Library of Congress

Photo od Cabot Jackson Russel, ca. 1863....Chris Carroll Collection

He is memorialized at Memorial Hall on the Harvard University campus. Photo taken in July of 2014.

Sergeant 44th Mass. Vols. (Infantry), September 12, 1862; first Lieutenant 54th Mass. Vols. March 23, 1863; Captain, May 11, 1863; killed at Fort Wagner, S. C., July 18, 1863.

Cabot Jackson Russel was born in New York on the 21st of July, 1844. He was the son of William C. Russel, a lawyer of that city, and Sarah Cabot, daughter of Patrick T. Jackson of Boston. His mother died a few days after his birth, and for the first nine years of his life his home was in the house of his grandmother, Mrs. Jackson, in Boston. In 1853 he removed to his father's house, and attended school in New York.
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The darkness of night hung over the sufferings of that sacrifice where the noblest and the best, appointed to lead blat soldiers to death, and prove that they were men, had obeyed the order. When our troops fell back from an assault in which they were not supported, hundreds of dead and wounded marked how far they had gone. Among those who did not return was Captain Russel. A ball struck him in the shoulder and he fell. Captain Simpkins offered to carry him off. But the boy had become a veteran in a moment, and the answer was, ‘No, but you may straighten me out.’ As his friend, true to the end, was rendering this last service, a bullet pierced his breast, and his dead body fell over the dying.
Some of his soldiers offered to carry him off, but his last order was, ‘Do not touch me, move on, men; follow your colors’; and they left him. He was not quite nineteen, and he was breathing his spirit out in suffering, in the darkness of night, amid the roar of musketry and cannon. But he lay by the side of a dear friend, in the steps where his hero leader had fallen, and surrounded by hundreds whom he had helped to raise to be men and fellow-soldiers. There was no one there to receive his last words of affection, but his generous impulses in behalf of his country and his fellowmen were becoming through his blood an element of the nation's life. No stone need mark the place where his bones moulder, for future generations will reverently point to the holy ground where the colonel and two captains of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts were buried with their soldiers.


Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

He is memorialized at Memorial Hall on the Harvard University campus. Photo taken in July of 2014.

Morris Island is smaller than 1,000 acres and is subject to extensive erosion by storm and sea. Much of the previous site of Fort Wagner has been eroded away, including the place where the Union soldiers had been buried. However, by the time this had happened, the soldiers' remains were no longer there because soon after the end of the Civil War, the Army disinterred and reburied all the remains—including, presumably, those of Col. Shaw—at the Beaufort National Cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina, where their gravestones were marked as "unknown."

This plaque is in King's Chapel, Boston, MA.

This plaque is in King's Chapel, Boston, MA.