THE NEED FOR A TOUGHER KIND OF HEROISM

At the crest of Boston's Beacon Hill, a bronze monument portrays Colonel Robert Gould Shaw leading the black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in their assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863--a battle that cost the young aristocrat and nearly a hundred of his troops their lives. When the Union army asked for his body, a Confederate officer replied, "We have buried him with his niggers." Shaw's sacrifice--memorialized by the poet James Russell Lowell as a "death for noble ends"--has become an emblem of the lofty idealism that inspired New England's 19th century abolitionists and their 20th...

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