The 54th Massachusetts Infantry was raised in early 1863 under the shadow of Jefferson Davis’s December 1862 proclamation that captured Black soldiers and their officers would be put to death. Governor John A. Andrew built the regiment through abolitionist networks, with Frederick Douglass recruiting and sending his own sons, and appointed Robert Gould Shaw as colonel and Norwood Penrose Hallowell as lieutenant colonel. This episode follows the regiment from its first raid on Darien, Georgia, where Shaw protested James Montgomery’s order to burn the town, through Grimball’s Landing and the July 18, 1863 assault on Fort Wagner.

After Wagner, Black sergeants and corporals held the shattered companies together, and the regiment opened a second front against its own government. Promised $13 a month, the men were offered $10 minus a $3 clothing deduction and refused all pay for 18 months, even when Massachusetts offered to cover the difference. At Olustee, Florida, in February 1864, they covered the Union retreat and hauled a train of wounded men by hand, only for General Joseph Hawley to demand that newspapers deny them credit. The episode closes with Shaw’s burial, the Saint-Gaudens memorial, and the regiment’s 2008 reactivation.

• Only 250 men of the 54th halted an advance by 900 Confederates at Grimball’s Landing on James Island.
• Of about 600 men who charged Fort Wagner, 270 were killed, wounded, or missing.
• Colonel Edward Hallowell had his men swear they owed no man unrequited labor on or before April 19, 1861, so all could claim equal back pay.
• During the Olustee retreat the regiment fired over 20,000 rounds and pulled a broken-down train for three miles, a 42-hour ordeal.
• Hawley wrote that the officer who credited the 54th with saving the day deserved to be shot.