Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw

Russell Duncan has done us a favor by making available, and editing meticulously, Colonel Shaw's letters. The problem lies with his bias: it's fashionable today to read the biographies of old-time heros with suspicion, running any plaudits they may have amassed through filters of class, race, politics, gender, and so on. The result usually debunks the hero, which is fashionable, too. This "hermeneutic of suspicion" can introduce a real Rob Shaw beneath all the canonization piled onto him, but here it has blended into what's called "presentism," whereby a historian judges the subject's classism, racism, politics, gendered outlook--or whatever--according to today's baseline. I have a problem with this approach, found in the preface and several footnotes (the adjective "gentlemanlike" seems to give Duncan a special problem whenever he meets it; he needs to find out what it meant, and didn't mean, in the 1860's). Further, his analysis of why Shaw decided to leave his beloved 2nd Massachusetts seems way off-base. Duncan seeks to present to us a hapless young man who "never understood,or fully dedicated himself to" the abolition of slavery. It seems Shaw braved ridicule from his friends and death from the enemy if captured, taking on the labors of raising, training, and leading something new, a black regiment, before dying in the middle of it to ensure its work would be recognized and other black soldiers appreciated by racists North and South, all this only because his mother's apron strings still held him tight. Meanwhile we need to notice that Duncan has left out letters which don't support these appraisals, for example Shaw's letters protesting the iniquitous pay decisions coming out of Washington (cutting the 54th's pay below the standards they had signed on to receive), or the letter in which he rebuffs his mother's plans for a "show wedding." I also disagree with Duncan's analysis of the Shaw family dynamic, because he seems unaware that gender and family norms then are different from ours now. These seem like serious problems for a serious historian; most are found in the biography and some footnotes. Otherwise Duncan lets Shaw speak for himself (in the letters he offers us)and Shaw does so articulately and often eloquently when given the chance. Buy the book for the letters, thank Duncan for making them accessible, and take his commentary with a grain of salt.