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416 Main Street, the birthplace of Douglas Southall Freeman
James A. Huston on antitank firing range, Ojai Valley Country Club, California, in 1942. It was on the troop train from California to Alabama in 1943 that he first encountered Lee’s Lieutenants.
On A Troop Train
I first encountered the writing of Douglas Southall Freeman while traveling on a troop train from California to Alabama in April 1943. Our battalion commander had just obtained a copy of the first two volumes of Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command (a third and final volume was published in 1944). Knowing my interest in history, he thought I might want to take a look. There was little to do during the long days and nights on the train, so I was able to read with little interruption. I found the reading fascinating and remarkably relevant.
In the foreword to the first volume of Lee’s Lieutenants, I was struck by Freeman’s sense of urgency in having it published straightaway, in 1942. Ordinarily, “in times less out of joint” he would have preferred to publish all three volumes together, as a unit. But then he thought, “Something...may be gained by printing in the first year of the nation’s greatest war, the story of the difficulties that had to be overcome in
an earlier struggle before the command of the army became measurably qualified for the task assigned it....The Lee and the ‘Stonewall’ Jackson of this war will emerge. A Second Manassas will follow the blundering of backward-looking commanders and of inexperienced staff officers during any Seven Days’ Battle the new army must fight.”
As I read those lines in the midst of WWII, my thoughts turned to the early misfortunes of American forces at Bataan and Corregidor, and Wake Island, and to the recent action at Kasserine Pass.
Then, in his introduction to the second volume, Freeman added: “The writer consequently is grateful that this volume of a work undertaken in 1936, when war seemed remote, should have become ready for publication in a year that may parallel events described here. Ours it may be in 1943 to duplicate the experience of the Army of Northern Virginia from the Seven Days to Chancellorsville. In the next phase of this Second World War, the period from our Gettysburg to Appomattox, may the fortunes of our men be not those of the Army of Northern Virginia but of its gallant adversary, the Army of the Potomac.”
Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, it may be well to ponder these things again as we find ourselves in a different kind of war, but one in which at least some of the experiences of an earlier conflict may apply.
The Washington Civil War Roundtable
In 1953, ten years after my cross-country train ride when I was introduced to Lee’s Lieutenants, I was back on active duty in the Pentagon, and the colonel who had been my battalion commander was now Adjutant General of the District of Columbia.
SPRING/SUMMER 2008 
Photo courtesy The News & Advance