This paper is a history of the Shaw Memorial dedicated to the memory of Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the first all black regiment to be raised in the North during the Civil War. The paper deals not only with a nearly fourteen year struggle by the artist, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the master sculptor of American art by the end of the century, to come to terms with art, but it also marked an intense contest over the memory of the Civil War. The tensions inherent in the political and cultural contention over public memory are reflected in the art and mirror the dominant ideology of the late 19th century while at same time, because the art also reveals cultural conflict, it has allowed for the transformation of meaning in the memory of the Civil War in the century following its unveiling.

This paper is a history of the Shaw Memorial dedicated to the memory of Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the first all black regiment to be raised in the North during the Civil War. The paper deals not only with a nearly fourteen year struggle by the artist, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the master sculptor of American art by the end of the century, to come to terms with art, but it also marked an intense contest over the memory of the Civil War.