Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes (1900) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XVI THE COLORED TROOPS Jot and sorrow followed each other very closely in the war times. My father's delight at the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, which met him on his landing in New York in July, 1863, was mingled with grief at the death of his young cousin, Robert Shaw, who had been killed while leading his colored regiment against Fort Wagner. It had been largely through his influence with Governor Andrew that the doubly dangerous post of colonel of this regiment had been offered to Robert Shaw, whose parents represented strongly the anti-slavery feeling in the North, ?doubly dangerous, for the Confederates had threatened that colored soldiers should be enslaved and their white officers treated as criminals. The governor had wished to show that the best people in the Bay State were willing to lead in the movement to arm citizens of African descent. The young colonel was a representative man, already distinguished in his original regiment, and his appointment had been followed by that of other volunteers like him, and the roll of officers was promptly filled. Their gallantry and that of the men they led is matter of history. The whole episode grieved and impressed mj father very much, and made him, after the war, president of the committee and one of the most energetic workers in raising the fund for the monument to the memory of the fair-haired Northern hero, with his guard of dusky hue, which now stands on the edge of Boston Common, facing the State House, at the spot where Governor Andrew had bidden them Godspeed on their leaving for the South, not two months before the attack on the fort. But in those days, when the Union was in a life and death struggle, all private grief was merged in public work, and his correspondence shows that he at once ...