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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. 10½ 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.