Plot
Captain Robert Gould Shaw leads a company of Union soldiers from a Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in an attack on Confederate troops at the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, 1862. His regiment suffers heavy losses, Shaw is wounded, and later loses consciousness. He is awakened by a black gravedigger named John Rawlins and sent to a field hospital. While receiving medical attention, Shaw is told that President Lincoln is on the verge of passing the Emancipation Proclamation; freeing slaves in rebel held territory. While on leave in Boston, Shaw is promoted to Colonel, and given command of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first all-black regiment. He accepts, and asks his friend, Cabot Forbes, to be his second-in-command. Their first volunteer soldier is another of Shaw's friends, an educated black man named Thomas Searles.
Many more men join the regiment; including an escaped slave named Trip, a free black man named Jupiter Sharts, as well as the gravedigger Rawlins. At the military camp, the company is forced to endure the unyielding strict discipline of Sergeant Major Mulcahy. After spending time doing mostly menial work, Shaw realizes his unit is to be used only for manual labor. Shaw confronts his commanding officers Charles Garrison Harker and James M. Montgomery, whom he finds are involved in war profiteering and corruption, and threatens to report them to the War Department if the 54th infantry is not deployed for combat. Shaw's request is granted, as the regiment later participates in a skirmish in South Carolina where they successfully repulse a Confederate attack. Soon after, Shaw volunteers the 54th infantry to lead an assault on Fort Wagner. After nightfall, he leads the men in a charge upon the fort. Shaw attempts to rally the men forward, but is shot and killed. Numerous other soldiers including Trip, Rawlins, Thomas, Forbes and Jupiter in the regiment charge up the parapet and die in the fighting too.
The film's epilogue displays a series of graphics stating that Fort Wagner was never taken. It also notes how news of the regiment's courage spurred the recruitment of numerous black volunteers, and by the end of the war, there were more than 180,000 African American men in uniform; a fact which President Lincoln considered instrumental in securing a victory for the Union.
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