Robert Gould Shaw - Memorials

Memorials

• In 1864, sculptor Edmonia Lewis created a bust of Shaw.
• The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White, was built in his memory on Beacon and Park streets in Boston in 1897.

"There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback among them, in his very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy youth every divinity had smiled."—Oration by William James at the exercises in the Boston Music Hall, May 31, 1897, upon the unveiling of the Shaw Monument.

• Some drawings and plaster mock-ups also exist. A patinated plaster cast of a slightly different design for the Shaw Memorial is now on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C..
• A monument to Shaw's memory was erected by his family in the plot at Moravian Cemetery in Staten Island, New York. An annual commemoration is held there on his birthday.
• Shaw was memorialized in the transept of Harvard University's Memorial Hall, which is dedicated to the students who perished in the American Civil War. Although he did not graduate, he is credited with the class of 1860.
• Elizabeth Gaskell was inspired by the life of Robert Gould Shaw to compose a text and poem in his honor, "Robert Gould Shaw", which appeared in Macmillan's Magazine (1864) and is available on The Gaskell Web.
• The story of Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts was dramatized in the 1989 film Glory, with Shaw portrayed by Matthew Broderick.
• Shaw, the 54th regiment, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens' memorial are one of the subjects of Charles Ives's composition for orchestra, Three Places in New England.
• The New England poet Robert Lowell referenced both Shaw and the Shaw Memorial in the poem "For the Union Dead" which Lowell published in his 1964 book of the same name.
• African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote a poem entitled "Robert Gould Shaw", in which he states: "Since thou and those who with thee died for right/Have died, the Present teaches, but in vain!"
• African-American poet Benjamin Griffith Brawley wrote a memorial poem entitled "My Hero" in praise of Robert Gould Shaw.
• The neighborhood of Shaw, Washington, DC, which grew out of freed slave encampments, bears his name.