Arts and Letters

Of the twenty-seven-year-old George Washington, Douglas Southall Freeman wrote, "Whatever he undertook to do, he did thoroughly and methodically. That was his nature and the process of his reasoning. He learned, too, so to respect the particular work he was doing, and so devoted himself to it, that he could concentrate on it in spite of distractions." This appraisal of Washington might pass with having some of the essence of Freeman. He was the editor of an important newspaper in a large city; he wrote before sunrise a column and more of editorials for the morning paper; he broadcast radio news and commentary at 8:00 A.M. five days a week. In this crowded daily regime he divided his hours of sleep and work so that he could write biography and history. He wrote a shelf of books. They fill a vacuum. They stand in an isolation and might be saying, "Where else can you find what is between our covers?" He took a set of fighting characters out of the most violent convulsion that ever shook the American Republic; he made them come alive on a grand scale. His four volume R. E. Lee is a finished portrait in a large mural. Many are its paradoxes and involutions, for R. E. Lee was opposed to the secession of his native state of Virginia, R. E. Lee freed slaves that came into his ownership and wrote plainly that he wished the slavery institution could be "extinguished." Yet such were his roots in Virginia that when she seceded he and his sword went with her.

Of the winter of 1863-64 Freeman wrote, "Lee's balancing of the ponderables on the military scales was accurate. He could not realize, and few even in Washington could see, that an imponderable was tipping the beam. That imponderable was the influence of President Lincoln… He [Lee] was much more interested in the Federal field commanders than in the commander-in-chief. After the late winter of 1863-64, had Lee known all of the facts he would have given as much care to the study of the mind of the Federal President as to the analysis of the strategical methods of his immediate adversaries. For that remarkable man, who had never wavered in his purpose to preserve the Union, had now mustered all his resources of patience and determination. Those who had sought cunningly to lead him, slowly found that he was leading them. His unconquerable spirit, in some mysterious manner, was being infused into the North as spring approached."

There followed the three-volume Lee's Lieutenants, subtitled "A Study in Command." In the years from then on Freeman was a consultant of the United States Army high command, a lecturer at the War College and at West Point. There came The South to Posterity, a review and appraisal of the books wherein the South reports its actions and states the case for the Confederacy. Referring to certain of these books as related to the heavy anxieties of the time, he wrote, "To spirits perplexed or in panic there may be offered, in the story of the Confederacy, the strange companionship of misery."

Then began his toils on one of the most formidable and extensive biographies ever undertaken. He saw five volumes of this work published. He finished writing a sixth volume—yet to be published. The projected final seventh volume remained unwritten. In reviewing Volumes III and IV of George Washington the Manchester Guardian mentioned "the immense scale of Dr. Freeman's great biography," and "No similar monument of this kind exists for any other eighteenth-century figure on either side of the Atlantic, and the historian of the period cannot but delight in the fact that Washington's career is being unrolled before him in all its detail." We meet an item about the young commander Washington, "His seriousness predominated… no surviving record of his youth credits him with a laugh, even with a smile." And furthermore, "He never said… as did Frederick of Prussia, that he wanted 'to be talked about,' but he desired precisely that." We are presented with eight valid points why the first love letter of Washington to Martha Custis, so long generally accepted, is "a forgery" or so edited that "the text cannot be trusted." Freeman enfigures a hero having faults and follies, a reckonable percentage of errors, yet when the smoke has blown away and the agony died down, Washington still stands an all-time hero, and we can understand better any one saying, "God, what a man you made here!"

The books of Freeman breathe of an affirmative America having unknown and unspent strengths of body and spirit. He deals with the only two periods in which the American people have fought a civil war, with a people divided in fear, suspicion, mistrust, in tragic bloodletting. They are studies of unity that come at high human cost out of sad and fateful human pride, prejudice, arrogance, greed, unreason, hate. When death came so suddenly to Douglas Freeman he could have said, had there been time, "So this is you, Mister Death? I've been walking and talking for years with men and women well acquainted, even familiar with you, Sir. You are no Stranger and since you say so I'll go with you."

His shelf of books will live long and testify for him. He was a Man of Learning not weighed down by his load of learning. He had a sense of humor and a gift of laughter hardly known at all to his heroes Lee and Washington. He lived with gusto for work and travel and a wide variety of fellowships. It might almost be said that in his sixty-seven years he covered eighty-seven or ninety-seven years of rich living. He was and is an American phenomenon having association and import in the shadowy and tentative reality termed the American Dream.