ere made of.
He, therefore, accepted the dangerous duty with gladness. Late in the
day the troops were marched across Folly and Morris islands and formed
in line of battle within six hundred yards of Fort Wagner. At half-past
seven the order for the charge was given, and the regiment advanced.
When they were within a hundred yards of the fort, the rebel fire opened
with such effect that the first battalion hesitated and wavered. Colonel
Shaw sprang to the front, and waving his sword, shouted: "Forward,
54th!" With another cheer, the men rushed through the ditch, and gained
a parapet on the right. Colonel Shaw was one of the first to scale the
walls. As he stood erect, a noble figure, ordering his men forward and
shouting to them to press on, he was shot dead and fell into the fort.
After his fall, the assault was repulsed.

General Haywood, commanding the rebel forces, said to a Union prisoner:
"I knew Colonel Shaw before the war, and then esteemed him. Had he been
in command of white troops, I should have given him an honorable burial.
As it is, I shall bury him in the common trench, with the negroes that
fell with him." He little knew that he was giving the dead soldier the
most honorable burial that man could have devised, for the savage words
told unmistakably that Robert Shaw's work had not been in vain. The
order to bury him with his "niggers," which ran through the North and
remained fixed in our history, showed, in a flash of light, the hideous
barbarism of a system which made such things and such feelings possible.
It also showed that slavery was wounded to the death, and that the
brutal phrase was the angry snarl of a dying tiger. Such words rank with
the action of Charles Stuart, when he had the bones of Oliver Cromwell
and Robert Blake torn from their graves and flung on dunghills or fixed
on Temple Bar.

Robert Shaw fell in battle at the head of his men, giving his life to
his country, as did many another gallant man during those four years of
conflict. But he did something more than this. He faced prejudice and
hostility in the North, and confronted the blind and savage rage of the
South, in order to demonstrate to the world that the human beings who
were held in bondage could vindicate their right to freedom by fighting
and dying for it. He helped mightily in the great task of destroying
human slavery, and in uplifting an oppressed and down-trodden race. He
brought to this work the qualities which were p