Douglas Southall Freeman

Douglas Southall Freeman,¹ a 1904 graduate of Richmond College, was likely the University’s most widely known alumnus in the middle of the 20^th century. When he first joined the University of Richmond Board of Trustees in 1925, he was already editor of the Richmond News Leader and a popular radio commentator, positions that afforded him significant public influence. He served the University as a trustee until 1950 and led the board as its rector from 1934 to 1950. During the period of his University leadership, his national reputation as a historian of the Confederacy and as a public intellectual grew substantially, particularly after his receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for his four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee in 1935. He received a second Pulitzer posthumously for his seven-volume biography of George Washington. At the height of his career, Freeman exercised significant influence with the general public, military leaders, business magnates, and politicians.

Freeman leveraged his influence to elevate and benefit the University of Richmond. As rector, he shepherded the University through the deprivations of the Great Depression and World War II and initiated ambitious fundraising and public relations efforts. Additionally, his active support for the University in the pages of the Richmond News Leader functioned as a powerful public relations tool for the institution.

In his scholarship and public commentary, Freeman both reflected and molded attitudes about the Confederacy and Civil War, racial segregation, and eugenics. His perspectives were deeply entwined with his conviction of white superiority and his lifelong belief in the role of so-called “clean blood” in determining character and achievement. These beliefs were also shared by many white Virginians. What set Freeman apart was the power of his platform.

Life and Career

Douglas Southall Freeman was born in 1886 in Lynchburg, Virginia. Throughout his life, he considered his father—a Confederate veteran and a key figure in the memorialization and veneration of the Confederacy and its leaders—one of his greatest influences. Freeman also embraced his father’s view that his ancestry conveyed to him and others like him natural and superior character traits, which informed his lifelong attitudes about race, intelligence, and the eugenics movement in Virginia.

Freeman’s family moved to Richmond when he was a boy, and at the age of 15, he became a student at Richmond College, following his brothers Hamner G. Freeman, an 1893 graduate, and Allen Weir Freeman, an 1899 graduate. As a student, he was involved in a number of activities, including the student-run literary magazine The Messenger, Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, and the Dramatic Club. Academically, he was profoundly influenced by Samuel Chiles Mitchell, a professor who shared a reverence for the Confederacy and who steered the younger Freeman’s attention to the formal study of history.

After three years at Richmond College, Freeman graduated in 1904, at age 18, with the equivalent of today’s bachelor of arts degree. He continued his education at Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a doctorate in history. In his dissertation, The Attitude of Political Parties in Virginia to Slavery and Secession, 1846-1861, he emphasized states’ rights rather than slavery as the cause of the Civil War, a common view among white Southerners who admired the Confederacy.

In 1915, he published his first major book, Lee’s Dispatches to Jefferson Davis, 1862-1865, a collection of wartime correspondence between the Confederate leaders. The book “turned Freeman into an overnight sensation among Confederate historians,” according to Encyclopedia Virginia, and led to a contract with a major New York publisher for a biography of Robert E. Lee, which in 1935 would earn him the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes.²

Also in 1915, at age 29, Freeman became editor of Richmond News Leader, one of the city’s two major dailies, after serving in more junior roles. His new position, along with his growing fame as a historian, gave him an influential platform for sharing his views on public matters, including among the nation’s political, military, and business leaders. During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson reportedly stipulated that Freeman’s editorials be placed on his desk in the Oval Office. He corresponded regularly with U.S. military leaders throughout his career and delivered as many as 100 lectures a year. He spoke frequently at the United States Army and Navy war colleges, emphasizing what he viewed as Confederate officers’ admirable leadership skills and character. He exchanged extensive correspondence with Gen. George C. Marshall and made a recommendation to Secretary of War Robert Patterson in 1942 that developed into the legislation known as the G.I. Bill, which offered federal aid to help veterans adjust to civilian life, purchase homes, find employment, and pursue education.

A devout Baptist who originally considered the ministry as a career, Freeman was actively involved in Second Baptist Church in Richmond, where he taught a highly popular Men’s Bible Study Class, at times presenting his views on public issues of the day. The audience sometimes overflowed into the parking lot.

