The Virginians
(See Cover)
GEORGE WASHINGTON (Vols. I & II, Young Washington, 1,013 pp.)--Douglas Southall Freeman--Scribner ($15).
". . . and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, 'I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.'
" 'Run to my arms, you dearest boy,' cried his father in transports, 'run to my arms. Glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is worth more than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.'"
No man could completely live down a yarn like that, which was told to Parson Weems in 1800 by an "excellent lady." It is just such saccharine legends, overlaid with priggish nonsense, that have helped to make George Washington a forbidding figure in U.S. history. The too-well-known portraits, by Gilbert Stuart and others, haven't helped either. The frozen face of Washington that stares down on thousands of U.S. schoolkids is that of a jut-jawed old party whose cumbersome false teeth are giving him trouble.
No less forbidding is the awesome father-of-his-country whose chilly shade rises from the five massive volumes of Chief Justice John Marshall. There have been at least 54 other Washington biographies, most of them rewrites, but their net effect has been to make a great man something of a national bore. Paragons rarely make sympathetic heroes, and to most U.S. youngsters Feb. 22 is a wintry day that celebrates a wintry figure.
Durable Heroes. This week, in an attic study 69 miles from George Washington's Virginia birthplace, a self-confessed "amateur" scholar was digging away at the formidable task of making the nation's first President a credible man. It was a rescue job--as biography must be--of a historical character buried alive. At 62, Douglas Southall Freeman, the nation's No. 1 military historian, is a past master at converting the legendary dead into durable heroes. He devoted 19 years to a four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee, the untouchable Galahad of the Confederacy; historians of the Civil War were agreed that the job need never be done again. Another six years were spent on his three-volume Lee's Lieutenants, a study in command and military personality so lastingly pertinent that General Omar N. Bradley made it his major reading in the days before the European invasion.
If anyone could find Washington-the-man behind the cold marble mask of the historical figure, it was Douglas Freeman. Next week, with the first two volumes off the press (there are four more to come, the last in 1952), readers can get started on what is certain to be the best researched life of Washington yet written.
Washington Monument. Said Biographer Freeman, in Richmond, where he is at work on Volume III: "Washington did not himself climb up on a marble pedestal, strike a pose and stay there. What we're goin' to do, please God, is to make him a human bein'. The great big thing stamped across that man is character.''
Will Freeman's rescue party succeed? On the evidence so far, the answer must be a qualified yes. He has made Washington human, in the sense that he displays human feelings, but he has not--in the first two volumes, at least--made of George Washington a more lovable figure for popular consumption. Readers of the seven thick volumes on Lee and his generals know that Freeman is not a portrait painter who gets his effect with quick, inspired strokes; his method is careful and cumulative. His works are what book reviewers are apt to call monumental, and monumental they literally are: built block by patient block, soundly based, immense, monochromatic--and towering high.
Young Washington (the first two volumes bring him up to the age of 27) is 1,013 pages of solid fact and educated guesswork buttressed with 5,440 footnotes, uncompromisingly set below the text. For the popular, novelized biography, full of glib insights into the inner man, Freeman has nothing but contempt. His dogged intent is to portray Washington day by day and "year by year, through each new experience, as if nothing were known and nothing were certain about his future."
In the end, the very absence of color, the refusal to jump to conclusions, and the blunt, graceless prose, have the persuasiveness of a courtroom exhibit. What Freeman once said of Robert E. Lee holds good for his approach to George Washington: "I know where Lee was and what he did every minute of the Civil War, but I wouldn't dare presume what he was thinking."
The young Washington whom Freeman has shaken loose from thousands of documents is first a proud, preoccupied child (here Freeman is weakest, because of the many undocumented blanks in George's boyhood), then a self-made provincial surveyor, land-grabbing and money-seeking; later, a Virginia colonel of militia in the French arid Indian War with "the quenchless ambition of an ordered mind."
Life on a Timetable. The "quenchless ambition of an ordered mind" that Biographer Freeman finds in George Washington is an apt description of Freeman himself.
