Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth Century Reform

by Lorien Foote

A radical abolitionist and early feminist, Francis George Shaw (1809-1882) was a prominent figure in American reform and intellectual circles for five decades. He rejected capitalism in favor of a popular utopian socialist movement. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, he applied his radical principles to the Northern war effort and to freedmen's organizations. A partnership with Henry George in the late 1870s provided an international audience for Shaw's alternative vision of society.
Seeking the One Great Remedy is the biography of this remarkable and influential man. In compelling detail, author Lorien Foote depicts the exploits of the Shaw family. Their activities provide a perspective on the course of American reform that calls into question previous interpretations of the reform movements of this period.
Francis George Shaw is perhaps best known as the father of Robert Gould Shaw, Captain of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, a black regiment in the Union army, and subject of the movie Glory. Francis and his wife, Sarah Blake Shaw, achieved considerable notoriety for their activities, including their effort to shape public opinion during the Civil War. Turning their son's tragic death at Fort Wagner into a public relations and propaganda triumph, they altered Northern opinion about the war and shaped a historical perception of the famous Fifty-fourth Massachusetts that continues today.
Seeking the One Great Remedy argues that social radicalism was pervasive among elite reformers before and after the Civil War and finds in the dramatic story of Francis George Shaw a model of that cause.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 2003

About the author

Lorien Foote is the Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor in History and author of four books, including Rites of Retaliation, winner of the 2022 OAH Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award. She co-edited The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War and leads the Digital Humanities Project “Fugitive Federals,” mapping escaped Union POWs’ movements.

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

first off, the description in Goodreads is for the wrong title. Seeking the One Great Remedy is a biography of Francis George Shaw and the story of the group of mid 19th century New England radical reformers who experimented with communalism and Transcendentalism and feminism and social justice. Dr. Foote's writing is engaging and well researched, scholarly without descending into jargon. This book is a great introduction to a fascinating world of radical social and intellectual movements of the mid-nineteenth century.