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Book Review!
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"Public Policy Leadership in the Virginia Tradition"
Book Review!
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Every two months, the Virginia Institute offers a review of a book. Our current selection was written by David E. Johnson. |
 click book to buy it from amazon.com |
Douglas Southall Freeman David E. Johnson Richmond, Virginia Reviewed by David A. Bovenizer Lynchburg, Virginia |
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Over recent months the Richmond Times-Dispatch has published several editorials deriding the old Confederacy and denouncing the extension of its principles through much of the twentieth century. These editorials were perfect expressions of the Political Correctness that now deforms public discourse; hence they were devoid of significant historical, philosophical, or religious reflection. Such editorials would not have been published even by the late Virginius Dabney, the long-time editor of the Times-Dispatch editorial page who a half-century ago won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his deeply reasoned positions on Southern customs, including segregation, as the United States' increasing role in foreign affairs required a reconsideration of domestic practices. Nor would such editorials have been conceivable in the era during which the Richmond News-Leader (since absorbed into the Times-Dispatch) was edited by Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography not once but twice-first for his magisterial four-volume Robert E. Lee, secondly for his exhaustive six-volume George Washington. (There are no Pulitzer Prize recipients on the editorial staff of the Times-Dispatch at present.) This discontinuity of conviction within the editorial perspective and purpose of a single newspaper is not, of course, uncommon, especially in the South. Our generation is, after all, characterized by a wholesale repudiation of the past on matters ranging from abortion to zoology. In thrall to an ideology of Progress discredited by history on every other continent-and once, Southerners believed, discredited also on our own-most Americans simply cannot compute (to borrow a term appropriate to the mind restricted to the categories of science) the struggle, strife, and sorrow, the imperfections and the tragedies, of actual historical experience, most especially the experience of the South. There was a time, though, when Virginians, who at horrific costs had pledged themselves to historical reality against abstract ideology, knew in a unity of mind and heart that "old times here are not forgotten"-and this embrace included the sorrowful as well as the celebratory times. A sympathetic reading of Douglas Southall Freeman suggests that that time is no more. Even a critical reading of the biography suggests, too, that, for all our vaunted self-confidence, we are, in most of the respects that matter, lesser men than our forebears. That continuity of culture, conviction, and character were central to the principles and person of Dr. Freeman is of course manifested in the literary labors to which he devoted unimaginable energies. From Washington to Lee was, in his judgment, a direct descent, and it is no exaggeration to suggest that, though as scholar instead of soldier, he wished himself to be worthy of participation in the succession-and that, in his every labor, as editorialist, essayist, broadcaster, professor, and military strategist, he strove to sustain the succession in the lives of all Virginians and Southerners, white, certainly, but black as well. For reasons beyond the scope of David Johnson's splendid work, Dr. Freeman can be said to have failed in this principal purpose. But the failure reflects less on the men (and women) of the past than on the Faustian forces arrayed against such an individual achievement, even such a cultural and political purpose on the part of a once-sovereign state, in our own sudden era of mass society, mass communication, mass (pseudo-) culture, and, now, global pressures so pervasive and encompassing that the individual, society, and state are, alike, impotent before them. "Everything that is solid melts into air" in the modern age, a noted student of modern conditions once remarked, a long time ago. Change, not continuity, is the inescapable consequence of modern America's commitment to science, materialism, capitalism, and individualism, and of the massive systems by which these forces displace even ancient traditional orders of society, church, and state. Indeed, ours is at its heart, in the engines that define our national drive and direction, the most anti-traditional society of the anti-traditional modern era. Douglas Freeman knew this, but the very thrust of his studies-of men larger than the mighty systems of their own times-suggests that he hoped, if against hope, that something of the admirable substance of the Virginian past would prove sufficient to the future. He was not alone in being mistaken. * * * * * * The first thing that must be said of Johnson's Douglas Southall Freeman itself is that it is an exhaustively researched and beautifully written work. Only one biography of a Virginian of the same era is perhaps more thoroughly researched-Harry Byrd of Virginia, by Ronald L. Heinemann. That obviously Johnson is more sympathetic-even