He is an unhurried deliberate man of medium height (5 ft. 10 1/2 in.), a little paunchy and careless of dress. With his pale face, grey-fringed, bumpy bald head, and shrewd appraising eyes, he looks like a country doctor. At the end of his 17-hour day his cheeks are sunken and he puffs a little as he climbs to the attic bedroom of his stately 22-room Georgian house in Richmond's swank Hampton Gardens. But Freeman has no intention of dropping any of his fulltime jobs. For 33 years he has been editor of the Richmond News Leader, of which he is also a "substantial" stockholder.* And for 23 years Freeman has been a daily news broadcaster. When he finds time in between, he labors on his huge historical projects.
Freeman, who has a maxim for everything, likes to say, "One of the great things about life is to keep movin' and not hurry, and that's largely a matter of schedulin' your day." To run on his timetable, not only Freeman himself but everyone about him has to keep moving. He gets up early--really early. He is up at 2:30, after five or six hours' sleep. (Back in 1940 his rising hour was 4:30, but, says Freeman, "the temptation always is to sneak up a few minutes earlier.") Every activity of his day is timed to the minute, often to the second. The time allotted for cooking breakfast (an egg, toast, Thermos coffee): two minutes, 40 seconds.
Freeman eats his breakfast slowly (he never hurries anything) then allows 17 minutes for the 4.7-mile trip to the News Leader building in the heart of Richmond, and that's what it takes. As he rolls past the handsome statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue, he gravely raises right hand to forehead in salute to the "great gentleman" whom he considers the finest man the South has produced. "I shall never fail to do that as long as I live."
By 3:15 a.m. Freeman is in his air-conditioned office, reading the morning Times-Dispatch (15 minutes). Then, turning to his typewriter, he pecks out his' daily two columns of editorials. He is done by 6, takes 40 minutes for longhand revisions, then jots down a few notes for his 8 a.m. broadcast. At 6:55 he plunges into the life & times of George Washington, writing in a clear, small hand on white, unlined paper. Freeman has three synchronized clocks in his office placed to catch his eye from any position (over one of them stands the stern sign: "Time is irreplaceable. Waste it not").
At 7:55 he drops George Washington abruptly, goes downstairs into the newsroom to pick up notes on the latest news, then crosses a catwalk to a studio in radio station WRNL (owned by the Richmond newspapers). Frequently the announcer is hopefully saying, "And now Dr. Freeman," just as he sticks his head in the door.
Regardless of the weather, Freeman always starts by saying it's a fine morning. Then, with time out for a sponsor's message about mayonnaise, he drawls glibly without script for 15 minutes. Sometimes he announces that there is no news worth mentioning, advises people not to buy a paper that day. From politics, war, or a headlined disaster he may slip into a spiel on Southern cooking: "Where you go'n' to find better cookin' than in your own Virginia? Provided, of course, you use enough corn bread, and enough bacon in cookin' your vegetables." Even some Richmonders who profess to be fed up with his sagelike utterances and sweet-talkin' voice admit that they listen anyhow.
No Time for Smoking. At 8:16 a.m. Freeman is back in his office. Waiting for him are the key newsmen of the News Leader, prepared to have their brains picked by the editor. Each one is expected to have at least one juicy item a day. Freeman starts with the capitol reporter ("Mister, how's the Governor today?") and goes right down the line. No one smokes, because Freeman objects to the lingering odor (he dropped smoking years ago when he found that the buying, lighting, smoking and crushing out of cigarettes, "wasted" 8 1/2 hours a week). Freeman also has a newspaperman's dislike of office whistlers. He will bolt from his chair, at the cost of precious seconds, to bawl out a whistling copy boy.
At 9:45 Freeman goes down to the second floor to make up the editorial page, then gets in another lick at George Washington until 11, when "my secretaries put me to bed" on an office couch for 15 minutes. After his nap he sees visitors (his secretary says radio listeners sometimes drop in just to look at the great man) until 11:55, when he heads for the radio station again and his noon broadcast.
Lunch at home with his wife is a leisurely, almost time-wasting meal, in a spacious dining room from whose walls handsome young Lieut. Lee looks down. At 2 :30 sharp he is in bed. At 3 (he wakes himself almost on the dot) he begins his "second day." From his attic bedroom he steps into his study for 2 1/2 solid hours of work on Washington. Here visitors, and even his family, are forbidden. On the walls are autographed pictures of his friends Winston Churchill and Admiral Nimitz, a letter from President Roosevelt thanking Freeman for suggesting the term "liberation" instead of the "invasion" of Europe, and a Helen Hokinson New Yorker cartoon in which a bewildered matron returns two fat volumes to her bookshop, saying: "I guess I bit off more 'Robert E. Lee' than I could chew."
