture. Not only was it the first American monument focused on a group rather than a single figure, it was the first example of a monument portraying blacks as central actors in the Civil War. Although Saint-Gaudens had neglected the opportunity to represent the features of the individual soldiers from that regiment-only Shaw’s image was a specific likeness-he nevertheless avoided representing the black troops in any kind of stereotypical manner, portraying them instead as noble patriot soldiers of the American nation. Both in its novelty and in its sentiment the Saint-Gaudens monument remains, according to art critic Robert Hughes, “the most intensely felt image of military commemoration made by an American.”1