admiring-of his subject than was Heinemann of his subject accounts, no doubt, for the singular elegance in style that Johnson is able to maintain throughout. Freeman was born in Lynchburg in 1886 of a family originally from neighboring Bedford. Not unimportantly, his father was a veteran of the Piedmont (Fourth Virginia) Artillery who saw action from the dawn of battle to the agony of Appomattox-and who, in the fact that gives rise to the legend memorialized in such works as Cold Mountain-walked home after the surrender. Subsequently the elder Freeman left farming to become a merchant, first in Lynchburg, finally, in 1892, in Richmond. Douglas Freeman thus grew to maturity as aging Confederate veterans still strode the streets of the one-time capital of their vanquished country. In them he recognized the embodiment of the same virtues of the Virginian whose life-like statue adorns the rotunda of the nearby Capitol-Washington-and of the Virginian past whose statue on Monument Avenue he drove to his office for many years, saluting as he did so-Lee. These were the influences that took firm and lasting root in Freeman's heart and mind. (This is not to say imagination, of which an explanation will follow.) Freeman was educated-well-in the once-renowned McGuire's School of Richmond, took his undergraduate degree from Richmond College (a Baptist institution that is now the University of Richmond), and earned his doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University. Even in these years he wrote-attempting, as young men are wont to do, the composition of drama. It was not to be the literary field in which his enormous gifts as a scholar were to flourish (requiring as it does the singular gift of imagination, as distinct from the sheer mastery of information and the style appropriate to the writing of history or biography). In addition to the beneficent influences of Richmond in those days, Freeman drank deeply of the Baptist faith of his forefathers. He preached-no doubt well-and he would preach, on occasion, for the remainder of his life. Indeed, he preached also in print, as an editorial writer, and on the air, in a program on Richmond radio that was for decades a popular feature of life in Richmond. Freeman was devoted to his church, as a Sunday School teacher and more, and to his college, though Johnson's observations on the exact nature of Freeman's faith is revealing of the methodology of mind to which Freeman, as an historian, had committed himself: "[Freeman] summed up the four treasures of a man's heart as 'his reading, his prayer, his experience, [and] his service.' These four traits had so marked Freeman's life from his earliest days that it is difficult to judge whether he shaped his life to his beliefs or vice versa." Just so. That a fair number of his readers and, via radio, listeners found Dr. Freeman's sermons to be vague to the point of "deliberately [omitting] any references to Christ," as one complained, hints at a characteristic, though not uncommon during Freeman's time or our own, that Johnson might have fruitfully explored. By the mid-1920s, while still in his mid-thirties, Freeman was "becoming paterfamilias to the city of Richmond," Johnson writes. "He was the person to see when any figure of note visited." Freeman had achieved this extraordinary influence through a variety of accomplishments. First, of course, he was an outstanding scholar-one of a relatively few men of his time to have earned a doctoral degree in a major scholarly discipline. As early as 1908 Freeman had begun his public career as author-or, rather as editor, of A Calendar of Confederate Papers published by the Confederate Museum of Richmond. Second, he was an extraordinary teacher, having begun his career on the faculty of the School for Young Ladies in Richmond, the headmistress of which was the redoubtable Virginia Randolph Ellett and whose students were drawn from the leading families of his adoptive city. Third, Freeman had gained widespread public attention as the author of a series of thirty-three learnéd and persuasive editorials on reform of the state's tax code for the Richmond Time-Dispatch. Fourth, he had established an exemplary record of public service as secretary of the Virginia Tax Commission created by the Virginia General Assembly-a position to which he was summoned precisely because of the mastery of the subject of taxation he had displayed in his editorial series-and he wrote the Commission's report. Finally, since 1915 Freeman had been editor of the editorial page of the Richmond News-Leader, and he exerted in that position an influence that today it is nearly impossible to imagine any individual public intellectual exercising in any city of the Commonwealth, let alone within the entire Commonwealth. Actually, Freeman's influence extended to the country, for Woodrow Wilson was but the first in a series of Presidents to seek the counsel of an editorial writer whose study of history had by World War I established him as a scholar of military strategy, tactics, and the subtle qualities of effective leadership. Add to these of Freeman's labors the preaching, radio commentaries, essays in numerous prestigious journals, and Sunday School teaching, and one begins to appreciate something of the measure of the man and of the reach of his influence. Johnson admirably portrays the developing life and multiplying labors of his subject