Washington

by Douglas Southall Freeman

  He made his decision after some pressure. To many it seemed desirable, even imperative, that his powers be employed in something fully worthy of them. No minor task would do; it had to be a major undertaking. Stephen Vincent Benét summed the matter up when he said that Douglas Freeman ought to be “chained to his desk” and forced to write a life of George Washington. There was logic in this, beyond a doubt. Materials on Washington that were now available had not been fully exploited; an authoritative military estimate of him was needed; and Washington was the fountainhead of the tradition which had been inherited by Lee as a man and soldier. The first great American hero clearly deserved and seemed now to require full-length treatment, and the finger of destiny pointed to America’s greatest military biographer. Freeman never considered anything less than a spacious study of the whole man and his whole life. The work he planned was to be more extensive than any that had ever been written on this subject. Indeed, it had no real parallel in American biography, and in sheer bulk the task was enough to deter any but the most indefatigable workman. What was more, it fell within another century, which Dr. Freeman had never explored as a scholar and in which he had not lived in spirit—as he had lived so long in the shadow of Lee’s Virginia and the Southern Confederacy.

  His acceptance of this challenge may be attributed, perhaps, to the “quenchless ambition of an ordered mind,” which he was soon to perceive in Washington. In Freeman himself this took the form of eagerness to match his talents and skills against an immense task while there was yet time. There were grave risks but these were calculated risks, and he assumed them fully confident of his demonstrated powers and his tested methods. He viewed this gigantic undertaking with the eye of an engineer; he counted the time and concluded that he could perform it, relying on his unequalled craftsmanship. A notable aspect of his treatment of Lee was his emphasis on that General’s ability in organization and administration, and this was to be even more notable in his treatment of Washington. Native ability and high character are not enough; industry and system are indispensable to those who would achieve greatly. He counted on them in his own case, and if there have been other American historians who have matched him in industry (which is doubtful), no one of them seems ever to have matched him in system.

  His methods can be commented on most appropriately in connection with his last work. They developed through the years and received full systematization in the period when he had most need to realize upon them, because time was running short. It was not until after he had begun to work on Washington that I ever talked with him about the mechanics of research and writing. Like many other people, I knew a good deal about his schedule, but I did not know just how he spent his time in his third-floor study. In the late nineteen-forties he told me and showed me, the net result being that I emerged from these conversations with enhanced humility and a number of excellent ideas. It is a great pity that he did not write an article on the subject of historical method, for it could have been a classic of its kind.

  His procedure was systematized to a degree that I have never seen equalled, but no one should say that he was engaged in mass production. He had more help in his last years than when doing his Confederate books, but, considering the scale of his operations, his staff was always small. In his work on Washington he had a regular research assistant who looked up things for him, going to places where he could not conveniently go, and her services were invaluable. But he never saw things through the eyes of anybody else; the fact that an abstract had been made by an assistant never relieved him of the responsibility of looking at an important document, and no scholar whom I have known was more conscientious about a personal examination of source material. He took nothing on secondary authority, and at times he carried almost to the degree of fault his independence of the conclusions of others. He mastered the facts for himself, expressed his own opinions, and wrote his books with his own pen. The last statement is literally true of his final work, for he wrote it in longhand, having concluded that his typewriter by its very speed led him down false trails that had to be retraced and into inaccuracies that had to be painfully corrected. He always remained a master craftsman and the significance of his methods lies chiefly in his skill in making himself effective without loss of motion.

  Fortunately, he was in good position to get all the necessary materials that were obtainable, and his collections on the Confederacy and on the age of Washington might have been envied by any scholar and almost any library. This policy with respect to materials was partly a matter of necessity, since he had to remain at home, but he had the advantage of working from the sources themselves and not merely from notes made on them. Thus he was able to reduce note-taking to the minimum. One of the most helpful hints I got from him was not to copy long extracts out of books you have in your own library and can easily refer to; a card, giving date, reference, and some idea of contents is quite enough. He had an advantage over academic scholars in that he collected his materials for use in a particular book. There was no need for him to put something down because of the thought that some time he would use it in a classroom. The form of his notes need not concern us here except to say that he had worked everything out on the basis of experience and that he saved thousands of wasted motions by maintaining uniformity and perfect order. He used cards (size 5½ × 4¼) and “long sheets” in ring binders. The former, which were strictly chronological, constituted the master file, to which the latter were a supplement. Each of the latter had a card of a distinctive color. All these were numbered before he began to write, and when he made a chapter outline he referred to them by number. Anyone who has ever tried to write a chapter from a folder of untidy notes on paper of various sizes (as is often the case with beginners and sometimes with the mature) can realize the anguish and frustration which this orderly workman saved himself by care and system. One can also see how he was able to weave into his story countless details about marches and battles, without losing any of them in the process.

