Over the past decade, heated public debates and waves of protest have resulted in the defacement, destruction, and removal of numerous monuments to the Confederate States of America. However, the northern memory of the American Civil War is equally contested, as continuing disagreements over the meaning of memorials to the victorious Union dead reveal. Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts (1897), located on Boston Common, elicits contradictory readings and responses. It positions the war as a war to end slavery, and highlights the role of Black soldiers in making freedom real and permanent; yet, in centring the regiment’s martyred white officer, it reinforces paternalistic racial hierarchies and betrays the conflicted political priorities of the statue’s champions, funders, and designers. Despite its frequent celebration in popular culture, successive generations of Bostonians have responded to the statue with anger, confusion, and indifference. This chapter explores how, by reinterpreting, repurposing, or even rejecting the Shaw memorial, citizens of Boston—a northern city with a long and interwoven history of fraught race relations and powerful civil rights activism—have attempted to wrest control of Civil War memory in public spaces from authorised channels.