40 Fun Facts About 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment

Which abolitionist orator had two sons among the first recruits of the 54th Massachusetts?

Frederick Douglass saw two of his sons join the regiment he was recruiting for. One of them rose to sergeant major, then the highest rank open to a Black soldier.

Which actor won an Academy Award for playing Private Trip in the 1989 film Glory?

Denzel Washington won Best Supporting Actor for a character who never existed. Of the film's main soldiers of the 54th, only Colonel Shaw was a real person.

After the Battle of Olustee, men of the 54th Massachusetts used ropes to haul what for miles?

A train carrying wounded soldiers had broken down, so the exhausted regiment dragged the engine and cars by hand for about three miles until horses could be found to help.

Confederates meant to insult Colonel Robert Gould Shaw by burying him in a mass grave with whom?

His own men shared the grave, and his father refused to have the body moved, saying he could imagine no holier place for his son to lie.

What did the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts refuse to accept for 18 months in protest at unequal treatment?

Their pay was set below a white private's wage, so the whole regiment boycotted the paymaster's table, even after Massachusetts offered to make up the difference.

Which woman, a Union Army scout in South Carolina, reportedly served Colonel Robert Gould Shaw his last meal?

Harriet Tubman was working with Union forces on the Carolina coast that summer. Weeks earlier she had guided the Combahee River raid that freed more than 700 enslaved people.

Which belonging of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, stolen after Fort Wagner, turned up in a family attic in 2017?

His sword was found by descendants of his sister and given to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which put it on display on the anniversary of his death.

Which actor played John Rawlins, the recruit promoted to sergeant major, in the 1989 film Glory?

Morgan Freeman played Rawlins and later narrated a documentary about the real regiment. On set he stressed that the film was about the 54th, not only its colonel.

Fort Wagner, stormed by the 54th Massachusetts in 1863, guarded the approach to which Confederate port?

Charleston was the prize the Union wanted. The assault failed, but after weeks of further shelling the Confederates abandoned Fort Wagner in September 1863.

How did Robert Gould Shaw first respond when the governor offered him command of the 54th Massachusetts?

He turned it down, unwilling to leave his comrades and doubtful that a Black regiment would ever be sent to the front. He soon changed his mind and telegraphed his father to say he would take it.

The Emancipation Proclamation, which opened the Union Army to Black regiments, took effect on which holiday?

New Year's Day 1863 brought the proclamation, and within weeks the War Department told the governor of Massachusetts he could raise regiments that included men of African descent.

Which actor played the 25-year-old Colonel Robert Gould Shaw in the 1989 Civil War film Glory?

Matthew Broderick played the colonel in a script built partly on the real officer's own wartime letters, more than 200 of which survive.

After an eight-hour bombardment, the 54th Massachusetts began its charge on Fort Wagner at what time of day?

At dusk, around 7:45 in the evening, the regiment advanced along a narrow strip of beach. The shelling had barely hurt the defenders, who waited it out in a bombproof shelter.

Union shells did little damage to Fort Wagner before the 54th attacked because its walls were mostly what?

Sand and earth simply absorbed the blasts. The walls stood 30 feet high, braced with palmetto logs, and hours of shelling killed only about eight of the garrison.

Robert Gould Shaw left which university without a degree, though its memorial tablets still list his name?

Harvard honors him among its war dead even though he quit in 1859 to work in his uncle's New York trading firm, a job he disliked just as much.

Robert Gould Shaw fought as a 2nd Massachusetts officer in which 1862 battle, shown in the opening of Glory?

Antietam was his third major battle with the 2nd Massachusetts, after Winchester and Cedar Mountain. The film shot it with volunteer reenactors gathered for a major event at Gettysburg.

What has become of Fort Wagner on Morris Island, where the dead of the 54th Massachusetts were buried?

It eroded away as the Atlantic reshaped the island, taking the burial trench with it. Preservation groups bought the island in 2008 to keep it from being developed.

The Shaw Memorial on Boston Common shows the men of the 54th Massachusetts doing what on May 28, 1863?

Marching off to war down Beacon Street is the moment frozen in bronze, with the colonel on horseback beside his foot soldiers, each given a distinct face modeled on a live sitter.

Glory shows many freed slaves in the ranks, but most real soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts were what?

Free men from the North filled the ranks, recruited far beyond New England because Massachusetts itself had too small a Black population.

Which sergeant of the 54th Massachusetts earned the Medal of Honor for carrying the flag back from Fort Wagner?

William Carney was shot several times yet never let the colors fall. His medal came nearly 37 years later, by which time he had spent three decades delivering mail in New Bedford.

