George Washington, Vols. I-VII
by Douglas Southall Freeman, John Alexander Carroll, and Mary Wells Ashworth
Summary
Douglas Southall Freeman's seven volume George Washington follows its subject from his birth in 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, through an early career as a surveyor and Virginia militia officer during the French and Indian War, where he survived defeat at Fort Necessity in 1754 and the disastrous Braddock expedition the following year before resigning his commission over the limits colonial officers faced in rank. It follows his marriage to the wealthy widow Martha Custis in 1759 and his years running Mount Vernon's tobacco and wheat operations, then his growing opposition to British taxation as a member of the House of Burgesses. The biography's central volumes trace his command of the Continental Army from his 1775 appointment through the sieges and defeats of the war's early years, the winter crossings that won Trenton and Princeton, and the combined French and American campaign that forced the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781.
Later volumes follow him into the presidency in 1789, covering his balancing of Jefferson and Hamilton in his cabinet, his suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion, his pursuit of neutrality in the wars convulsing Europe, and the 1796 Farewell Address warning against regional faction, before closing with his 1797 retirement to Mount Vernon and his death in December 1799.
Freeman, who had already won a Pulitzer Prize for his four volume life of Robert E. Lee, died of a heart attack in 1953 having completed the biography's first six volumes, the sixth appearing posthumously in 1954. His research assistants, John Alexander Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth, completed the seventh and final volume from Freeman's own notes and research, publishing it in 1957. The finished seven volume set, credited to all three, is built throughout on the same exhaustive documentary method Freeman had used for Lee, working from Washington's own letters and papers rather than secondhand accounts, and it remains, by the judgment of later Washington scholars including John Ferling, unmatched in its documentary depth.
Historical Context & Significance
Charles Scribner's Sons published the completed seven volumes between 1948 and 1957, and the set won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, awarded jointly and posthumously to Freeman alongside Carroll and Ashworth, the collaborators who finished it after his death. It was Freeman's second Pulitzer, following the one he won in 1935 for R. E. Lee: A Biography, making him one of a small number of writers to win the prize twice for biographies of two different American commanders.
The Washington biography has been superseded in places by later scholarship with access to sources Freeman could not use, but historians have continued to treat its documentary base as a foundation few later biographers have matched, and it remains a standard reference for Washington's military and presidential record even where its interpretations have been revised.