Why I love one
of America’s most striking and impressive parental decisions.
I’m sure there
are lots of reasons to love Francis George Shaw and Sarah Blake Sturgis Shaw. The
Bostonian couple were devoted and passionate abolitionists, which despite popular
misconceptions was far
from a widespread or popular position in mid-19th century New
England (much less New
York, where they moved in the early 1850s). They befriended and supported some
of the era’s most innovative, interesting, and impressive literary, cultural,
and social figures, both while living adjacent to Brook Farm and
in their later neighborhood on Staten Island. And they cleary did a wonderful job
raising their five children to carry on their progressive identities and perspectives,
at least if their only son, Robert
Gould Shaw, is any indication—even if we leave aside Shaw’s decision to
command the 54th Massachusetts, one of the nation’s first official
African American regiments, Robert’s
letters reveal a young man of unique and impressive maturity, insight,
openmindedness, and character.
But honestly,
even if I learned that the Shaws kept a torture chamber in their basement where
they practiced ritualistic Satanism on innocent passers-by, I’d still love them,
thanks to the exemplary and profoundly American decision they made at one of
their toughest and darkest moments. When Robert was killed during the
regiment’s unsuccessful assault on South Carolina’s Fort Wagner, the
Confederate forces buried him with the rest of the regiment’s dead; “with his
niggers,” as the fort’s commander, future South Carolina Governor
Johnson Hagood, replied when a Union general wrote to inquire about what
had happened to Shaw’s body. When Shaw’s fellow regimental officers wrote to
his grieving parents to ask if they wanted to press for his body to be disinterred
and brought back North for a full burial with honors, Francis
wrote back, “We would not have
his body removed from where it lies surrounded by his brave and devoted
soldiers, if we could accomplish it by a word. Please to bear this in mind and
also, let it be known, so that, even in case there should be an opportunity,
his remains may not be disturbed.”
If it wasn’t
easy to be an abolitionist in the best of circumstances, which certainly the
wealthy Shaw family often experienced—and, again, it most definitely wasn’t—I can
only imagine how incredibly difficult it was in this horrifically difficult
moment. And it’s not like the alternative decision would have been necessarily
a negative one—who could critique the Shaws if they asked for their only son’s
body to be returned home, to have the chance to bury him and pay full tribute
to all he had done and sacrificed? But they chose instead to honor what lay
behind those actions: his principles, his ideals, and his powerfully American
sense of community, which were of course also their own but which Robert had
taken to another and even more striking level. (And which would be echoed in Saint-Gaudens’
amazing Shaw Memorial a few decades later.) As a parent, I respect that
choice so much, and hope that I would have the courage and conviction to do the
same. As an American, well, I just plain love the Shaws.
My next American
love tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Responses to this post? Loves you’d share for the weekend post?
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