  His books were always in order, so he wasted no time in finding one of them; he had weights to keep books open at the proper place; he had a place to write standing if he got tired of sitting; he used specially ruled paper and could tell almost at a glance how many words were on it; he could tell what time it was from the clock in the back of his head; he could tell within a page how long a chapter would be before he had finished it, and even before he started. This last he was enabled to do because of his practice of elaborately outlining a chapter in advance, and I have found this one of the most interesting items in his procedure, though I must confess that so far as I am concerned it is quite inimitable. He was convinced that it was a great time-saver. On March 13, 1947, he made this entry in his Diary:

  Finished outline of Chapter XVII (Braddock’s Defeat). It took about 11 hours and will save 20 at least.

  By means of organization and system he saved himself hundreds of precious hours, and by rigid adherence to his exacting schedule he kept his record books in balance. In fact, he was always ahead of the game, doing more than his quota of time and accumulating credits which he could draw on when he made business or pleasure trips. He always carried his briefcase along, but he gave himself no credit for the revising or proofreading he did on trains and planes. Every large-scale enterprise of research and writing is an endurance contest, rather than a sprint, and Freeman, relying on regularity and persistence, did not let himself be hurried. He set a grueling pace, nonetheless, and occasionally he put on a tremendous burst of speed. On one October Sunday in 1948, when the trees outdoors were golden, he wrote 4,800 words, noting that this seemed to be his record. He took nearly twelve hours, however, and probably would have denied that he was sprinting. This was while he was still doing full time as an editor and he was taking advantage of the only day in the week that was wholly free. It was at the end of the following June that he retired from the News Leader and instituted a fifty-six-hour week in his third-floor study. During the first week of his new freedom, when
he was sixty-three years old, he went beyond this and put in sixty-five hours!

  A major secret of his success, unquestionably, was his ability to work effectively for a much longer stretch than is possible for most people, but not even he would have been able to maintain such a program if he had not found joy in it. Several years before this, returning to history after a round of commencement speeches, he had written in his Diary: “Rejoiced to get back to my beloved work.” His entry at the end of the first week after he became a full-time historian is even more eloquent:

  Life is so beautiful now I’m afraid it is a dream from which I shall be awakened by a voice that says: ’Get up and go downtown and write two columns of editorial.’

  Sometimes he spoke of himself as “plugging away,” but at the end of six years of work on Washington he described it as “joyous labor.” It was, he said, “the most delightful intellectual experience” of his life. Before the end, however, he himself admitted that he was overdoing it. In the autumn of 1950 he wrote in his Diary: “I am working too long hours, and for the good of myself and the completion of the work at a high level, I must shorten the week so as to give me time every day for exercise . . . I must not let my interest override my discretion.” The remedy, however, was not a drastic one. The new schedule, exclusive of mail and broadcast preparation, was to consist of eight hours daily and seven on music days. He was then taking music lessons twice a week, so the schedule seemed to call for fifty-four hours. He did not always take that hour of exercise in his garden, but music was a solace even during worktime: he often played records while writing. Beethoven accompanied his pen as he traced the career and assayed the personality of George Washington.

  George Washington, which resulted from the unceasing but joyous labors in the study at “Westbourne,” has already been extensively reviewed. It is quite unnecessary, therefore, to review the work here, and any attempt to anticipate the consensus of historical judgment on it would be presumptuous as well as premature. Something may be said, however, about the sort of work this is, and the sum of the matter is that in view of the author’s interest, training, and methods, it is just what might have been expected of him.

  It is an extraordinarily full story of a man of affairs and action, set on an immediate background which is always meticulously drawn and often elaborately detailed. If Freeman did not know precisely where Washington was and what Washington was doing every day of his adult life, as he did in the case of Lee, he came as near to it as is humanly possible and he carefully reconstructed every important scene. He rode and fought alongside of Washington, maintaining an Olympian detachment all the while and afterwards summing up these actions and operations with unerring skill. Also, he viewed with penetrating eye the man’s personality and character as these developed, analyzing them stage by stage as no other writer had ever done. This is biography in the grand manner which gains its texture and color from exact detail but which is unmarred by special pleading. It is as full a story of a planter’s life as anybody is likely ever to write, and it is military biography par excellence. It is the full record of a public man, and in its portrayal of Washington’s relations with the civil authorities, from Governor Dinwiddie to the Continental Congress, the author is an irreproachable narrator and commentator. Finally, it is a thoroughgoing examination and judicious appraisal of a legend.

  Yet, while it is all of this, it is not everything; it is not the history of an age and, despite its extraordinary richness of detail, it requires supplementation. The author explored with zest the society of Virginia in the hero’s youth and turned up and organized a mass of fresh descriptive material, but he did not write social history in the full sense. He focused attention on the immediate scene rather than the larger setting, and he did not have time to attain the degree of familiarity with the eighteenth-century world that he had gained with the times of Lee and Jackson. For all Washington’s nobility of spirit and high intelligence he was not a man of thought in the sense that Franklin, Jefferson, and John Adams were, and his biographer did not venture far into the history of ideas. He did not even write political history in the usual meaning of the term. He did not essay a fresh interpretation of the causes of the American Revolution or of the movement for the Constitution, and in his account of Washington’s first term he kept out of the partisan struggle, just as the President himself tried to keep above it. At this point the biographer’s unwillingness to accept secondary authority and his determination to hew his own path did him some disservice. He may be criticized for his rather external treatment of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison—about all of whom, apparently, he was reserving judgment until he should come to the time when Washington himself was unable to remain above the combat. He stuck to Washington, saw the scene through his eyes, and raised no question which was not voiced by the President himself. In this work as a whole he did not adhere to the formula he had used in his biography of Lee, but he seems to have recurred to it at the last.

