ONE GALLANT RUSH

by Peter Burchard ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 1965

Terrific foreknowledge keeps the reader gritting his teeth as he chews each page of this quiet tragedy. The subject is Colonel Robert Shaw of Boston and the first Negro regiment of the Civil War. This is also a magnificent companion piece to Robert Lowell's great poem ""For the Union Dead"" which subject it shares. Shaw died young, in his middle twenties. Homesick at Fordham, he received a polished education abroad in Switzerland, Germany and France. At sixteen he was on his own as a Parisian boulevardier. When War broke out, he enlisted as a private, soon received an officer's commission. He had been baptized in blood several times over when the Governor of Massachusetts offered him the command and colonelcy of the North's first black regiment. Shaw combed the North for volunteers and by rigorous screening formed a superb fighting group. Meanwhile, New Yorkers rioted, hung and burned Harlem Negroes...Shaw died in a doomed attack upon an impregnable fortress near Charleston. Sneering Southerners buried him in a common grave with his black soldiers--to them the highest insult. Shaw's very self and image are captured time and again, on the field or in his tent reading Shakespeare, in this stirring biography.

Pub Date: June 11, 1965

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1965

Categories: NONFICTION