biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1837–63)
|
| biography:
| US soldier, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The son of abolitionists, he enlisted in the Union army early in the Civil War. In April 1863 he assumed command, initially with some reluctance, of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, the first Northern black regiment to see combat. He was killed in July that year leading a charge on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. He and the events leading to this fateful charge were portrayed in the film Glory (1990). Shaw and his regiment are memorialized in a low-relief sculpture by Saint-Gaudens (1884–97) in the Boston Common. |
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