On July 19, a truce was declared. Shaw was stripped and thrown into a ditch with his soldiers, contrary to ceremonial burials usually provided for officers. Northern newspapers reported on the trench burial. Recruitment in the North was stirred, and Shaw's parents later rejected an offer to have their son's body exhumed, writing that they could hope for "no holier place" for it than "...surrounded by his brave and devoted soldiers."

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, May 1863, photograph, Boston Athenaeum