On July 18, 1863, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was killed while leading the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Volunteer Infantry in a bloody assault on Fort Wagner, near Charleston, South Carolina. The defeat was an event of powerful symbolic significance for one of the first African-American units of the Civil War. Thirty-four years later Augustus Saint-Gaudens created perhaps the finest sculpture of his career, memorializing Shaw and the Fifty-fourth.

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