Fort Wagner at the Point of assault.1 |
1 this shows the land-front of the Fort, with the sally-port, near which Colonel Shaw was killed.
2 The deaths of Colonels Shaw and Putnam caused the most profound sorrow, not only in the army, but. throughout the country. Colonel Shaw was only twenty-seven years of age when he gave his life to the cause of Right and Justice. He was son of Francis G. Shaw, of Staten Island, New York, and when the war broke-out was a member of the New York Seventh Regiment, so conspicuous in the movement for opening the way to Washington through Maryland. See chapter 18, volume I. He was with his regiment in those opening scenes of the war, and then received a commission in the Second Massachusetts, in which he did brave service, and had narrow escapes from death in the battles of Cedar Mountain and Antietam. He was appointed colonel of the first regiment of colored troops raised in Massachusetts, and at the head of these he fell just as he gave the word, “Onward, boys!” He is spoken of as one possessed of a most genial nature; of “manners as gentle as a woman's; of a native refinement that brooked nothing coarse; and of a clear moral insight that no evil association could tarnish.” Because he commanded negro troops the Confederates hated him; and they foolishly thought they had dishonored him when, as it was savagely proclaimed, his body had been “buried in a pit under a heap of his niggers.”
Colonel Haldimand S. Putnam, who was about the same age as Shaw, was a young man of most exemplary character and great promise. He was a graduate of West Point Military Academy, and had reached the rank of captain in the army when the war broke out. He shared the unlimited confidence and respect of General Scott, who, in the spring of 1861, made him his messenger to carry important military papers into the Southern States and to Fort Pickens. He was engaged in laying out the fortifications of Washington in the autumn of that year, when he was appointed Colonel of the Seventh New Hampshire Volunteers. With these he went boldly to the assault of Fort Wagner, and there became a martyr to the cause of Justice and Civil Liberty. His countrymen will always delight to honor his memory.
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