Freeman has a quartermaster's command of the immense body of historical material he works with. His researcher's notes on white, blue, pink and yellow slips are arranged to correspond to the biographical plan he has carefully outlined in his notebooks. By the use of an ingenious system of numbers and symbols he can turn to any scrap of material he needs in a matter of seconds. After he has written a chapter, he "lets it cool" for a month and then his revisions always "cut the first draft to pieces." After the fourth typing he sticks to what he has, unless he or his researcher, Dr. Gertrude Richards, belatedly turns up important new material.
Questions & Answers. Freeman sees Dr. Richards once a week, Saturday at 11 a.m. for 20 minutes, when they discuss the past week's work and Freeman tells her what he wants for the week following. At 8 a.m. each day, while Freeman is broadcasting, Dr. Richards picks up a list of questions he wants answered and leaves the answers to those he asked the day before.
When Dr. Richards completes her job, it is unlikely that future scholars will find much gleaning left to do. A slightly deaf, spinster Ph.D. of 62, she is a former history teacher at Wellesley. She dropped work on her own book, Confederate Women, to help Freeman, for whom she has tremendous respect as a historian. Her job is to find "every possible shred of evidence" about Washington, and so far, she and Freeman think, she has missed little. So jampacked with Washington documents is her room at Richmond's archaic Hotel Jefferson that she has "to go out in the hall to change my mind."
Balancing Time. Since 1926, Dr. Freeman has kept an "account book" in which his expenditures of time are recorded. When he wastes it, disgusted entries record the fact. When he uses it well, he enters exultant self-congratulations. Should he, for example, fail to do his daily stint on George Washington, he enters a debit of minutes and hours against himself. Every Saturday for 22 years he has cast up his accounts ; the books must balance.
His secretary, Henrietta Crump, who has worked for him for 30 years, has power of attorney to sign his checks, makes out his income tax and firmly defends him against interruptions. His wife, tall, poised and gracious, feels that her big job is to "keep the house quiet for him." She adds seriously: "It's a great privilege to be associated with him."
As Richmond's most famous living citizen, Freeman has an institutional character to live up to, and he seems to like to play the role. The boy who brings him his early morning A. P. wires is always "Professor" ("Mo'nin', Professor, whatchew got this nio'nin', Professor?"). Pretty or not, the girls around the office get their quota of Virginia gallantry as he passes by: "Mo'nin', beautiful, whatchew doin' lookin' so cold?" "Mo'nin', da'lin', how's yo' dea' fathuh?"
Homely Homilies. Some Richmonders privately refer to Freeman as a "fuddy-duddy." They poke fun at his air of paternalism and his habit of giving sententious advice ("The best thing about livin' is it gets better all the time"). His Sunday half-hour radio program, Lessons in Living, is a mixture of the shrewd and the banal. But many listeners find comfort in his homely homilies, write to tell him so and ask his advice on problems ranging from love to investments.
Freeman's editorials in the News Leader, fact-loaded and dogmatic, always get Richmond's serious attention. He generally sounds a cautious, middle-of-the-road note (in this year's election, he says, voters must "choose between two evils"--i.e., Truman and Dewey). He is fond of running a marathon series of editorials on subjects he thinks important. Once he wrote more than 600 consecutive editorials on postwar developments, did 60 on Henry Wallace and is now past number 35 on the Berlin crisis. He often had fault to find with the politics of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, but supported it. He refused to meet Roosevelt himself: ''Roosevelt's personality was so powerful, I was afraid he would influence me toward his way of thinkin'."
But in a 1944 editorial Freeman told Richmonders: "In spite of the wastefulness of the New Deal, the arrogance of some of his [F.D.R.'s] lieutenants, the incompetence of others and the un-Americanism of still others, we believe his preparation for the war and his conduct of it represent solid credit balances . . . This greatest of wars has been in every essential respect much the best conducted of them all. Believe it or not, Roosevelt has outdone every wartime President."
