Early in 1945, less than a year after Douglas Southall Freeman began work on his massive narration of Washington’s life, a distinguished historian and friend wished Freeman good luck with the daunting project and closed with the following words: “It is a great subject, and one in which both the subject and the author are worthy of each other.”1 That assertion is deceptively simple and meaningful because the subject and the author were both complex and fascinating men. Washington is demonstrably the most important figure in all of American history. He presided over the creation of the American republic, as a civilian, after having made its creation possible as a soldier.
Freeman is equally worthy of our attention because he ranked among the three or four most popular writers of history and biography during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The cultural climate in this country between 1945 and Freeman’s death in 1953 profoundly affected both what Freeman wrote and, even more, why the project was received so positively. Its appearance struck such responsive chords that the series became a notable event in the history of American publishing. As Freeman’s longtime editor remarked to him in October 1948, when Volumes I and II appeared: “The press you are getting on publication is something I have never seen equalled, either for promptness or for unanimity of praise.”2
Just as George Washington endures as a towering figure in our founding as a nation—despite his apparent blandness and unapproachability—Freeman’s biography endures because of its clarity, its judiciousness, its scrupulous attention to detail as well as context, and above all because of its empathy. Whereas Freeman’s four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee (1934-1935) had been an intense labor of love, the author embarked upon his Washington with dutiful respect. By 1949, however, when Freeman got deeply immersed in Volumes III and IV, his esteem for Washington’s character and greatness had been considerably enhanced. The more he learned about Washington, working through one crisis after another, the more Freeman appreciated him. Even though Washington successfully suppressed his innermost feelings in most situations, the public crises that he confronted were deeply felt at a personal level.
Like Washington, Freeman was a courtly Virginian. Although he was a newspaper editor by profession, military affairs and history fascinated him. Late in September 1945, with the Washington enterprise well launched, Freeman flew from Washington, D.C., on a trip around the world in order to meet with officers and men in “our various armies of occupation in Europe and Asia” along with officials of many other nations. His travels took him to England, Germany, Egypt, India, China, Japan, Guam, Pearl Harbor, the west coast of the United States, and finally home to Richmond, where he immersed himself in this biographical project that he hoped would be “definitive.” In June of 1949, at the age of sixty-three, he retired as editor of The Richmond News Leader (a position that he had held since 1915) in order to concentrate his full attention and energies on the biography.
In addition to his total identification as a Virginian and a strong fascination with historical biography, other features of Freeman’s life help provide us with clues to his affinity for George Washington. Early in the autumn of 1952, a month prior to the publication of Volume V, Freeman acknowledged to a friend that ever since 1908 he had devoted his most meaningful hours to writing and public speaking on the subjects of politics and military history.3 A lifelong Democrat, he nevertheless supported Dwight D. Eisenhower for the presidency in 1952 and contributed an important essay on “Ike” to Life magazine that fall. Freeman believed that a successful high command in the military provided excellent preparation for national leadership.
Unlike the tightly controlled dignity and reserve of George Washington, Freeman’s personal warmth won him many friends and admirers. A biographical sketch found among his papers and presumably written by a staff member informs us that he had “a wonderful sense of humor and everyone in his household shares in the fun and daily laughter that abounds in his presence. Each morning at the breakfast table he announces his choice of the Hymn for the day, and that is sung at intervals, or a phrase of it hummed whenever he or anyone of the family feels the urge to do so.”4 Freeman loved classical music, played recordings while he worked, and started taking piano lessons at the age of sixty-three.
Despite these cheery and attractive aspects of his temperament, however, Freeman subjected himself to a regimen that might have astonished the equally self-disciplined George Washington. From 1947 until his sudden death in 1953 Freeman kept a daily diary that enables us to trace his progress on the great biographical project week by week if not day by day. It is not an introspective or intimate journal. Rather, it is a log of hours invested in the Father of His Country and precious minutes wasted on mindless intruders. Saturday, June 6, 1953, provides us with a representative entry: “By every test, this has been a bad week. I miscalculated the time lost. . . . To cap it all, a deaf old jackass came here today and took almost an hour to ask me when he should fly the Confederate flag on his Confederate bank.”
Freeman rose every morning at 2:30 and was customarily at work by 3 A.M. His stated goal (in his diary) was to work on Washington eight hours each day, seven days per week. At the end of each week he tallied the number of hours actually logged; and from time to time he calculated the grand total to date. On June 7, 1953, six days prior to his death of a massive heart attack in the late afternoon, he recorded a total of 15,693 hours invested in the project. I’m not at all certain whether George Washington, who also rose early and kept a diary, would have applauded or would have been appalled by Freeman’s compulsiveness.