Freeman was also a very influential figure with the general public. During an era when most Americans’ awareness of news came via a small number of newspapers and radio stations, he received acclaim for his frequent editorials and radio broadcasts. During his tenure as editor of News Leader, he sometimes produced as many as seven editorials per day. These were widely read across the region and frequently excerpted in newspapers around the country. Encyclopedia Virginia estimates that his editorial output was more 600,000 words of editorial copy annually for more than 30 years.³ His twice daily radio broadcasts were described as “an essential of the Virginian breakfast” by one historian and “estimated to reach 63 percent of the listening audience” by another. His influence also extended to higher education beyond Richmond and the service academies where he lectured; he taught at Columbia University’s School of Journalism for many years, commuting from Richmond by train to do so.

Public Views on Race and Segregation

In some of his public commentary, he advocated for racial segregation built on a foundation of paternalistic white power and African American acquiescence, an approach to segregation that came to be called “the Virginia Way.” He also advocated continued disenfranchisement of African American voters as efforts were made to ease restrictions on white voters. Many contemporary white Southerners, and Freeman himself, considered his views moderate against a backdrop of lynchings and other forms of racial violence of the first half of the 20^th century. Freeman regularly criticized such extra-legal violence. However, his disagreement with more extreme segregationists was one of approach rather than of principle; he consistently expressed a belief in the inherent dominance of white people. For example, after an outcry over the appearance of an advertisement for the Ku Klux Klan in the News Leader in 1920, Freeman published an editorial expressing regret over its inclusion while indicating general approval of Klan principles. “The News Leader may be in full sympathy with them,” he wrote, but he then argued that the Klan’s methods of “terrorization and mystery” were “no longer” useful as “solutions to the problems of the South.” He continued, “Open council is needed. Instead of terrorization, education.”⁴ In another of many examples, two years later he wrote approvingly about a group committed to “racial integrity” called the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, endorsing its call for “proper laws” designed to maintain “racial purity, racial integrity and lofty racial ideals,” such as laws banning sexual relationships between people of different races.⁵

His writing influenced public opinion and policy during his lifetime and beyond, forming, after his death, part of the groundwork for Virginia’s organized resistance to integration known as “Massive Resistance” following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Earlier in his career, Freeman also promoted concepts central to eugenics, such as “making possible the checking of this great stream of defective and dependent in our population,”⁶ and expressed support for involuntary sterilization of populations who might pass on what eugenicists regarded as inferior genes. Eugenicists generally targeted people of color around the world, as well as, in the words of one prominent eugenicist named Arthur Estabrook, “low grade white” people.⁷

His stances opposing racial violence sometimes earned praise from those in the Black community, including from John Mitchell Jr., editor of Richmond Planet, a weekly newspaper. Mitchell also frequently challenged Freeman on his positions related to segregation and racial equality. In his responses to Freeman, Mitchell often reprinted excerpts of Freeman’s editorials interspersed with his own commentary, creating the effect of a public dialogue between the men for Richmond Planet readers. After Mitchell’s death in 1929, no other figure emerged to offer any consistent, public counterpoint to Freeman’s editorial stances.

Further Work as Historian

Despite the demands of his journalism career, Freeman also continued to produce highly influential historical scholarship throughout his life. He followed his biography of Lee with more celebrated works of military history. Most notably, he published a three-volume study of military leadership called Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command from 1942 to 1944 and began publishing his multivolume George Washington: A Biography in 1948. His work won widespread praise, particularly for its “fog of war” technique, in which the reader is given only the information that Freeman’s subject had at the time. A fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, T. Harry Williams, wrote in 1955 that Freeman “was accorded the rare honor of being accepted, while still alive, as a great historian, as the authority in his field and of having his works acclaimed as classics that would endure permanently. Undoubtedly he was the most widely known writer of our times on the Civil War.”⁸

Freeman’s books advanced Lost Cause beliefs about the Confederacy. These beliefs minimize the importance of slavery as a cause of the Civil War; characterize enslaved people as loyal to their masters and unprepared for freedom; and valorize Confederate leaders, actions, and values. His historical scholarship shaped public perception and misperception of the Confederacy and Civil War in ways that continue to be evident today.