"I'm Go'n to Do It." The Freeman family moved to Virginia in 1742, which makes them not quite F.F.V., but Biographer Freeman's maternal ancestors were. Young Douglas was a 17-year-old honor student at Richmond College when his father, who had been a private in Lee's army (and later a general in the Confederate veterans organization), took him to a Confederate reunion. The sight of the Confederacy's brave armless and legless old men stirred young Douglas; he decided: "If someone doesn't write the story of these men, it will be lost forever, and I'm go'n' to do it." Being Virginia born, Douglas Freeman had heard endless talk of the war; he had seen Generals Longstreet and Fitzhugh Lee in the flesh. The headmaster of McGuire's University School used to scold the boys for tardiness by reminding them that the battle of Gettysburg was lost because General Longstreet stopped to give his corps breakfast.
Freeman was 29 with a Ph.D. in history when New York Publisher Charles Scribner asked him to do a one-volume biography of General Lee. Freeman delivered it to Scribner's son 19 years later (January 1934*) in four volumes. At that, he got it done only by putting himself on his present rigorous timetable in 1926. Said Scribner: "This is a formidable job. We will have to sell 4,000 sets to break even." Freeman's reply: "I'm cheatin' you, man!" To date Scribner's has sold 35,000 sets of Lee.
R. E. Lee won Freeman the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1934. Lee's Lieutenants, which followed, was an even more impressive achievement, and a complex study of Lee's command problem highlighted by brief, brilliant biographies of his commanders--Jackson, Stuart, Early and Longstreet.
Those two masterly books brought Freeman invitations to lecture at the Army & Navy War Colleges and the Army's staff and command school. They also brought him the admiration of such men as Eisenhower, Marshall, Patton and Nimitz. Freeman still guides visiting generals over the Civil War battlefields near Richmond and no living person knows the terrain so well.
Four years ago, the Rockefeller Foundation's President Ray Fosdick persuaded Freeman that he was just the man to do a long-needed job--the definitive biography of Washington. Fosdick offered him Rockefeller money for the research, but Freeman refused because he was a trustee of the foundation. So Fosdick got the Carnegie Corporation to put up the cash. The cost so far: $23,000. For Freeman it meant ditching his plan to write a history of the Union's Army of the Potomac, something he no longer regrets because "There is so much ugliness in the history of the Army of the Potomac that it should not be shown up by a Southerner."
Not Even a Smile. Dr. Freeman, though no debunker, is too conscientious a historian to duck any ugliness that must out. Young Washington is proof enough of that. He himself is aware that the first two volumes add few cubits to George Washington's stature. In the Virginia of Washington's day, writes Dr. Freeman, "One verb told the story . . . grab, grab, grab." Washington's father and grandfather had been successful grabbers in a relatively small way. Father Augustine (he was called Gus) could afford to send two of his sons to school in England, though George got his meager schooling at home. When he died in 1743, Gus Washington left over 10,000 acres and 49 slaves. To eleven-year-old George went Ferry Farm, the family home, 2,180 acres, and ten slaves. To wealthy Virginians like the Fairfaxes and the Carters that estate was small potatoes, but George was soon to prove a more accomplished land grabber than most. If he wasted any time in boyish nonsense, Freeman found no record of it: "No surviving record of his youth credits him with a laugh, even with a smile."
Freeman proves, contrary to schoolbook accounts, that George didn't survey the Lord Fairfax estates at 16. He went along for the ride with young George William Fairfax (whose wife, Sally, he later fell in love with). Washington helped out but actually the two youngsters got tired of it and quit before the job was over.
"My Poor Resistless Heart." From the money young Washington made at surveying, he bought more land, and took to gambling at cards. He accompanied his sick brother Lawrence on a trip to Barbados and picked up a case of smallpox which marred his face for life, but also made him immune to the disease that periodically sliced through his ranks during the Revolution.
In his journals he left some embarrassingly bad verse addressed to girls who rebuffed him. To Frances Alexander in 1748:
From Your bright sparkling Eyes, I was
undone;
Rays, you have more transparent than
the sun . . .
Ah! woe's me that I should love and
conceal,
Long have I wish'd, but never dare
reveal.
