Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Gould Shaw

It reads like a preemptive strike against the Victorian cult of constant correspondence: Shaw is drawing a hard border around his time, his energy, and his emotional bandwidth. The line is blunt on purpose. By calling weekly letters "too much trouble", he refuses the sentimental script that soldiers should be endlessly reassuring, endlessly narrating their own danger for the comfort of people at home. He turns the epistolary obligation into a transaction: he will write "when I want something". That candor is almost impolite, which is the point. It punctures any illusion that letters are pure affection; they are also logistics, requests, leverage.

The second sentence is the sharper blade. "If you think I'm sick when I don't write" anticipates the family reflex to treat silence as catastrophe, then flips responsibility back onto them: if you need proof of life, you can "send for me" and he will "come and tell you". It sounds teasing, but the subtext is weary realism. In war, communication fails. News arrives late or not at all. The anxiety of the home front can become another front line for the soldier, and Shaw is refusing to fight it.

Context matters: Shaw, a Union officer from a prominent abolitionist family, lived under intense scrutiny and expectation well before he led the 54th Massachusetts. This isn t just impatience; it s autonomy. He is insisting that his interior life not be requisitioned on a schedule, even by people who love him. That small act of control hints at how thin a soldier s control already is.