University Leadership and Service

Freeman served on the University of Richmond’s Board of Trustees from 1925 to 1950. From 1934 to 1950, he served as its rector, or chair and, at times, convened meetings of the Board’s Executive Committee in his home. He guided the University through significant growth and through financial challenges brought on by the Great Depression and World War II. He regularly used his position as editor of the News Leader to raise public recognition of and support for the University through editorials and stories covering the University.

As rector, he initiated aggressive development and public relations efforts by the University, which he considered essential for fundraising and growth. During that time, the University hired its first alumni secretary and launched the Alumni Bulletin, published today as University of Richmond Magazine. Freeman helped plan fundraising efforts that strengthened the University’s endowment and aimed to bolster facilities through the addition of a “Central University Library” and a Westhampton College dormitory. He also oversaw the implementation of life insurance and retirement plans for faculty and staff and publicly defended the academic freedom of the faculty against external criticism. He provided the University with a sterling silver mace, and he and his wife, Inez, funded the Cannon Memorial Chapel reredos, a wooden ornamental structure behind the altar, and established a scholarship named for their son, as well as an endowed book fund.

Freeman’s views on race and segregation were also evident in his involvement in education at Richmond and beyond. In 1944, he supported President F. W. Boatwright’s handling of student complaints about the exclusion from the dining hall of a visiting Black speaker. In 1947, in his role as a member of the U.S. Presidential Commission on higher education, Freeman signed a letter of dissent opposing a proposed federal policy reform that allowed for integration, arguing that the issue’s resolution should be left to the “slow and unpredictable operation of time.”⁹ That same year, human remains presumed to be the graves of enslaved people were found during construction work on the University of Richmond campus. In response, Freeman argued that the discovery should not get in the way of development, writing “Were every grave left forever undisturbed, the globe would be a cemetery,” a point of view at odds with his interest in preserving the graves of Confederate soldiers and commemorating battlefields with markers.¹⁰

Freeman’s term as rector ended in 1950 amid a dispute about the appropriate role of athletics. Freeman had long disapproved of colleges and universities emphasizing athletics at, in his view, a cost to academics, a matter of much discussion among the president and board. He resigned rather than agree to further funding to support the then-struggling athletic department. Among the members of the Freeman family who later served on the University’s Board of Trustees was his daughter, Mary Tyler Freeman Cheek McLenahan.

Death and Memorialization

Freeman died suddenly of a heart attack in 1953 at age 67, not long after delivering an 8 a.m. news commentary on the radio. His obituary appeared on the front page of The New York Times, which described him as a “a leading military historian” and noted that his books “were widely read by military leaders and statesmen.”¹¹ At the time of his death, his seven-volume Washington biography, which would receive the Pulitzer Prize in 1958, was still in progress. Its final volume was completed by John Alexander Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth, based on Freeman’s research and notes. Freeman continued to be held in wide esteem as a historian, public intellectual, and newspaperman long after his death.

In 1965, the University named a new residence hall Freeman Hall in his honor at a time when it named several buildings for former rectors. In 1983, as part of its Cornerstones Campaign, the University raised funds to establish the Douglas Southall Freeman Chair in History endowment, harnessing Freeman’s then-continued reputation for scholarly excellence to attract eminent scholars to the faculty. More than 250 donors supported the fund, including Freeman’s daughter, Mary Tyler, and her husband, Leslie Cheek.

In 2021, the Board of Trustees initiated development of Naming Principles to guide naming decisions at the University. Based on the Naming Principles adopted in 2022, and extensive research into the life and work of Douglass Southall Freeman that documented his publicly promulgated views of issues of race, segregation, and eugenics, the Board renamed Freeman Hall as Residence Hall No. 3 and the Freeman Distinguished Chairs in History as the Cornerstones Chairs in History.¹²

More Information

For additional information about Douglass Southall Freeman, see the 2021 institutional history report, ‘The Virginia Way’: Race, the ‘Lost Cause,’ & the Social Influence of Douglas Southall Freeman, by Dr. Lauranett L. Lee and Suzanne Slye, available at the link immediately below.

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