Despite such assiduity, however, Freeman could not have completed six volumes in as many years by working alone. (He had earned a Ph.D. in history at Johns Hopkins in 1908, working in the customary self-reliant fashion.) In October 1944 he hired Dr. Gertrude R. B. Richards as a coworker. She remained his chief research associate throughout the project; but, after he gained financial support from the Carnegie Corporation, Freeman added Mrs. Mary Wells Ashworth to the staff as an associate early in 1948 and Mrs. Geneva Bennet Snelling as project librarian in 1952. Like George Washington, Freeman did not tolerate incompetence. Hence his shock in 1946 when Gertrude Richards discovered major gaps and errors in the massive thirty-seven-volume editorial project undertaken by John C. Fitzpatrick of the Library of Congress, The Writings of George Washington (1931-1940).5
Freeman began to serve as a local radio commentator as early as 1925, when radio programming was still in its infancy. In 1929 he started to make weekly broadcasts, called “Lessons in Living,” each Sunday. Eventually these informal sessions occurred daily and came to be regarded as one of the oldest radio features of continuous record in the United States. Whenever an occasion arose, Freeman urged military preparedness—prior to World War II but particularly during the Cold War, the period when Washington was in preparation. Had he lived into the age of television, viewers would have felt comfortable with his open, likable face, his alert, inquisitive, somewhat bemused expression, his solid build and balding head planted on a short neck, and his slightly rumpled appearance. Photographs of Freeman show a man comfortable in the company of others.
Early in March 1953 Freeman arranged a radio interview for a broadcast devoted to Parson Mason Locke Weems, whose biography of Washington first appeared in 1800 and undoubtedly sold more copies thereafter than any biography in all of American publishing history. It is the source for most of the best-known Washington myths, including the story of little George, his hatchet, and the defenseless cherry tree.6 Freeman’s broadcast occurred on March 10, 1953, just three months before his death. Here is part of his response to the question, What effect has Weems’s Washington had on the writing of American history and biography?
The answer may seem a paradox: Weems was absurdly in error with respect to detail; [but] he was fundamentally correct in his interpretation of the basic character of the man. In this, “the wheel has come full circle.” After the American Revolution, the average citizen of the young republic looked on Washington as the saviour of the country. No man in the history of the United States ever was brought so soon to a state just below that of apotheosis. . . . To regard him as the perfect patriot, the ideal American, was an imperative in the code of the average man. That continued until long after the death of the last of those who had known Washington in the flesh. The final entombment of the demigod came in the noble biography of Washington Irving, which was completed in 1859—just before the emergence of the new national and regional heroes of the Civil War. Washington was half forgotten by 1870 and, when praised in the familiar strains, was regarded as something of a bore. No man, it was said in substance, could be as nearly perfect as he was represented to be. That mental attitude prepared the way for the debunkers who did their utmost and their worst to prove Washington an unworthy man. . . . The debunkers have had their day. . . . Now that substantially all the historical evidence regarding Washington has been assembled, it is manifest, I think, that Parson Weems was far more nearly accurate in his appraisal than the debunkers have been.7
In the fall of 1951, after Volumes III and IV of Freeman’s work appeared, he received a long and rambling but laudatory letter from Rupert Hughes, the last of the debunkers, who never completed his own George Washington (1926-1930), a three-volume work that ended its narration abruptly at Yorktown in 1781.
Hughes lavished praise on Freeman and urged him to complete the saga that Hughes himself had left undone.
It has been said that every biography is really an autobiography. In so far as that is true you are building a glorious autobiography. Your research is astounding, but your calm, sane, kindly yet critical evaluations of the sources and the documents demonstrate a magnificent mind and a sterling honesty, a very winning character. Please hurry up the next two installments of your great Whodunit as I can hardly wait to learn how you will extricate Washington from his appalling and unending perplexities.
Freeman responded in his distinctively tactful fashion to the seventy-nine-year-old debunker. Hughes had done more than anyone else, he said, to prepare the way for a new study of Washington because he had performed two essential services. “One of them was to sweep away the debris, the other was to open entirely unknown sources for the use of your successors.”8
In contrast to this courtly pas de deux, Freeman had a concerned and revealing correspondence with Allan Nevins in the fall of 1948 after Nevins wrote a rave review of Volumes I and II for The New York Times, First Freeman asked Nevins, a veteran biographer, for counsel on the problem of detail, and then revealed why the subsequent volumes in the series would be more discriminating. Freeman felt that including minor details caused the early volumes to “drag.”
