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The major clue to his extraordinary accomplishments must be sought in the man himself, not in environmental influences that he shared with others; but his remarkable career cannot be understood or even viewed outside of its distinctive setting. Theodore Roosevelt in his Autobiography quoted a bit of homely exhortation from a rural Virginian which is pertinent in this connection, for Lee’s biographer found the same philosophy in the General and was himself an exemplar of it: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.” Douglas Freeman liked to speak of himself as a “tramp newspaperman,” but actually his career as an editor was wholly confined to Richmond. He was never a foreign correspondent, and only as a lecturer or consultant did he ply the journalistic trade in other cities. No one would think of describing this author of vast military volumes as provincial, but the fact is that he dealt first and primarily with the great chieftains of his own state. He stayed where he was and started with what was there. This exhaustive investigator eventually sought materials from everywhere, but, because of the physical necessities of his professional life, he had these materials brought to him as a rule—in books and photostats and microfilm—and he surveyed them in his own study. Long before his career ended he was traveling many thousands of miles every year, but there never was a time when his life did not center in Richmond, and neither in spirit nor manner did he ever cease to be a Virginian.
Virginians are not all alike, to be sure, and some of them did not lay the emphasis on the same things that he did. He did not romanticize the past and the first families. Once in private conversation I remarked to him that he was the most efficient Virginian since Jefferson—a charge that he smilingly denied. I still regard this particular parallel as close, but I doubt if this Richmonder got his major inspiration from Jefferson, even in matters of industry and order. If he consciously modeled himself on anyone it was on Robert E. Lee.
I
Douglas Freeman was born in Lynchburg, but his family moved to Richmond when he was only a little boy, and he grew up in the former seat of the Confederacy. In stories he often referred to the “Jeems” River, which flowed by both these small cities. Even Richmond was small in his boyhood, and his own talk always retained the flavor and humor of the countryside. His father, Walker B. Freeman, was a Confederate veteran who had served in the ranks throughout the War and was at Appomattox at the surrender. In later years he was known as “General” Freeman but he gained this title as an officer of the United Confederate Veterans, not as an officer in Lee’s army. In Virginia very little notice seems to have been taken of the fact that the “General” came of Mayflower stock, and it made little difference in those days that he was not conspicuously prosperous in his insurance business. Hardly anybody in that locality at that time was prosperous in any business. It was more significant in his son’s life that he came of a long line of devout Baptists. Douglas Freeman was a deeply religious man, and in his youth he gave serious thought to becoming a minister. It was highly significant, also, that the boy heard stories of the Army of Northern Virginia at his father’s knee. He himself attended Confederate reunions, where he saw gnarled and wounded men, and from an early age he cherished the ambition to tell their full story.
In the old Confederate capital above the James the boy received all of his formal education through the college stage. He attended the University of Richmond, a Baptist institution, and was always loyal to it, serving it afterwards for many years as head of the Board of Trustees. At all stages he was a good student and his interest in history may almost be described as innate, but this was quickened by Professor Samuel Chiles Mitchell, an inspiring teacher, who encouraged him to pursue the subject further. While an undergraduate he began to be a newspaper correspondent, besides contributing to the college literary magazine, and once having got printer’s ink into his veins he never could get it out. For the moment, however, history had the priority. He gained a fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied history and economics, and at the unusually early age of twenty-two received the Ph.D. degree. Throughout the rest of his life the title “Doctor” was fastened on him. Incidentally, he picked up a good deal of medical knowledge in Baltimore—from medical students he associated with and from his elder brother, Allen, who became a doctor in the more usual meaning of the term. The only copy of the young graduate student’s dissertation—on the Virginia Secession Convention—was destroyed by fire before ever it was published, but his Calendar of Confederate State Papers appeared in the same year (1908) that he took his degree.
Leaving Baltimore, he returned to Richmond. There, before embarking irrevocably upon a newspaper career, he served as secretary of the Tax Commission of the state and drafted its report. For a time he was on the staff of the Times Dispatch, but his enduring connection was with the afternoon paper, the News Leader. This began when he was twenty-five. At the age of twenty-nine (1915) he became the editor, and he held this post until he was sixty-three. It was also when he was twenty-nine that his edition of Lee’s Dispatches appeared in print and that he signed a contract for a biography of the great Captain, but nearly a score of years were to pass before he could publish that.
Of Dr. Freeman’s journalistic career I can speak with no special competence and I make no pretense of describing it with any adequacy. Being the editor of a paper with a small staff was no sinecure. One of his associates on the News Leader estimated at the time of his death that during his service of more than a third of a century he wrote at least 600,000 words every year—that is, the equivalent of about three books the size of this one and perhaps a hundred altogether. Yet his associates remembered him as one who always emphasized the virtue of brevity in a newspaperman. With this went an emphasis on restraint. “Don’t gush, and don’t twitter,” he told his juniors. “Play it straight.” In the course of his career he championed many changes which may be described as “reforms” while opposing others which he regarded as backward steps, but the predominant impression he gave was not that of a crusading editor. He was too judicious for that, and, while liberal in spirit, he could hardly have embodied the Lee tradition without being conservative in the true sense of that much abused term. He sought to safeguard old and enduring values and was wholly unsympathetic with demagoguery of any brand.
