On July 18, 1863, the recently formed 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, led by the twenty-five-year-old Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, attacked Fort Wagner, a Confederate stronghold guarding Charleston, South Carolina. Shaw, a veteran of Antietam, was the Harvard-educated son of abolitionists; like all Union officers, he was white. His troops were the first northern regiment made up of African Americans, a disparate but committed group that included two sons of the African American leader Frederick Douglass. The 54th Massachusetts fought heroically at Fort Wagner, but they were defeated in the fierce battle, with a horrific loss of life. Almost a third of the six hundred men who took part in the assault were killed or wounded—Shaw died leading the charge—and the many dead were buried, expediently, in a common grave. The story is one of those unforgettable moments in the history of the long, brutal Civil War, at once tragic and inspiring, a reminder of the hideous waste and carnage of that terrible period of our history and a testimony to the valor of a disenfranchised people who not only defended the ideals of their country but also definitively proved their own worth.