{"id":1596,"date":"2010-06-04T14:03:08","date_gmt":"2010-06-04T19:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=1596"},"modified":"2010-06-07T14:33:07","modified_gmt":"2010-06-07T19:33:07","slug":"william-h-carney-at-fort-wagner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2010\/06\/04\/william-h-carney-at-fort-wagner\/","title":{"rendered":"William H. Carney at Fort Wagner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On May 31, 1897, the city of Boston erected a monument<\/a> created by the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in honor of the 54th Massachusetts<\/a> and its colonel, Robert Gould Shaw<\/a>.\u00a0 The monument commemorates the regiment\u2019s participation in the second attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina<\/a> on July 18, 1863. The August 8 edition<\/a> of Harper\u2019s Weekly<\/em>, available in a transcribed form at Assumption College\u2019s primary source-rich database \u201cNorthern Vision of Race, Religion & Reform\u201d<\/a> recorded that at Fort Wagner: \u201cThe 54th Massachusetts (negro), whom Copperhead officers would have called cowardly if they had stormed and carried the gates of hell, went boldly into battle, for the second time, commanded by their brave Colonel, but came out of it led by no higher officer than the boy, Lieutenant Higginson.\u201d\u00a0 Sergeant James Henry Gooding of Company C of the 54th wrote weekly letters to the New Bedford Mercury<\/em>, a periodical in the company\u2019s hometown.\u00a0 Gooding\u2019s letters were published as On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier\u2019s Civil War Letters from the Front<\/em>, and some are available on Google Books<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 Gooding\u2019s July 20 letter documents the 54th\u2019s attack of Fort Wagner: \u201cWhen the men saw their gallant leader [Colonel Shaw] fall, they made a desperate effort to get him out, but they were either shot down, or reeled in the ditch below. One man succeeded in getting hold of the State color staff.\u201d The \u201cone man\u201d who reached the flag was Sergeant William H. Carney, originally of Norfolk, Virginia, as he maintained the sanctity of the flag by keeping it from touching the ground. Though Carney was wounded in both of his legs, one arm, and his chest he kept the flag aloft and is recorded as exclaiming, \u201cthe old flag never touched the ground, boys!\u201d\u00a0 During the 1897 monument dedication Carney raised the flag once more, an action that Booker T. Washington recorded in his autobiography, Up from Slavery<\/em><\/a> (1901), as causing such an effect on the crowd that \u201cfor a number of minutes the audience seemed to entirely lose control of itself.\u201d Three years later, Carney received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions during the battle of Fort Wagner. Though Carney is often listed as the first African-American recipient of a Medal of Honor, instead, Carney’s rescue of the colors at Fort Wagner was the earliest African-American act of bravery to be recognized with a Medal of Honor. The medal notation<\/a> reads: “Medal of Honor awarded May 9, 1900, for most dinstinguished gallantry in action at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, July 18, 1863.”<\/p>\n

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On May 31, 1897, the city of Boston erected a monument created by the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in honor of the 54th Massachusetts and its colonel, Robert Gould Shaw.\u00a0 The monument commemorates the regiment\u2019s participation in the second attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina on July 18, 1863. The August 8 edition of Harper\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,171,156,172,47],"tags":[161],"class_list":["post-1596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-war-1861-1865","category-historic-periodicals","category-images","category-letters-diaries","category-places-to-visit","tag-battles-soldiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1596"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1605,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1596\/revisions\/1605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}