According to John T. Luck, a captured Northerner, the Confederate commander, Johnson Hagood, said to him: “I knew Colonel Shaw before the war", and then esteemed him. "Had he been in command of white troops, I should have given him an honorable burial; as it is, I shall bury him in the common trench with the Negroes that fell with him.” Nearly twenty years later Hagood denied any recollection of making such a remark, but he did not deny that Shaw’s body had been pointed out to him.

From "The Negro in the Civil War" by Benjamin Quarles

How did Shaw know Hagood before the war? Shaw was a Harvard graduate, from an extremist abolitionist family and twenty-five years old; Hagood was 35 years old and graduated from the Citidel, and lived, from his biography, on the plantation in South Carolina up until the war. Neither, it seems, ever served in the military before the war. Whose telling the truth?

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David Upton