Sarah Blake Sturgis Shaw

Robert Gould Shaw by Henry Cabot Lodge.

Robert Gould Shaw was born in Boston on October 10, 1837, the son of Francis and Sarah Sturgis Shaw.

When he was about nine years old, his parents moved to Staten Island, and he was educated there, at school in the neighborhood of New York, until he went to Europe in 1853, where he remained traveling and studying for the next three years.

He entered Harvard College in 1856 and left at the end of his third year in order to accept an advantageous business offer in New York.