Douglas Southall Freeman

With the death at Richmond, Virginia, of Douglas Southall Freeman, the United States has lost a great Southerner, a distinguished newspaper editor and one of the most notable representatives of that declining species, the amateur historian.

The South has always been famous for the loyalty it inspires in its sons; and Freeman, in every fibre of his being, was a loyal son of the South. Born at Lynchburg, Virginia in 1886, he grew up in that “new South” which was emerging from the miseries of the Civil War and the hardships of Reconstruction into a new day, and which could contemplate the records of its past and the problems of its future with a greater serenity and objectivity than had been possible for half a century.