He was fully aware of the ephemeral nature of his own writing for a newspaper—“writing in sand” he called it—and as an editor he was relatively a local figure. During the First World War he won his spurs as a daily commentator on military events. He himself never served in the armed forces, since he was incapacitated by a hernia, but long before he achieved national fame he was recognized in Virginia and the South as an authority on military matters and on the Confederacy. Some wag remarked that the Confederate flag might as well be flown from the masthead of the News Leader, and during the Second World War he vivified his comments on terrain and movements by drawing analogies from the Virginia scene and Lee’s battles.
Most of the stories about him as a newspaperman that are still current relate to his later years, when he had become a legend. He worked behind an uncluttered desk and under a sign which read: “Time alone is irreplaceable . . . Waste it not.” He answered his letters immediately, wasting no words in his replies, but during his office hours he gave his visitors no impression of being hurried. His junior colleagues spoke of his daily editorial conferences as “powwows” and described themselves as “carrying wampum to the great white father.” No pipe of peace was circulated, however; nobody smoked at these conferences because he did not, and in his presence everybody guarded himself against profanity, which he did not use because of his respect for the English language. Perhaps the publisher, John Stewart Bryan, sometimes called him “Douglas” in private but he did not do so in public; and Dr. Freeman never called his longtime friend anything but “Mr. Bryan.” Both of them antedated the first-name era, and were heirs of a tradition of politeness which avoided excess of familiarity. Like Mr. Bryan, however, Dr. Fre
eman was characteristically genial; he told a good story, and there was plenty of laughter at his staff conferences.
No small part of his local and regional reputation before the appearance of his great historical works was owing to his frequent appearances as a speaker. Besides considering the ministry as a calling, he had flirted in his youth with the idea of becoming an actor, and he soon made himself at home on the public platform. In later years he often described speaking as a waste of time, but until the end of his days he engaged in it, and it might almost be described as his third life and third career.
The first time I ever saw the versatile and indefatigable young editor was when he was making a speech. It was at a convocation at the University of Virginia, whither I recently had come to teach American history, and as I remember, he delivered a challenging and inspirational address, such as everybody expected. He was about thirty-seven at the time, and stories were current about the incredible number and variety of things he did. Obviously he was a well-informed, a high-minded and a public-spirited man—just the sort of person one would turn to for a challenging speech in behalf of a good cause, such as the advancement of Southern education. But I wondered at the time if he were not spending himself too freely, if he were not scattering his fire too widely; and no external observer could have anticipated at this stage that, while still performing his manifold editorial tasks and making his innumerable public appearances, he would gain enduring fame as a writer of history. Nor could one who listened to his spoken words have anticipated the quality of his formal writings. Rarely did he write out his speeches and rarely did they represent him at his best; he simply took them in his stride. He had to take an enormous number of them before he was through: in the year 1937, when he seems to have been at the peak, he spoke eighty-three times to various audiences, besides delivering ninety lectures on journalism in Columbia University.
Long before then his radio talks had made his name a household word in the Old Dominion. Beginning in 1925 he was a daily commentator, and on Sunday he delivered what amounted to a lay sermon. I speak of these programs chiefly from hearsay, for I had no radio during the years that I was a resident of his state and I never had much chance to hear them. Those that I did hear were just what I had expected from the common account of them. His radio performances were highly distinctive, if not unique. He made no special preparation for them, except such as he had already made in going over the news of the day and writing his editorials, and he spoke from the briefest of notes. On a local station, without a nationwide hookup, he talked to his fellow Virginians, and he was just as relaxed as he was in his weekly current-events class or in his office at the News Leader. This was homely fare every day, and on Sundays it was inspirational. Everybody knew who Dr. Freeman was. Even before his great books came out he was the local authority on the Confederacy, on Richmond’s past and present, and on everything military; and until the end he was to his own people a combination of lay pastor and family physician.
II
The local celebrity became a national literary figure and gained a sure place in American historiography with the publication of R. E. Lee in 1934-1935, when he was forty-eight. The one-volume work he had contracted for in 1915 had grown to four large volumes, and the calendar showed that it had been a score of years in preparation. To those who were unfamiliar with the slow processes of research and writing this seemed a long time, no doubt, but to the initiated who were also aware of this author’s other tasks it was a notable performance by any reckoning. Probably it would have been impossible if he had not firmly regularized his own procedure and advanced with steady and unflagging step toward the distant goal of his high ambition.