At the same time I included it [detail] in these volumes because Washington is Washington and everything about him in that period of meager knowledge of his life seems justified. . . . From 1774 onward I eliminate a greater part of the small detail, but the old problem remains: If you include too much you bore and if you include too little you fail to give verisimilitude to the picture.9
Nevins responded a fortnight later with an equally candid letter. On the one hand, he declared, “detail seems to me the vivifying element in history or biography.” He then conceded, however, that “most readers boggle at a great deal.” Nevins then moved to his main message, unstinting praise for Freeman’s portrait accompanied by some skepticism about the historical subject himself.
You are admirably successful, I think, in making George Washington seem real; for the first time I realized, I think, just what sort of human being he was. Your analysis of him is masterly. I wonder if you realize that your portrait, so vivid and true, is a little bit disagreeable? He is not a likeable young man. He was too much a careerist, even too much an egoist.”10
Freeman replied with assent, yet looking ahead he saw a more attractive figure in the making.
Those who liked him did not know him fully. [Virginia Governor] Dinwiddie, who knew him best, disliked him in the end. The great fact is that Washington grew. I have been very much surprised to see how substantial was the development in his character and the change in what would appear to have been his “temperament” between 1759 and 1775.”11
By pushing ahead at the fearsome pace that he set for himself—eight hours each day, seven days a week, always completing four hours of work prior to breakfast—Freeman brought the story to 1793 and the close of Washington’s first administration as President. He finished Volume VI at one o’clock on the day he died in June 1953. It appeared in 1954 and a window exhibit in Richmond, arranged for the occasion, included Freeman’s specially constructed wide-armed writing chair, at which he composed all of R. E. Lee: A Biography (1934-1935), Lee’s Lieutenants (1942-1944), and much of George Washington. The exhibit also showed Freeman’s distinctive writing board and the manuscript of the concluding page of Volume VI, just as he left them on his desk when he paused for lunch on his last day.12 The window display did, indeed, have the trappings of a venerable shrine, the cell of a modern saint; but that is how he was regarded in the Old Dominion and by a great many admirers elsewhere.
In a letter that he wrote to his editor at Scribners in April 1953, Freeman looked ahead to Volume VII and envisioned room at the end for what he called “a final summing up that will be, in effect, an epitome of the entire work.” He then explained his motive and his reasoning.
I wish it to be elaborate because I have this possibility in mind: When we have done all we can in selling the full set of seven volumes, we might take this epitome, reset it in larger type and, in effect, have a brief one-volume life of Washington, a work that is needed and, I think, desired. Is this a crazy dream or is it practicable and potentially profitable for the firm and for me?. . .
P.S. Needless to say, while this matter of course can be discussed with your associates, it should be kept a secret among us.13
For several years prior to Freeman’s death he relied upon a full-time research aide at the Library of Congress named John A. Carroll, a young man of “ability and industry.” Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth saw Volume VI through the production process and then collaborated in researching and writing Volume VII (1957), which covered Washington’s second administration and his two last years in retirement at Mount Vernon, 1793-1799.
Richard Harwell, who prepared the one-volume abridgment that follows, had performed a similar work on Lee that first appeared in 1961. A Southerner like Freeman, Harwell was a historian and librarian who at various times held positions at libraries rich in their associations with George Washington: the University of Virginia (Charlottesville), the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), and the Boston Athenaeum. Harwell’s abridgment of Washington first appeared in 1968, a year in which the election for President of the United States was hotly contested.
Curiously enough, the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth in 1932 proved to be the most popular of all the commemorative observances held in the twentieth century—more memorable than the bicentennials of the American Revolution (1976) and the Constitution (1987), more successful than the Civil War Centennial (1961-1965) and the Centennial of the Statue of Liberty (1986). The extensive activities and observances held in 1932 are summarized in lively fashion by Karal Ann Marling in George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876-1986 (1988), especially Chapter 11. The Washington bicentennial year also saw a number of artistic reinterpretations of the historical figure, most notably Alfred Maurer’s cubist George Washington and Frank Moran’s modernist sculpture of the same name. Maurer’s painting is not a parody of Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait, but it is perhaps a bit irreverent—and realistic, despite the obvious influence of cubism. This candid realism helps to humanize Washington, and symbolizes America’s desire at the time to demythologize Washington, which is exactly what Douglas Southall Freeman hoped to do in his multifaceted biography.
