Sarah Luria

The bodies of officers who died in the Civil War could be sent to their families for burial, whereas enlisted men were simply buried where they died (Vendler n.7, 272).  Shaw's family chose not to invoke this priviledge; his father wrote the departmental commander:  "'We hold that a soldier's most appropriate burial place is on the field where he has fallen."  According to one source, it was a Confederate commander--and not Shaw's father as Lowell implies in his poem--who "was mistakenly reported in the press as saying, '[Shaw] is buried with his niggers.'"  This rumor contributed to the martyrization of Shaw by the North, and helped to attract African-American recruits to the Union Army (Wilkinson 278).

Sources:
Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry (Boston:  Bedford, 1997).
Burke Wilkinson, Uncommon Clay:  The Life and Works of Augustus Saint Gaudens (New York:  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).

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