It was in 1926, when he was forty, that he began to follow his now-famous schedule. It is now impossible to believe that he was ever unsystematic; and while soaking up Confederate lore as a young editor he must have done a vast amount of work on the life and campaigns of the great Confederate chieftain. But as his original plan expanded and his canvas lengthened, he became convinced that he must make a second vocation out of the historical research and writing which was his first love anyway. This necessitated a careful apportionment of his precious hours, and as rigid an observance of his historical as of his editorial schedule. At first he set himself a program of fourteen hours a week, and to make sure that he would attain it he began to keep books on himself. He did more than maintain a balance. He amassed credits—”s.c.o.” or “special carry over” of hours he called them—and he made up for lost time before he lost it. From the day in 1926 when he began to keep these records until December 10, 1933, when he finished R. E. Lee, he spent 6,100 hours on that work.
Eventually the story of his working habits became widely known and helped make him a legendary character on the national as well as the local scene, but when his first major work was published reviewers and readers judged him by results without much knowledge of processes. I shall never forget the impression his R. E. Lee made on me at the very first reading. By that time, although I had no such acquaintance with the man as I gained later, I had firsthand knowledge of his scholarship, for I had seen the articles on Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and others that he had prepared for the Dictionary of American Biography. He afterwards told me that he found the writing of these sketches, under sharp restrictions of space, a cruel task. These were miniatures, and to paint them he had to turn aside from the vast canvas on which he was then working and to which he had become accustomed. But they left no doubt of his historical craftsmanship and his skill in portraiture, whatever the scale might be, and I awaited with confidence the appearance of his long-heralded life of Lee. Great as my personal expectations were, the realization far supassed them, and never did I devour a major historical work with such insatiable appetite and more unalloyed satisfaction. The book reached the full stature of the man, in my opinion.
This work, like all the major works of Freeman, is a blend of biography and military history, and it has the qualities of exhaustiveness and judiciousness which became his hallmark. The author himself never expected that all of his military judgments would be accepted without question, and some of them may no doubt be disputed.
While performing his daily task as an editor, Douglas Freeman had produced a major work which was immediately hailed as a classic, and he could have been readily forgiven if he had rested on his laurels. He had had financial success; he had more invitations to make speeches than he could possibly accept; he was serving on more and more boards—business, educational, and philanthropic; and he was drawn into constant consultation about scholarly and journalistic matters. Actually he did not enter upon another major historical undertaking for two or three years, but given the necessary health and strength, he was sure to do so, for he had not yet completed the task he set himself in his youth. This was “to preserve the record of our fathers of the Army of Northern Virginia.” In a real sense his R. E. Lee told the story of that army, but in that military biography he had wisely adopted the device of viewing the field from headquarters and thus had been unable to give a full account of the actions of Lee’s officers. Fearing that unwittingly he had done them an injustice, he wanted to redress the balance and fill out the story. The result was a second major work, Lee’s Lieutenants, which may be regarded as a supplement to its predecessor but turned out to be even more popular. On June 14,1936, he began work on it. In his Diary that day he made this entry: “Outlined scope on train between N. Y. City and Meriden, Conn., and finished broad outline at Middletown, Conn., this A.M.” Almost eight years later he completed the work, having spent on it 7,121 hours. It was published in three volumes, 1942-1945. Probably this is the most colorful of all Freeman’s works; it has been accepted as a classic in the field of tactics; and it will long live as a penetrating study of military personalities.
III
Two weeks after his fifty-eighth birthday, Freeman finished Lee’s Lieutenants, and he began outlining the first chapter of another major work six months later—on Ja
nuary 7, 1945, to be precise. This was his biography of George Washington, and he was engaged on it the rest of his life, spending 15,693 hours on it according to his own records. In the midst of this period of eight and a half years (June 30, 1949) he retired from the editorship of the News Leader. He continued his radio broadcasts and many other public activities, but more nearly than ever before he became a full-time historian. That is, he worked at history fifty-six hours a week as a rule. His labors on R. E. Lee and Lee’s Lieutenants were spread over a period of twenty-nine years, and he did not keep exact records during the first of these. It is impossible to make exact mathematical comparisons between the time spent on these two works and on George Washington, but, roughly speaking, the third major undertaking may be compared to the two others in bulk and in the hours directly devoted to it. Against the seven volumes of Confederate biography may be set the five volumes on Washington that he published before his death, the sixth that is published here, and the seventh that he never got to. In sum, he embarked at the age of fifty-eight on a literary and historical task which was roughly equivalent to the one he had performed already.
The question naturally arises, why did he do it? He did not then lack for useful and interesting employment. Besides doing his editorial work, he was serving on many boards; he belonged to all the major historical and literary societies, and in them could have consorted even more than he did with his brethren in letters and learning; he was traveling on the average 20,000 miles a year and could have had endless speaking engagements. He had fame enough, being now indisputably recognized as one of the first military historians of the world. Also, it might seem that he had won the right to rest, or at least to modify a schedule that most men would have found intolerable.
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