January 2011

When Ed Brown finally left Abbeville, Georgia, in 1962, he id his wife worked as domestics for Jane Maguire’s family, first in Atlanta and then for thirteen years in New York City. During those years Ms. Maguire became fascinated by Ed’s sharp memories of what life was like for a black farmhand in Georgia, and she persuaded him—he is illiterate—to let her help tell his story. She interviewed him, taking careful notes over a period of about four years, and assembled the interviews into a consecutive reminiscence entitled simply Ed. His direct, unself-pitying, and often heartbreaking story will be published by W. W. Norton later this month, and we are pleased to publish the following excerpt from this unusual memoir.

Mr. Brown is now retired and lives in Brooklyn, New York, where his too daughters by a second marriage are in high school.

COPYRIGHT ©1976 BY JANE MAGUIRE

ON SHARES

In his articles, books, speeches, and interviews General Ridgway has expressed only a secondary interest in the fact, the decision, and the act. He has placed greater emphasis on the reasoning, or the philosophy, that leads to action. He has placed primary emphasis on the need to project that reasoning into the future. He has hoped that such projection might serve as a guide in deciding for or against comparable action in similar situations and might benefit those who may be charged with responsibilities comparable to those he carried. His thirtyeight years of experience as a soldier and twenty more as a civilian observer have led him to these basic conclusions:

1. The United States cannot reorder the world. We cannot impose a Pax Americana on other nations. We must recognize the limitations of our national power.

2. War is the ultimate tragedy of mankind. It is a ghastly, wasteful business that settles nothing unless the cause is right and the political objectives are clear-cut and limited.

President Lincoln had been dead more than three years in May of 1868, and the model of his statue still rested unfinished in young Vinnie Ream’s Capitol studio. Now its very completion was threatened by a band of bitter congressmen who had failed to eject Mr. Lincoln’s successor from the White House and, in their frustration, would try to turn Vinnie’s ambition to ashes as well.

Vinnie Ream had come to Washington at the age of fourteen when her father, in 1861, found a job with the War Department’s cartography section. It was an exciting place for a young girl, with soldiers constantly marching through the streets and ambulance vans from the nearby fighting front moving to army hospitals in the city. In the midst of the turmoil one recurring scene made an indelible impression on Vinnie. It was when the carriage bearing the tall, gaunt Mr. Lincoln would pass by, surrounded by a score of cavalrymen in colorful uniforms. Her fascination turned to a resolve to do a bust of the President. Soon the resolve became an obsession.

He was called “the indomitable Max,” “the indefatigable Max,” “the hardy pioneer,” “the Napoleon of Opera.” About that Napoleonic designation Max Maretzek himself disagreed. It would be more accurate, he ruefully said, if he were described as the Don Quixote of Opera. And in a way he was right. For some forty years the indomitable, indefatigable Max tilted at the American public and at assorted singers, mostly Italian, making and losing fortunes in the process. A stout, ebullient, eternally optimistic man, a good musician, a canny infighter when he had to be, a gambler, he was in many respects the Sol Hurok of his day, and he did more to establish opera in general and Italian opera in particular in the United States during the period before and after the Civil War than any other man.

Although curiously neglected by historians, the Buffalo War of 1874-75 was according to General Philip Sheridan, who engineered it, “the most successful of any Indian campaign in the country since its settlement by whites.” By the end of it three of America’s most powerful Indian tribes—the Cheyennes, the Kiowas, and the Comanches—had been subjugated, the bison had been exterminated from the South Plains, and white settlers could move freely into former Indian lands that stretched from central Kansas to central Texas.

By the terms of the Medicine Lodge Treaty, solemnly signed by the South Plains Indians in 1867, the United States government had pledged itself to protect the Indians from exactly such “successes” in return for the tribes’ promises to move onto designated reservations. It was not the Indians who first broke the promises.

Some time ago our contributing editor Robert C. Alberts asked General Matthew B. Ridgway if he would consent to be interviewed for the AMERICAN HERITAGE series “Before the Colors Fade.” The idea of the series is to record the impressions and comments of certain Americans whose careers have been so distinguished as to become a significant part of American history in their own lifetimes.

In 1884, after he was offered an appointment to the medical faculty of the newly created Johns Hopkins University, Dr. William Henry Welch wrote to his stepmother: “Such great things are expected of the medical faculty at the Johns Hopkins in the way of achievement and of reform of medical education in this country that I feel oppressed by the weight of responsibility. A reputation there will not be so cheaply earned as at Bellevue, but in so far the stimulus to do good work will be the greater. I shall be surrounded by cultivated, refined and distinguished men, who will estimate a man for his intrinsic worth and not for money or glitter.”

A few months after the shooting began, the besiegers and the beleaguered of Boston became aware of a new presence on the scene. It was a new man, so to speak, with a new weapon; and since there were some fourteen hundred of them—boisterous, cocksure frontiersmen, clothed in fringed buckskin shirts and leggings, given at the slightest encouragement to demonstrating their skill with their deadly-accurate long rifles—it was difficult for anyone in the vicinity of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to ignore them. To the delight and amazement of onlookers, they could put one ball after another into a seven-inch target at 250 yards, and to the dismay of George Washington, who was trying to fashion an army capable of standing up to the British, the backwoodsmen proved as unrestrained a lot of ruffians as could be imagined, hopelessly unsuited to discipline.