Which sculptor spent 14 years on the bronze memorial to Colonel Shaw and the 54th on Boston Common?

Augustus Saint-Gaudens kept reworking the relief even after its 1897 unveiling. He also designed the $20 double eagle, often called one of the most beautiful American coins.

Which Massachusetts governor pressed the War Department to raise the 54th and chose its young colonel?

John Andrew wanted Black officers as well, but that was refused, so he hand-picked white officers from abolitionist families instead.

What did Colonel Robert Gould Shaw do in New York less than a month before the 54th sailed south?

Got married: he wed Annie Haggerty despite both families' misgivings about the war, a chapter the film Glory leaves out. She was widowed at 28, after less than three months of marriage.

Before joining the 54th Massachusetts, James Henry Gooding earned up to $20 a month in which New Bedford trade?

Whaling paid him far more than soldiering did, and he protested the unequal wages of Black troops in a letter to President Lincoln. He later died a prisoner of war at Andersonville.

The film Glory staged its climactic assault on Fort Wagner on which stretch of the Georgia coast?

Jekyll Island stood in for the South Carolina shore, and part of its beachfront is still known as Glory Beach in honor of the shoot.

Which director made Glory in 1989 and later returned to war stories with The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond?

Edward Zwick took over after another director left the project, and he hired the Civil War writer Shelby Foote as a technical adviser.

Which American composer opened his Three Places in New England with a movement inspired by the Shaw Memorial?

Charles Ives named the movement after the sculpture and its regiment, and wove in borrowed tunes such as Reveille and the spiritual Deep River.

Which author's 1863 story My Contraband follows a Union nurse tending wounded men of the 54th after Fort Wagner?

Louisa May Alcott had served as an army nurse herself that winter, and she published the story five years before Little Women made her name.

Which philosopher, whose brother was a wounded officer of the 54th, spoke at its memorial's 1897 unveiling?

William James had a personal stake: his brother Wilkie was wounded in the assault on Fort Wagner. A third brother, Henry, became the celebrated novelist.

The 54th's colonel had each man swear he owed nobody labor in April 1861, an oath nicknamed for which faith?

Quaker was the colonel's own faith. Congress had limited equal wages to men who were free when the war began, so his carefully worded oath let formerly enslaved soldiers qualify too.

Which Confederate leader's 1862 proclamation threatened Black troops and their white officers with death?

Jefferson Davis cast them as leaders of a slave revolt, so every officer of the 54th served knowing capture could mean execution. By most accounts the regiment still left Boston in high spirits.

The 54th Massachusetts covered the Union retreat at Olustee, the largest Civil War battle fought in which state?

Florida mattered to the Confederacy mainly as a larder of beef and salt. The regiment went into the fight shouting about its seven dollars a month, a jab at its own unequal wages.

Where in Readville, on the edge of Boston, did the 54th Massachusetts drill before heading south?

Camp Meigs drew so many Black volunteers that the overflow became a second regiment, the 55th Massachusetts.

Robert Gould Shaw protested when a fellow colonel had which undefended Georgia town looted and burned in 1863?

Darien had offered no resistance, and the colonel of the 54th wrote that turning women and children out of their homes was barbarous. He committed only one company to the raid.

Which officer, wounded three times at Fort Wagner, led the 54th Massachusetts for the rest of the war?

Edward Hallowell came from an abolitionist family whose summer home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He then spent months campaigning for his men's equal wages.

Which sergeant became the 54th's first Black line officer after the War Department initially refused his commission?

Stephen Swails was wounded in the head at Olustee and recommended for promotion days later, then made to wait almost a year because of his African descent.

At which April 1865 fight did a lieutenant of the 54th reputedly become the last Union officer killed in action?

Boykin's Mill could be reached only along a narrow embankment, one man at a time. Lieutenant E. L. Stevens was shot there by a teenage home guardsman, nine days after Lee's surrender.

Which sculptor's 1864 bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw sold so well that it funded her move to Rome?

Edmonia Lewis, of African American and Ojibwe heritage, modeled the bust after the colonel's death. His family bought it, and about a hundred plaster copies financed her career abroad.

First Sergeant Robert Simmons of the 54th, a British Army veteran, came from which island colony?

Bermuda gave the regiment one of its most admired sergeants. He wrote a vivid account of its first fight, then was fatally wounded two days later at Fort Wagner.

Which state had organized a Black volunteer regiment in the North before Massachusetts raised the 54th?

Kansas got there first, and its 1st Colored Infantry had already seen combat at Island Mound, Missouri, in October 1862, months before the 54th began recruiting.