“R. E. Lee” by Douglas Southall Freeman. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936.
Douglas Southall Freeman’s feet hit the floor at 2:30 a.m. Crisp in his three-piece suit and horned-rimmed glasses, he pulls out of the drive way of his Richmond, Virginia home at 3:10.
As editor of the Richmond News Leader, Freeman spends the next few hours organizing, composing letters and World War I editorials. By 8:00, it is time for his daily radio broadcast, then the daily conference with the newspaper staff. At noon, a nap. By 2:30, he turns his attention to his life’s work: writing the multi-volume biography of Robert E. Lee. Freeman settles to bed at 8:30 to begin the next day with the same intensity. With these details meticulously documented in David Johnson’s biography of Freeman, it’s not surprising that Freeman wrote late in life that he expected “to die with a pen in [his] hand.”
Born in the former Confederate Capital of Richmond in 1886, Freeman was immersed in southern history. While already working at the Richmond News Leader, an acquaintance turned over a cache of communications between Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Freeman published “Lee’s Dispatches” in 1915 and became a celebrity among Confederate historians. This notoriety led to an invitation from Charles Scribner’s Sons to write the biography on Robert E. Lee.
Spending nearly twenty years researching Lee, Freeman’s biography focuses on Lee’s campaign with less emphasis on social and political history. Freeman illustrated the “fog of war” throughout the biography by giving readers the same information Lee had at any moment during the war, immersing the reader in the action as it happened.
Freeman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1935, and seventy years later the biography is regarded by many as the authoritative study on the Confederate general. To commemorate Freeman’s accomplishment, Scribner’s published a limited, four-volume Pulitzer Prize set of “R. E. Lee” in 1936 with gilt lettering and decoration, foldout maps and illustrations. Remarkably, Freeman also won a second (posthumous) Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for his biography of George Washington.
Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.
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