so that we are given at last the portrait of a man any one of whose accomplishments are beyond the reach of all but a handful of men in any generation. Still, one wonders who Douglas Freeman was-or, in the vernacular, what made him tick? The few men in active life in Virginia today who remember even the reputation of Douglas Southall Freeman-and Johnson, a senior counsel to the Attorney General of Virginia, is among them-invariably express a combination of admiration for and mystification at the method of the man. As Johnson notes, "Douglas Freeman's schedule has become the stuff of legend. People unable to name his books will say they heard, somewhere, that he got up at two or three or four o'clock in the morning." In fact, Freeman was so punctilious in his sense of time that it is arguable that the man himself was subordinate to his method. After all, not all scholars find it necessary to follow so exacting a regimen as the following:
Why, Freeman even abandoned wearing a bowtie, switching to a necktie, simply to save twenty seconds. It is fair to suggest that there are not a half-dozen men in the world in any generation who follow so fastidiously such a schedule. Not surprisingly, the consequences of such a schedule were not all light and glory. Mrs. Freeman wrote of her husband a poem the concluding stanza of which is nothing less than stunning: Once in a year or so To Johnson, Freeman's son remarked of his father, bluntly, "He was always gone." To his daughter Freeman provided notes that he had written to him for her-all she had to do was to check which of the statements was applicable to her at the time she posted each respective note. (To be sure, the daughter has devotedly sustained her father's legacy, most especially in the life of his college and church in Richmond.) And many are those who believe that it was the very rigor of his schedule that abruptly concluded Dr. Freeman's life, in 1953, at the by no means advanced age of 67. * * * * * * It had been a remarkable life-though not without its controversies. For example, Dr. Freeman had for nearly fifty years served in a variety of capacities, including as rector, for his beloved University of Richmond. As Johnson observes, "Things had been changing at his alma mater, and he was less inclined to change with them." The final break occurred when Freeman discovered, "to his 'horror,' that 'promises of free tuition and board and lodging' had been made by unauthorized personnel to incoming athletes. Freeman believed 'physical education' had a place, 'but no more than its proper place in academic training.'" How our colleges have changed…. But of course much else, nearly all else, of Virginian society, culture, and politics have changed since Douglas Southall Freeman died just over a half-century ago. Most assuredly the most celebrated change-but by no means the most historically significant change-has been with regard to race. Johnson deftly limns Freeman's convictions concerning what in his time was honorably held to be "the color line." "What some judged to be racial prejudice," Johnson elegantly reminds, "Freeman deemed to be "biological caution." Accordingly, the biographer continues, "intelligent Southerners, who had close contact with blacks, took what Freeman declared to be 'the Southern point of view.'" The letter in which Dr. Freeman elaborates that view is well worth the quoting: "You [Negroes] must have justice and we [whites] shall help you get it; we have a common economic stake in this land of sunshine; we must work together to conquer the soil, to develop the mines; and to harness the waterfall; we whites must see to it that you get your part of the profits in generous proportion to the contributions you make; ours is the duty also of seeing that you are not humiliated; but biologically and therefore socially we are different; we are not going to amalgamate; because that is so, you simply are made miserable when you are brought so close to the whites that passion or ambition fires you to seek the unattainable-a white wife; for this reason we believe you should stay apart, build your own society, improve it, strengthen your family life, combat innate promiscuity, and build up race pride; we do not believe it fair to pretend to equality we have no intention of recognizing. Separation is better than deception." Those lines, written in a letter in 1944, is continuous with Southern (and for the most part Northern) sentiment for centuries preceding, and was given its most poignant, tragic, and elegiac expression two years earlier by another Southern man of letters, William Alexander Percy, in "A Note Concerning Race Relations" in Lanterns on the Levee. That society, of which Douglas Freeman (and Percy) was an eminent embodiment, and to whose convictions-social, political, historical, and religious-he gave memorable expression, is as gone with the wind as the Confederacy he memorialized. Still, for Freeman, as his biographer is quick to point out, "respect for General Lee and devotion to the Confederate cause did not equate to racial prejudice." The general appreciation of that perspective is, too, gone-or nearly gone. Importantly, less than a half-decade later Freeman "defied convention by running a photograph of civil rights attorney Oliver Hill, a candidate for the [Richmond] school board, on the front page of the News Leader. 