In Boston: Aid and Comfort for the Shaw

Frozen in bronze, the black infantrymen trudge forever forward, their rifles scraping the metaled sky. On horseback alongside them, stern, proud, aristocratic, rides their young colonel, Robert Gould Shaw. Here, just across from the gold-domed statehouse, Shaw led the North's first black regiment down Beacon Street and off to war. "The very flower of grace and chivalry," John Greenleaf Whittier wrote of Shaw's departure, "he seemed to me beautiful and awful, as an angel of God come down to lead the host of freedom to victory."

After nearly a century of New England wind and rain, the colonel's face is now as black as those of his soldiers. But beneath his cap a streak of bright green flows, like blood from a saber wound, down the temple, blinding the right eye, grazing the mustache. His naked sword is fastened to his knee, but someone has broken it off just below the bolt.

The frieze's granite back, originally inscribed with the pieties of Harvard President Charles Eliot ("The white officers taking life and honor in their hands cast in their lot with men of a despised race ..."), has been reinscribed with an indignant black crayon: "Stop the genocide of the abortionist degenerates! Stop abortion holocaust! Stop capital punishment for the innocent unborn!" That in turn has been covered, like buried layers of forgotten civilizations, by orange spray paint: "John Lennon lives on forever."

To command the first black regiment in the war against slavery was an ambiguous honor, particularly since slavery was still legal. Only after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 could Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts recruit a black regiment, and though he promised equal pay of $13 a month, the War Department voted only $10. The Confederates reacted by announcing that any black soldiers taken prisoner would be treated as runaway slaves, and their white officers considered guilty of incitement to insurrection, both subject to the death penalty.

No true martyr seeks martyrdom. Robert Gould Shaw loved music and drawing, spoke German and Spanish easily, dropped out of Harvard to try his hand at business (the Shaws had grown rich in the China trade). He was a serious youth but no zealot. Before the first Confederate shell hit Fort Sumter, however, Shaw had already enlisted. When Andrew offered him command of the black 54th, he wrote back saying he lacked experience. He was only 25. Then he sent a countermanding telegram of acceptance. "Now I feel ready to die," said his proud mother, a dedicated abolitionist, "for I see you willing to give support to the cause of truth that is lying crushed and bleeding."

Less than two months after the march down Beacon Street, the cause of truth brought Shaw and his men to the beach beneath Fort Wagner, which guarded the harbor entrance to Charleston. Shaw volunteered to lead the attack. Perhaps he was rash. Perhaps his commanders regarded his troops as fodder, expendable. Intelligence reports claimed that Shaw's 600 men outnumbered the defenders 2 to 1. Exactly the reverse was true. Even after a heavy Union bombardment, Confederate soldiers remained strongly entrenched behind their palmetto barriers. As darkness fell on July 18, 1863, Shaw spoke quietly to his troops: "I want you to prove yourselves. The eyes of thousands will look on what you do tonight."