Lay This Laurel

Essay by Lincoln Kirstein, photographs by Richard Benson

1973

An album on the Saint-Gaudens Memorial on Boston Common honoring black and white men together who served the Union cause with Robert Gould Shaw and died with him on July 18, 1863. With a forty-eight-page essay/story on the history of the Regiment, the monument, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens by Lincoln Kirstein; poems by Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and pre-Civil War black poets; a listing of Regiment members; and a selected bibliography. The book that inspired the movie "Glory."

Lay this Laurel on the One
Too intrinsic for Renown–
Laurel–vail your deathless tree–
Him you chasten, that is He!
–Emily Dickinson

The feeling of the Nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
–Frederick Douglass, 1862