Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw by Russell Duncan

This book draws together the Civil War correspondence of Robert Gould Shaw, the young colonel who led the North's vanguard black regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry. Killed in 1863 while leading his men in an assault on a fort protecting Charleston Harbor, Shaw was memorialized in numerous poems, in a magnificent sculpture on Boston Common, and in the Oscar-winning film Glory. Yet, as this book reveals, he accepted command of the Fifty-fourth with great reluctance, and he remained a much more divided and complex—if no less heroic—figure than his legend would have it.