'It never occurred to us,' he wrote, 'to discriminate in the circumstances that existed.'" Keenly aware of the power of the press, he observed, "Four-fifths of the things that should be done for the betterment of race relationship in the South are things that ought never to get into the newspaper one way or the other." He labored on behalf of numerous causes for just such a betterment, and, "At the request of civil rights leader Robert R. Moton [Freeman] joined the Commission on Interracial Cooperation." We all know the rest of the story-that the South, and the larger Union, came gradually at times, revolutionarily at times and in some consequences, to a closer approximation to the ideal of equality espoused by Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence. But there were costs, borne by black as well as white, in the achievement, certainly to the manner in which the United States Constitution is constructed and, accordingly, to the traditional relationship of the states to the federal government, more certainly still to the social and political orders to which Freeman was devoted. * * * * * * Freeman figures only marginally in one of the principal studies of the period of Virginian history that immediately succeeded his retirement in 1949 as editorial page editor of the Richmond News-Leader. The study is The Crisis of Conservative Virginia, by James W. Ely, Jr. Today, when self-identified conservatives decry a "crisis" in state affairs, invariably their complaint has to do with the size, scope, or cost of state government-that is, with taxes. To Freeman, and to his editorial heir James J. Kilpatrick, the crisis of a half-century ago had to do not only with the crucial matter of the hermeneutics of constitutional interpretation but with the preservation of a particular, that is to say a traditional, social and political order. Admittedly, racial segregation was an element-but only one element-of the crisis with which the social and political orders of the Commonwealth were confronted, and the traditional forms of the Commonwealth did not survive the encounter. The enveloping crisis of Freeman's time was nothing less than The Crisis of the Modern World, which is the very title of a 1927 work by Rene Guenon with which, apparently, Freeman was not acquainted. At the root of the crisis, deep then, catastrophically deep now, was the deepening displacement by applied science and its ramifications of all traditional modes of knowing and being, and therefore of the social, political, and economic orders that were expressions of the traditional way-of-life of Western civilization, of which Virginians had forever deemed themselves both a part and the preservers. That the traditional order of millennia in the West generally, and of Virginian culture specifically, were under siege during his lifetime, Freeman surely knew well enough. In 1930, for example, Twelve Southerners, among whom were Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren, summoned Southerners-including, therefore, Virginians-to eschew the siren-song of "Progress" by conserving the social, political, and economic orders and independence that constituted what they termed "the Agrarian tradition." In their work, I'll Take My Stand, these authors pointed out that even the liberal Jefferson believed that the American republican consciousness, and therefore the very human capacity of genuine self-government, depended on conserving-and in fact was but the political expression-of the socially-and-economically agricultural and small-town contours of American existence. At old City Auditorium in Richmond in 1930, over 3,000 people, probably including Freeman himself, heard the principal Agrarians argue their case. Freeman's counterpart on the Times-Dispatch, Virginius Dabney, wrote extensively of the event, though he himself remained a convert to the "New South" gospel of "development" that of course eventually prevailed. Ely, in The Crisis of Conservative Virginia, touches only briefly on this dimension of the challenges confronting the Commonwealth a half-century ago, and including not only self-confessed conservatives but self-styled "liberals"-of a decidedly Southern cast-such as Douglas Southall Freeman. Ely does so in reference to debates about the interpretation of the Constitution as these interpretations either upheld or undermined existing Southern customs with regard to race. But Ely makes clear enough that the defenders of "states' rights" were, however inadequately, the defenders not only of a legal conception of the American republic but primarily of an existent and imperiled republican consciousness, that is, of an innate capacity for self-government arising from the individual's immediate participation in a social and political order of long tradition, shaped (however imperfectly) by the human person, and, conversely, not shaped by ideologies or social, political, and economic systems beyond either human comprehension or control: "One must not be too hasty to denigrate the sincerity of the legal convictions expressed by the [Virginia] segregationists," Ely writes. "The personal correspondence of the leading Virginia [Massive Resisters of the 1950s] indicates how strongly they felt about the constitutional aspect of the [race] problem. 