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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."