In addition to studies of George Washington’s image and reputation in American culture, such as Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (1987) and Margaret B. Klapthor and Howard A. Morrison, G. Washington: A Figure Upon the Stage (1982 [prepared for an exhibition held in 1982 at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., to observe the 250th anniversary of his birth]), books and essays have also appeared in recent years that provide succinct reappraisals of Washington’s political wisdom and character.14 They call our attention to the fact that he virtually created the Presidency as an institution and conferred upon it great dignity. Washington established the standards by which all subsequent Presidents have ultimately been measured—their moral character and political wisdom. Historian Gordon S. Wood, in a lecture presented at the White House late in 1991, asserted that to his contemporaries Washington was the embodiment of classical republican (that is, non-monarchical) virtue, epitomized in 1783 by his circular letter to the states in which he promised to retire from public life and by his resignation as commander-in-chief of the American forces just before Christmas in 1783.15 (See pp. 508-510 below.)
Washington’s contemporaries understood as well as admired him. They rarely doubted that he always sought to act in a patriotic and disinterested manner. David Humphreys, who lived for a while at Mount Vernon and became one of Washington’s most trusted advisors, wrote a biographical sketch that has recently been published. Although it concentrates primarily on the period from 1756 to 1783, the origins of the Revolution and the War for Independence, Humphreys depicts a very human and engaging man who eagerly wished to retire once peace had been achieved, who struggled with his conscience before accepting the Presidency, and who gladly resigned after his second term despite entreaties that he continue.16
His countrymen pleaded with him to do so because he seemed to them to embody the cherished values of the nation more than any other individual. At a time when political animosities ran high and conflict threatened to tear apart the very fabric of republican society, Washington alone appeared to be above partisanship and to have at heart only the best interests of the country as a whole. How those perceptions surfaced from a lifetime of public service is revealed in the compelling chapters of Douglas Southall Freeman’s narrative. Altogether Freeman handwrote 3,109 printed pages of text for this project. The condensation that follows will give the reader all of the essentials and then some, complete and fulfilling in its own succinct fashion.
MICHAEL KAMMEN
1992
1. Julian P. Boyd to Douglas Southall Freeman, Jan. 6, 1945, Freeman Papers, box 59, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. (hereafter LCMD).
2. Wallace Meyer to Freeman, Oct. 18, 1948, Freeman Papers, box 91, LCMD.
3. Freeman to Emmet J. Hughes, Sept. 7, 1952, Freeman Papers, box 112, LCMD. See Samuel Eliot Morison to Freeman, Nov. 3,1948, box 91, LCMD: “Congratulations on Washington [Volumes I and II]. I love the way you have handled the background. You have said many things that needed to be said and could only be said by a Virginian.”
4. This untitled, typed document is located in the Freeman papers, box 120, LCMD. Although it is undated, it must have been prepared around 1951.
5. Freeman to Julian P. Boyd, Nov. 8, 1945, and June 4, 1946, Freeman Papers, boxes 59 and 65, LCMD.
6. See Mason L. Weems, The Life of Washington, edited by Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), especially the introduction, pp. ix-lxii; William Alfred Bryan, George Washington in American Literature, 1775-1865 (New York, 1952).
7. The full manuscript of this broadcast is located in the Freeman Papers, box 120, LCMD. The quotation is from pp. 10-11, at the close of the broadcast.
8. Freeman to Rupert Hughes, Oct. 17 and Nov. 17, 1951, and Hughes to Freeman, Nov. 14, 1951, Freeman Papers, box 106, LCMD.
9. Freeman to Allan Nevins, Oct. 18, 1948, Freeman Papers, box 91, LCMD.
10. Nevins to Freeman, Nov. 1, 1948, ibid. This impression of the young Washington has recently been reinforced in persuasive detail by Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988). Longmore’s emphasis does differ from Freeman’s in one important respect, however. Referring to the years of maturation, 1758 to 1775, Longmore believes that Washington’s biographers “have misunderstood his ambitions and development during those years. He remained active in provincial [Virginia] politics and attentive to colonial-imperial relations. He continued to develop his skills and style as a leader. Contrary to Freeman’s opinion, he underwent a transformation not so much of personal character as of political perspective. At least as important as his emotional maturation was his increasing political sophistication” (p. 56).
11. Freeman to Nevins, Nov. 4, 1948, Freeman Papers, box 91, LCMD.
12. A description will be found in ibid, box 120.
13. Freeman to Wallace Meyer, April 4, 1953, Freeman Papers, box 120, LCMD.
14. See also Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument (Boston, 1958); Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York, 1978); Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991); Cunliffe, The Doubled Images of Lincoln and Washington (Gettysburg, 1988).
15. See Gordon S. Wood, “The Greatness of George Washington,” Virginia (Quarterly Review 68 (Spring 1992), pp. 189-207; Edmund S. Morgan, The Genius of George Washington (New York, 1980).
16. Rosemarie Zagarri, ed., David Humphreys’ “Life of General Washington” with George Washington’s Remarks (Athens, Ga., 1991); Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Walter Jones, Jan. 2, 1814, in Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1944), pp. 173-76.