An Address

Dr. Freeman, the dean of Civil War scholars, passed away June 14, 1953. This speech, given before the Civil War Round Tables in Richmond, May 7, 1953, has been taken from a tape recording made at the time, and has not been substantially revised. We are greatly indebted to Mrs. Freeman for her permission to publish Dr. Freeman's remarks. An Address DOUGLAS SOUTHALL FREEMAN first of all, ladies and gentlemen, I wish to say that you have come to Richmond to receive the warmest welcome we can extend you, but you have come at a time when unfortunately there are grave limitations on what some of us can do for your entertainment. Before I knew of your plans, we set for this very weekend the meeting in Richmond of the National Advertisers of our Richmond newspapers. These gentlemen I am to conduct tomorrow and the next day on pilgrimages of grace in this part of the Commonwealth. For that reason, and for that only, I shall be denied what otherwise would be my great delight in going with you and participating in what I hope will be your interesting discussions of this area. You will understand that nothing short of this most compelling necessity has kept me from having the privilège of being with you and of learning from you more about the various fields you may visit and your reflections on them. I hope at least that I may be able to shake your hands and to thank you for coming to Virginia. I purpose tonight to talk to you for exactly one half hour and at the end of that time to try to answer such questions as you may see fit to put to me. In this half hour I am going to try to describe five of the difficulties that a historian of the war of 1861-65 encounters. They are by no means the only problems that have to be faced. They have nothing to do, in general, with those sources of information that may be uncovered or yet may be missing. They are, in the main, matters of historical critique , and when we have reviewed these five, I shall come at the end to a consideration of the final factor in the last of these points. That will lead to my closing appeal to you — one I hope will find an answer in your own hearts. Every student of this period finds himself confronted with testimony from three different types of witnesses. One of those might be called the 7 8 DOUGLAS SOUIUALL FREEMAN immediate witnesses. Another type is represented by the rnen and women who felt it necessary, or profitable, or desirable, to write, almost immediately after the conclusion of hostilities. In this category, for example, belong the memoirs of General Beauregard. We have, after that, the third classification — a later series of witnesses who may be said, broadly , to have begun their work at the time of the publication of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, and simultaneously the appearance of that very remarkable book known as Battles and Leaders. Unfortunately, we have a great many writers on this period who accept as equally deserving of credibility the testimony of contemporaries and the testimony of men who wrote twenty or thirty years after the war. It is a very grave mistake to give the same measure of acceptation to the late witness that is given to the early witness. So it is for this reason, among others, that we find the most invaluable of all the documents relating to the period of your study the correspondence volumes of the Official Records. Here we have the account from the field of action. It has the limitations that inevitably inhere in that type of testimony; but it has also the element of immediacy about it. No more interesting development in the study of the Civil War has come than that of the new emphasis on the correspondence, whereas thirty or forty years ago, all the emphasis virtually was on the reports. As a matter of fact, you will find in a good many instances that the reports themselves were...