The Definitive Biography of Lee

Dr. Freeman's Study Reads Like a Novel, Says Eckenrode

By. H. J. Echenrode

R. E. Lee, by Douglas Southall Freeman. Charles Scribner's Sons. In four volumes, $15.

The concluding volumes of Dr. Freeman's monumental work on Robert E. Lee have just issued from the press and have received remarkable notices by reviewers the country over. There are several reasons for this acclaim. In the first place the work is the first detailed life of Lee and in the second place (and more important) it is exceedingly readable.

Biographies in several volumes are rare in these days of rush. It has been many years since Nickolai and Hay put out their dull and tedious life of Lincoln, perhaps the most massive biography of comparatively recent times. Washington, of course, has been the hero (or the victim) of several colossal works, one of which by John Marshall, is among the most dreary books ever published. Marshall himself, however, was so fortunate as to find a notable biographer in the late Senator Albert J. Beveridge. But no Confederate had been considered worthy of exhaustive treatment until the firm of Charles Scribner's Sons chose Dr. Freeman to make his study of the immortal Lee. Jackson had been the subject of a brilliant British book, but Lee had been left to "interpretations," the best of which was by the late Gamaliel Bradford. Thus this four-volume work is a tribute to the South as well as to the cause of history.

Dr. Freeman spent his leisure hours for many years in the preparation of this book. He ransacked libraries and private collections for Lee letters, he went through all available records of military operations in his research; he did a tremendous job in the field of historical scholarship. But even more important than this, he did not, like so many historians, succumb to Old Dry as Dust, the great enemy of history. He remained, in putting his vast mass of material in book form, the master of vigorous and dramatic narrative style which makes "R. E. Lee" as "interesting as a novel," only history is so much more interesting than the dull treatises nowadays called novels that there is no comparison. In fact, it is in the books of such biographers as Strachey, Ludwig, Maurois and Freeman that one has to look for entertaining reading in these times when novels have no heroes, no villains and nothing doing.

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Few things are more difficult than the making of military operations understandable to the traditional "man in the street," that tyrant that awes all of us. Dr. Freeman has done this. His narrative of the great operations of the War of Secession: the Seven Days Around Richmond, the Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville are graphically and most realistically described in his first two volumes one can smell the smoke and hear the bullets whiz by. In the concluding volumes, which open with the mighty drama of Gettyburg, the interest heightens, as it should. There is no anti-climax; the story goes on unflaggingly through the winter of 1863, the terrible struggle of the Wilderness, the carnage of Cold Harbor, the deadlock of Petersburg, the retreat, the surrender at Appomattox.

In few histories, especially those on American subjects, have interest and historical accuracy been so well combined. For Dr. Freeman is, foremost, a careful historian, and Dr. Freeman's research has been most careful and thorough. The result is a work that will stand the test of time and remain, in all probability, the standard book of Lee and the mility operations of 1861-65 in Virginia for all the years. It is a reviewer's truism to say the "every one should read"a book. The truism is true in this case. Every one, particularly every Virginian, should read one of the ablest and most remarkable books ever written by a Virginian.