"The burial of Robert Shaw and his men may not have been so brutal as the Northern press made it out to be. John T. Luck, a Federal assistant surgeon who had been captured by the rebels and helped tend to the wounded after the battle, spoke with the commanding Confederate general Hagood about Shaw's body. Because Shaw had commanded black troops, Hagood said, "I shall bury him in the common grave with the Negroes that fell with him." In the Northern press this decorous sentence became "I buried him with his niggers." The Confederate commander of the Charleston defenses, P. G. T. Beauregard, had ordered the same care for black and white wounded, and there was no discrimination in death. The bodies of other white officers were returned; Shaw's was not. Shaw's family thought it the most glorious interment possible. According to Colonel George P. Harrison Jr., of the Georgia Thirty-second, "Shaw's body was laid 'without roughness and with respect"'; then the burial detail "placed on his body 20 of the dead Blacks whom he had commanded."
From "The Words of the Sea The Vanishing Battlefields of Troy and Battery Wagner" by James Tatum