Even though severly Loves Pains I feel;
And his very next entry:
Oh Ye Gods why should my Poor Resistless Heart
Stand to oppose thy might and Power,
At Last surrender to cupid's feather'd
Dart . . .
He was 20 when Betsy Fauntleroy, 16, got him to the point where he popped the question. Betsy turned him down cold, not once but twice; and not even a letter to her father helped. Not until Washington began to wrestle with his hopeless passion for the married Sally Fairfax is there any sign of another serious love affair.
Excuse the Hanging. When his half brother, Lawrence Washington, died in 1752, George lost the friend who had influenced him most. By Lawrence's will he eventually got Mt. Vernon; the Virginia Council and Governor Dinwiddie also gave him a job as adjutant and the rank of major which Lawrence had held in the militia. Two years later, the serious, acquisitive money seeker became the watchdog of a 350-mile frontier harried by French and Indians.
The rest of Young Washington is chiefly the story of George's effort to fight a nightmarish war against able enemies, with insufficient men and supplies. Freeman's accounts of Washington's volunteer trip to warn the French away from the Ohio, the disastrous defeat at Fort Necessity and the slaughter of Braddock's army are easily the soundest and most complete in print.
For his men, more often cowards than heroes, Washington had little respect. Of one group of 400 recruits, 114 deserted. More than once they broke and ran as soon as enemy were reported near. Washington hanged two deserters who had been sentenced to death by shooting and wrote to the Governor: "Your Honor will, I hope, excuse my hanging instead of shooting them. It conveyed much more terror to others; and it was for example sake we did it."
Bitterly, at the end of the next year, he resigned his commission. Not until he was called to command the Continentals in 1775 did he wear a uniform again.
On short acquaintance and after two calls, he had proposed to Widow Martha Custis, yet, engaged to her, he could still write to his best friend's wife: "You have drawn me, dear Madam, or rather I have drawn myself, into an honest confession of a simple fact. Misconstrue not my meaning; doubt it not, nor expose it. The world has no business to know the object of my Love, declared in this manner to you, when I want to conceal it . . " Sally Fairfax answered his letter at once, but tactfully avoided any mention of his romantic confession.
Not Love, but Justice. The young Washington that Freeman has exhumed will give many a superpatriot the twitches. Freeman knows that his portrait of a proud and selfseeking Virginian has ruthlessly kicked Washington, the Eagle Scout who could not tell a lie, off his pedestal for keeps. Most men of Washington's rank, writes Freeman, "considered him ambitious and not particularly likable or conspicuously able . . ." Washington's favorite disciplinarian was the cat-o'-nine-tails: 25 lashes for profanity, 100 for drunkenness. His letters to superiors were often fawning, too prone to dwell on his own belief that he was "open and honest and free from guile."
He never hesitated to ask influential friends to advance his cause, resented being second in anything and lived in constant fear of losing "preferment, character, credit, esteem, honor . . ."
Yet in the end, Freeman, and consequently the reader too, is impressed by a strength of character, an almost fierce sense of justice and principles of conduct rare in Washington's time or any other: "The foundations of that code were not love and mercy, faith and sacrifice, but honesty and duty, truth and justice, justice exact and inclusive, justice that never for an instant overlooked his own interests."
After four years of research and writing, Freeman can make this measured judgment: "The patriot emerged slowly. Two generations ago this statement would have been considered defamation. The integrity of the United States was assumed, for some reason, to presuppose the flawlessness of Washington's character and vice versa . . . More Americans will be relieved than will be shocked to know that Washington sometimes was violent, emotional, resentful."
Washington & Lee. Readers of the near-reverent R. E. Lee will learn with surprise that Freeman found Washington "a more interesting young man to study" than Lee.
"Washington has not replaced Lee in my affection, but he has rivaled him in my respect," said Dr. Freeman last week. "After you have spent 20 years in the company of a great man [Lee] you get ideas of what an historical personage ought to be, and you can't keep the company of ordinary men after that."
* Majority stockholders: Publisher David Tennant Bryan and his family, who also control Richmond's only other paper, the morning Times-Dispatch. Freeman's opposite number on the Times-Dispatch is famed Southern Editor Virginius Dabney.
* Freeman purposely finished it on Lee's birthday, Jan. 19.
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