  It will appear, I think, that Douglas Southall Freeman rendered the same sort of service to his countrymen in the case of George Washington that he did in that of Lee. By the slow and painstaking processes of scholarship he examined, verified, and preserved a major legend. With a wave of the hand he dismissed the trivial and false story of the cherry tree, but he placed on a new pedestal of truth the legendary figure of a national hero whose greatness lay chiefly in his unselfish patriotism and unassailable character. The portrait is convincing because it is utterly candid, and the character assumes reality in the mind of the observer because it is shown not as something static but as something that develops. At the end of the first two volumes of this work [the unabridged version], when the character of a bold and dashing but ambitious and calculating young man was analyzed with devastating candor, no reader could help wondering if the legend of Washington was not something of a hoax. But as the man and patriot grew before the discerning eye in the successive volumes, as his portrait was painted by a thousand deft but scrupulously honest strokes, he emerged in the lineaments that his countrymen have so long recognized and so long honored. By and large, his biographer enhances his military stature, showing him not as a military genius but as a great commander, within the sharp limits that were set by circumstance. What the American cause most needed in him was “patience and determination, inexhaustible and inextinguishable,” and Washington manifested these very qualities while providing in his relations with the civil authorities a model for all time. Some may have wondered then and some may wonder now if the man could have been as irreproachable, as inflexibly just, as dedicated a patriot as he seemed to be. The verdict of the scrupulous historian after years of unremitting inquiry is that, as nearly as can be in human life, the legend and the man were identical.

  To say that the biographer merely gave us in elaborate form what we already had is, however, to do much less than justice to the invaluable work of historical conservation. Legends grow shadowy with the passing years and need to be buttressed by freshly established truth; and the finest traditions of a free people, like their liberties, can be maintained only by eternal vigilance and incessant labors. National heroes can be cast from their pedestals by unholy hands and the ideals that patriots lived by can be dishonored. Unlike stones, literary monuments have life within them and they often prove more enduring. The creators of noble books about noble men are public benefactors, and such a creator was Douglas Southall Freeman.

  DUMAS MALONE

  1954

  INDEX

  Index

  (Prepared by William C. Kiessel)

  Abercromby, Maj. Gen. James, and French and Indian War, 103–4, 120–21

  Accokeek Creek, farm on, 4–5

  Adams, Abigail, 231, 256, 270, 274, 590

  Adams, John, President, 209, 218–20, 251–53, 256, 269, 333, 348, 366, 538, 557, 565, 568, 573, 577, 611–14, 618, 647, 659, 661, 665, 696, 704–5, 712–13, 724–25, 727, 729–30, 739, 746–47;

  annual address of, 707–8, 716, 733
;

  and Congress, 716, 719–20;

  and Washington, 736–37;

  and XYZ affair, 720–21

  Adams, John Quincy, 649, 680, 698, 707

  Adams, Samuel, 193, 198, 202, 216–17, 240, 366

  Adet, Pierre, 665, 671, 682, 702–4

  Africa, 679, 681

  Agenois Regiment, 486

  Agrarian society, 10, 143, 156, 188, 222, 225. See also Plantations, life on

  Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, 33

  Akin, Edmund, 112, 114

  Alabama, frontier defense of, 111

  Albany, 253, 266–67, 270, 298

  Albany, Treaty of, 3, 13

  Alexander family, 24

  Alexandria (also known as Belhaven), 26, 32, 37, 48–49, 63, 66–67, 73, 92–97, 105, 108–9, 111–12, 116, 118, 120, 125, 142, 155, 167, 173, 177, 183, 203–5, 210, 212, 527, 561, 671, 682, 699, 710

  Alexandria Academy, 741

  Alexandria Regiment, 754

  Algiers, 704;

  Bey of, 691

  Alien and Sedition Acts, 730–31

  Allegheny mountains, explorations in, 10, 13–14, 87, 92, 108, 125–27, 131, 179, 650

  Allegheny River, 25, 38, 40, 45–47, 65, 73, 85, 131–32, 134, 615

  Allen, Ensign, 77

  Allen, Ethan, at Ticonderoga, 237

  Alliance, 440

  Alliance, treaties of, 131, 572, 624, 627

  Alston, William, 594

  American Daily Advertiser, 701

  Ames, Fisher, 695–97, 704

  Amherst, Gen. Jeffery, and French and Indian War, 121, 141–42, 148