By May 1863, Massachusetts had successfully raised its first Black regiment: the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. Departing for South Carolina under the leadership of a young white colonel named Robert Gould Shaw, whose abolitionist parents were close friends with Sumner, the regiment bravely fought and lost a deadly battle at Fort Wagner in July. The northern press heralded Shaw for a heroic charge against the Confederate troops that led to his own martyred death.