'This matter to me,' [Governor Lindsay] Almond asserted, 'is one of deep conviction relative to the Constitution of the United States. It transcends considerations of race.' Virginia's position, [Senator A. Willis] Robertson wrote, 'goes far deeper than a racial issue-it goes to the very heart of the kind of government the Founding Fathers gave us to safeguard….' Moreover, [Senator Harry F.] Byrd and his followers took a restrictive stance regarding federal authority over the economy, and a conservative understanding of the federal constitution was consistent with the overall Byrd philosophy." The point is, that the generation of which Freeman was an eminent spokesman not only lost the principal political battle of their time; more importantly they lost the social and economic battles of which the constitutional confrontation over race was in important respects only secondary. (Of course some deem the loss to be Progress.) The evidence of their loss-and therefore of our own loss-is manifest, for example, in the evisceration of the very landscape of Virginia over huge swaths of Northern Virginia and Tidewater-and, if the proposed expansion of Interstate 81 occurs, of the once-glorious Shenandoah Valley. The degradation of Chesapeake Bay is another indication of the sacrifice of authentic common weal to individualistic economic zeal. And these are but the environmental manifestations of Virginia's transformation. Socially, politically, and economically, laissez faire has supplanted order, or what Edmund Burke termed "the cake of custom," as the sine qua non of even "conservative" conviction and endeavor. Consequently, socially, though former barriers having to do with race have, thankfully, been legally resolved, in their place has arisen a dogma of individualism that makes impossible any kind of enduring social-bond or authentic common weal based upon commonly held mores and manners. (The citizen has been transmogrified into the consumer.) Persistent crises arising from astronomical rates of illegitimacy, the dissolution of our cities-now empty spaces surrounded by superhighways and suburban sprawl-of public schooling, and of a host of other "social issues" testify to the degree to which certain losses in the realm of the humane call into question the claims of merely material "progress." Politically, though anyone over 18 years-of-age, of whatever color, can vote, vast numbers of voters now regularly complain, with justification, that state government, very generally speaking, attracts only mediocre representation. Economically, the transition to a cash economy has for millions of people all but eliminated genuine self-reliance and actual economic independence. The "family farm" is now a quaintly (that is, falsely) named subdivision; the "family wage" has disappeared with the manufacturing jobs that made it possible. The economy is so dependent on foreign oil that oil dominates our foreign policy-and even a brief, modest drop in oil production, let alone a sharp, sustained rise in oil prices, could imperil our very national independence, politically speaking, for we long ago bartered our economic independence, as astronomical current accounts deficits attest. In sum, Virginians have, for the most part unconsciously (the class of Virginians who were conscious of the transformation having been defeated, displaced, or dispossessed), passed through the experiences forewarned in 1933-as Freeman must well have known-in The Revolt of the Masses. Democracy is triumphant on every hand, socially, politically, and economically, precisely as Tocqueville warned-and feared it might-a century earlier (as surely Freeman well knew). The pertinence of this perspective is apparent in national politics, now riven by division on issues ranging from abortion to the scale and expense of federal government, to the encroachment by Federal Courts upon virtually every aspect of state and even local existence and institutions, to the very definition of marriage. In Freeman's time, because since the Founders' time, these questions were to be determined, conservatives believed, solely or at least primarily by the states because the states were the expressions of the traditional societies that had created them. * * * * * * All of which is but to observe that, for all of his prodigious learning and influence, Freeman is an eminent embodiment of a generation that failed in its quest to conserve for transmission the principal elements of the social, political, and economic order that was for generations a Virginian's inheritance. It is a far, far different Virginia that we inhabit in 2004, better in certain respects, to be sure, but worse, a conservative can argue, in many of the larger respects that are fundamental to civilization, to social, political, and economic order in a commonwealth. It is this dimension of Freeman's life and times that receives too little elaboration in Johnson's otherwise splendid study. That even so gifted a man as Douglas Freeman, whose influence especially in Richmond but also in all of Virginia was fundamental in social, political, and religious circles, was finally unable (or so it seems) even to comprehend let alone successfully to confront the changes overtaking his community and Commonwealth is the crucial consideration that Johnson leaves unexplored. It is in this respect that Douglas Southall Freeman could have been enriched had the author approached his subject within the framework of the changes-inaugurated by the applied sciences-that finally overwhelmed the human capacity to direct them. (Science asks only what