Word: freeman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...rest of Young Washington is chiefly the story of George's effort to fight a nightmarish war against able enemies, with insufficient men and supplies. Freeman's accounts of Washington's volunteer trip to warn the French away from the Ohio, the disastrous defeat at Fort Necessity and the slaughter of Braddock's army are easily the soundest and most complete in print...
...Love, but Justice. The young Washington that Freeman has exhumed will give many a superpatriot the twitches. Freeman knows that his portrait of a proud and selfseeking Virginian has ruthlessly kicked Washington, the Eagle Scout who could not tell a lie, off his pedestal for keeps. Most men of Washington's rank, writes Freeman, "considered him ambitious and not particularly likable or conspicuously able . . ." Washington's favorite disciplinarian was the cat-o'-nine-tails: 25 lashes for profanity, 100 for drunkenness. His letters to superiors were often fawning, too prone to dwell on his own belief that...
...Freeman, and consequently the reader too, is impressed by a strength of character, an almost fierce sense of justice and principles of conduct rare in Washington's time or any other: "The foundations of that code were not love and mercy, faith and sacrifice, but honesty and duty, truth and justice, justice exact and inclusive, justice that never for an instant overlooked his own interests...
After four years of research and writing, Freeman can make this measured judgment: "The patriot emerged slowly. Two generations ago this statement would have been considered defamation. The integrity of the United States was assumed, for some reason, to presuppose the flawlessness of Washington's character and vice versa . . . More Americans will be relieved than will be shocked to know that Washington sometimes was violent, emotional, resentful...
Washington & Lee. Readers of the near-reverent R. E. Lee will learn with surprise that Freeman found Washington "a more interesting young man to study" than...