On July 18, 1863, a 25-year-old colonel led his regiment against Fort Wagner on the South Carolina coast. The 1989 film Glory ends on that beach, and most people know how it ends. Robert Gould Shaw fell. The Confederates meant to insult him. They put his body in a shallow pit with his Black soldiers. His parents turned that insult into his monument. Harold Holzer reviews a new biography in the Journal's Bookshelf.
The book is A Glorious Fate by Kevin M. Levin, an independent historian who writes the Civil War Memory newsletter. Holzer calls it the first Shaw biography in decades and the most nuanced. The regiment was the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first official Black regiments in the Union Army. It lost half its men at Fort Wagner. The film version of that night is hard to top, Holzer writes, and Levin manages it.
What makes the book new is the man it finds. Shaw was born in 1837 in Dartmouth, Mass., to wealthy abolitionist parents, Francis and Sarah. He was miserable at school and unhappy at Harvard. He kept away from the antislavery activism around him. When the war came, what he wanted was army service. He told his parents he didn't think about slavery all the time. He fought at Cedar Mountain and Antietam with a white regiment. When the chance to lead Black troops came, it came because of his parents' reputation. He turned it down at first. He doubted his men would hold a line.
The man he became
Then he changed, at least in what he did. He trained the recruits into a skilled unit. He supported their fight for equal pay. In June 1863 he objected to orders to loot and burn Darien, Ga. A few weeks later he agreed to lead the assault on Fort Wagner, a plan Levin suggests was no honor. Witnesses said he looked set on winning or dying. After his death, his parents refused offers to dig up his remains. They said there was no better place for him to rest than beside his men. That choice made a symbol out of a soldier. Augustus Saint-Gaudens later cast him in bronze on Boston Common.
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This is an Estate story in the oldest sense. A legacy is partly what you do and partly what the people who outlive you decide to say about it. Shaw's parents made one decision, and they held to it. Leave him where he fell. That single choice did more for his memory than any monument. The book is also honest about the money thread. Equal pay for Black soldiers was a fight Shaw backed once he had the command. People grow into their jobs. Biographies that admit it are better than the ones that don't.
Here's the connection to your own plan. Shaw's parents were asked a hard question in the worst week of their lives, and they had an answer. Most families don't. The paperwork that covers it is dull and short. A written statement of your wishes for final arrangements, and the name of the one person who gets to decide. In many states that's a separate form from the health-care directive. This week, check whether yours exists and whether the person you'd name knows it. If you've only told people out loud, write it down. A decision made on a calm day is the one that holds on the hard one. It's easier to find the umbrella before the storm than during it.