can be done? Traditional societies answer, only what ought be done.) Conservatives-and Douglas Freeman was, arguably, a conservative-seek to conserve existing things, if only by adapting them to new challenges, for example a society and its polity. But it was precisely these then-existing things that were undone by truly revolutionary changes in the very meaning and manner of human endeavor as science supplanted civilization: jobs changed, society changed, cities changed, politics changed, morals changed, all because consciousness itself had changed, precisely when Dr. Freeman was writing editorials and books extolling the virtues of Washington and Lee. (Studies that address these questions include No Place of Grace: The Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, by T. J. Jackson Lears, and Consciousness and Society, by H. Stuart Hughes. Neither was consulted for the Freeman biography.) Douglas Southall Freeman would have been an even finer work, then, had Johnson explored his subject within the lineage of Virginians other than Washington and Lee. For, great as these men were, neither of them, not even Washington as President engaged in depth the fundaments of the Virginian tradition. That vocation occupied the politics and polemics of a lineage encompassing William Byrd, Patrick Henry, John Taylor of Caroline, John Randolph of Roanoke, Robert Lewis Dabney, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Basil Gildersleeve, George W. Bagby, and, more recently, Thomas Lomax Hunter of King George County, Freeman's contemporary, an essayist and poet, and a columnist for the Times-Dispatch. These were the exponents of a way-of-life in which traditional principles informed and guided, or at least shaped, human activities. Today, by contrast, peoples the world over, and in Virginia, too, of course, abandon their ancient beliefs and social, political, and economic orders at the behest of "globalization" and the ideologies of "self-expression," "development," and individualism that globalizing interests deploy to "level the playing field" for maximal economic exploitation. In other words, whereas today it is a law of life that we exist in a "market society," Virginians traditionally deemed economics, or the market, to be subordinate to-and in the service of-society; in other words, they sought to cultivate and conserve a society with a market. Such a society may breed libertarians and individualists who conform to the ethos of the era; it does not breed conservatives who possess individuality. Which is another way of suggesting that, though Freeman presents a good deal of Freeman's contests with Big Government and with Big Labor, not so apparent is that government has played far less a role in the subsequent transformation of Virginian culture than Big Business, Big Science, and Big Nihilism. * * * * * Additionally, despite the many merits of Johnson's biography, the question remains whether Freeman is to be best understood as a man of a particular character and accomplishment-both apparent and notable enough, to be sure-or as a man to whom an idiosyncratic method of research and writing, albeit a method of extraordinary discipline, confounded the very attempt to which he devoted his exceptional capacities of mind, namely, the history of Virginia generally, the lives of Washington and Lee specifically. Beyond the effects on his family of Freeman's rigorous regimen, Johnson does not explore the degree to which Freeman's very methods of research and composition narrowed the breadth of his grasp of his subjects and heroes-and also of the historical tradition of which Freeman certainly deemed himself a custodian. That clearly Johnson is smitten of his subject would seem to be the explanation for this deficiency. (Perhaps even more accurately, the biographer is smitten of the methods of his subject?) In any event, it is arguable, for example, that, for all of his massive research, and despite the beauty of his prose style in his R. E. Lee, Freeman did not finally understand Lee at all. Several scholars, most notably Thomas Connelly in his provocatively titled study of Lee and the legend of Lee, The Marble Man, Emory Thomas in his Robert E. Lee, and Alan Nolan in his Lee Considered, have only tentatively presented even the indication of such an argument. But none of these authors (and especially not Nolan, a Hoosier who derides Lee) explores whether Freeman's fascination with detail and regimen is not itself a hindrance in reaching to the depths of historical understanding generally, to an understanding of Lee specifically. This is no minor matter. Freeman self-consciously sought to place himself within the shadow of Washington and Lee, and the jacket of Johnson's book presents the images of Washington, Lee, and Freeman in succession, as embodiments of shared characteristics and a shared cultural lineage. But in the famous final chapter (entitled "The Pattern of a Life") of his biography of Lee, Freeman concluded of the great Confederate soldier and soul: "That is all. There is no mystery in the coffin there in front of the windows that look to the sunrise." It is a beautiful observation. But it is not true. In fact, there is so much mystery about Lee the man that no less a student of the South than Allen Tate, who was conducting research toward a biography of Lee at precisely the same time that Freeman was preparing his own biography of