Douglas Southall Freeman, Virginian and biographer of Virginians, achieved recognition during his lifetime as the preeminent authority on Confederate military history, a judgment accorded both by the academic community and by the popular press. The compelling sweep and controlled mastery of detail of R. E. Lee and Lee's Lieutenants caused them to be hailed as literary classics. Long a notable public figure in his native state as editor of an important Richmond newspaper, Freeman attained real national celebrity as a historian in the last twenty years of his life. He was unquestionably one of the best-known American historians of his time. His final work, George Washington, does not claim the authoritative place in historical literature occupied by his studies of the Army of Northern Virginia, but it is one of the monumental American biographies, and it buttresses his position among the leading American biographers of this century.

That...