Early Life and Career
Shaw was born in Boston to a prominent abolitionist family. His parents were Francis George and Sarah Blake Sturgis Shaw. The family lived off an inheritance left by Shaw's merchant grandfather, also named Robert Gould Shaw (1776–1853). Shaw had four sisters: Anna, Josephine, Susannah and Ellen.
He moved with his family to a large estate in West Roxbury, adjacent to Brook Farm when he was five. In his teens, Shaw spent some years studying and traveling in Switzerland, Italy, Hanover, Norway, and Sweden. His family moved to Staten Island, New York, settling there among a community of literati and abolitionists, while Shaw attended the lower division of St. John's College, the equivalent of high school in the institution that became Fordham University. From 1856 until 1859, Shaw attended Harvard University, where he was a member of the Porcellian Club, but he withdrew before graduating. He would have been a member by primogeniture of the Society of the Cincinnati had he survived his father.
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