the General, despaired of the project, proclaiming-mysteriously enough-"there is an abyss there," that is, within the interior life of the Southern commander. The importance of this point can be illustrated from the observations of Owen Barfield about his close friend of forty years, the renowned twentieth-century scholar and author C. S. Lewis. "I am fairly often approached for general comment on C. S. Lewis or for an 'explanation' of his attitude to this or that," Barfield wrote. "This used to be so even during [Lewis's] life. Such requests always make me feel both embarrassed and fraudulent. As if I could explain anything! He stood before me as a mystery as solidly as he stood beside me as a friend." Contemporaneous with the publication of R. E. Lee, in the early 1930s, Andrew Lytle-one of the Twelve Southerners of I'll Take My Stand-made very nearly the same observation about the mystery of Freeman's subject. "Any life of Lee which proposes to be definitive must of necessity," Lytle wrote in a major review of Freeman's work, "lay great and special demands upon the author's critical imagination…When times were stricter, as in the eighteenth century, it was not necessary for the biographer of a great soldier to explain the society from which he had sprung or his particular place in it, because the reader, being a part of that society, intuitively understood its nature, its divisions and institutions. In that time, when a political quarrel was settled by war, nothing was changed fundamentally. But with Lee it was different. He was called on to defend the society itself which produced him and the life he loved, a thing which he seems never to have understood. He conducted his campaigns largely in the eighteenth-century fashion as he had seen war conducted in Mexico. This fact gives to the tragedy of his life a flavor of irony which the author has singularly missed" (emphasis added). And: "If Lee did not [as Freeman seems to suggest Lee did not] understand the implications of the policy of the Northern radicals, who were the [Federal] government, his nobility conceals a serious flaw…Must [Lee] not have asked himself how virtue can fail or did he know how the noble man may be pursued by Fate and overthrown? Or did the flaw lie deeper, somewhere behind that irreproachable mask, in the refusal to demean his personal code to save the [Southern] cause? "These questions are not proposed in [Freeman's] work; but they must be considered before the biography of Lee can be said, in all respects, to be definitive." That Lytle's essay is not cited as even a secondary source in the otherwise thorough bibliography in Freeman suggests that Johnson wished not to consult at least some of the contemporaneous critics of his subject. Significantly, Johnson does quote a stunningly apropos observation by the eminent historian Perry Miller, who in reviewing Freeman's later George Washington volumes, wrote: "After we have put by the enchantment of the four volumes…[we] still do not know how [Washington] got that way." * * * * * Douglas Southall Freeman is, then, a flawed masterpiece of biography regarding one life-the life of Douglas Southall Freeman. It does too little, however, to advance our understanding of, as it were, "how Freeman got that way." Freeman does little, too, to advance our knowledge of the forces-intellectual, social, political, economic, and, most emphatically, scientific or mechanical and only subsequently ideological-that forever ended assumptions and institutions that had for generations defined the Virginian tradition of which Freeman was the product and the proponent. Consequently, to the conservative, Freeman offers no counsel on means of sustaining the vestiges of Virginian tradition that somehow manage to endure amidst the concrete, the suburbs, and the disappearing farmlands. (That Freeman wrote a touching Introduction to the 1942 memoir of her father by Rebecca Yancey Williams of Lynchburg, The Vanishing Virginian, suggests that Freeman well knew that a particular kind of society-his society-and therefore a particular kind of individuality-olde Cap'n Bob Yancey's-was indeed disappearing from the Commonwealth.) For just as Freeman's monumental biography of Lee leaves one wondering how well Lee grasped the larger social and political issues at stake on the battlefield, so one comes away from Johnson's biography wondering whether even Freeman himself comprehended the forces of change that finally overwhelmed the traditional Virginian concern for continuity in custom, polity, and faith. Born when the ravages of Reconstruction were still fiercely resented by Virginians-when horses were the common mode of transportation and long before the telephone and electricity (or indoor plumbing) became staples of every home-and dying after two world-wide wars, the Great Depression, and the advent of both the Atomic Age and the Civil Rights Era, Freeman's lifetime was characterized by nothing so much as revolutionary change. But for all of his learning, for all of his great and good labors, there is little evidence that either as man or as historian he had plumbed to the fundamental origins-or grasped the explosive ramifications-of the revolutionary changes, far beyond those having to do with race relations in the South, with which he was confronted and of which he otherwise wrote so much and so well. |
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