Shaw is killed at the parapet; the 54th Massachusetts storms Fort Wagner
By the summer of 1863, the Union had begun arming Black soldiers, but many doubted they would fight. On July 18, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first African American regiments in the Union Army, led the assault on Fort Wagner guarding Charleston harbor. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was shot and killed leading his men to the fort's parapet. The regiment suffered heavy losses, but its stand on that beach helped open Union recruitment to thousands more Black soldiers.
Fort Wagner settled, in blood, a question Northern skeptics had refused to answer: whether Black soldiers would fight and die like any other troops. The 54th's charge changed Union recruitment policy and gave the abolition cause a battlefield argument it had lacked. Nearly 200,000 Black soldiers would serve in the Union Army by war's end.
QWhy did Frederick Douglass have a personal stake in the 54th Massachusetts?
Douglass helped recruit for the regiment, and two of his own sons, Charles and Lewis, enlisted in its ranks. Lewis Douglass served as sergeant major and survived the assault, later writing about the battle in a letter to his future wife.
QWhat happened to Colonel Shaw's body after he died at the fort?
Confederate forces buried Shaw in a mass grave alongside his soldiers, a burial meant as a deliberate insult to a white officer who had led Black troops. When Union officials later offered to recover his remains, Shaw's father refused, writing that he could imagine no better resting place for his son than among the men he led. Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens later memorialized Shaw on horseback with his regiment in a bronze relief that still stands on Boston Common.
QWhat did Sergeant William Carney do during the retreat from the fort's walls?
Carney, wounded multiple times, carried the regimental colors back from the parapet rather than let the flag fall into Confederate hands, reportedly telling fellow soldiers the flag never touched the ground. He survived his wounds and received the Medal of Honor in 1900; while other Black soldiers had already been awarded the medal by that time, Carney's action at Fort Wagner is the earliest for which the honor was given to an African American.
