Early Life
Douglas Southall Freeman was born May 16, 1886 in Lynchburg, Virginia, to Bettie Allen Hamner and Walker Burford Freeman, an insurance agent who had served four years in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. From childhood, Freeman exhibited an interest in Southern history. In Lynchburg, his family lived at 416 Main Street, near the home of Confederate general Jubal Early. The family moved to the former Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia in 1892 at the height of the monument commemoration movement that memorialized Virginia's Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.
In 1904, Freeman was awarded an AB degree from Richmond College, where he had been a member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. In 1908, at the age of 22, he earned a PhD in history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Unable to secure a position in academia, Freeman joined the staff of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1909 and, in 1915, at the age of 29, he became editor of The Richmond News Leader—a position he held for 34 years.
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