The Seeds of Doubt

Speaker 1:
Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Ed Ayers:
From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Ed Ayers:
Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Ed Ayers. If you’re new to the podcast, each week along with my colleagues, Joanne Freeman, Nathan Connolly, and Brian Balogh, we explore a different aspect of American history. Now, I’ve covered many different topics in my decade with BackStory, from the poetry of Walt Whitman to the politics of the Supreme Court and lots of stranger subjects in between.

Ed Ayers:
But some of my favorite BackStory moments have touched on anniversaries and events related to my own field on American history, slavery, the Civil War and reconstruction. Those conversations tell stories of pain and struggle, of change and triumph. They bring in pathbreaking scholarship and some of the best public history. And I’m grateful to have had the chance to bring them to you over so many years.

Ed Ayers:
So today’s episode, I’m excited to share some of my favorite BackStory moments. This is part of an ongoing series we’re doing as BackStory starts to wrap up, after more than 12 years. You’ll learn about the newly opened American Civil War Museum and how looking at one item from a different perspective changes the story it tells. And you’ll hear tape from a BackStory live show at the 150th anniversary of the liberation of Richmond, Virginia.

Ed Ayers:
But first up, a deeper dive into what the Confederacy means today. Waverley Adcock is a southerner, and for many years, he took pride in his role as a Civil War re-enactor. But along the way, Waverly’s feelings about the Confederate cause started to change. I got the chance to ask Waverley about this.

Ed Ayers:
And I wanted you to hear our interview because it comes to you with such a tone of sincerity, a sense of what was invested and lost in this change, and a sense of what’s still at stake as we think about how we remember the Civil War. And so, here’s my conversation with Waverley Adcock. It’s from the show Contested Landscape, Confederate Symbols in America.

Ed Ayers:
Waverly Adcock’s love of Civil War history dates back to the fifth grade. That was when his teacher pointed out that in 1862, Stonewall Jackson’s army marched down the very street where he lived.

Waverly Adcock:
I could imagine seeing those soldiers walking down our road with the dust flying and the muskets gleaming in the sunlight.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah, right.

Waverly Adcock:
And at that moment, I was absolutely hooked.

Ed Ayers:
As an adult, Adcock spent more than a decade living out that history as a Confederate re-enactor. He loved everything about it, the drills, setting up camp and the camaraderie. He even liked the hardtack. All that made him feel a powerful connection to his ancestors who had fought for the Confederacy.

Waverly Adcock:
Well, I’d say we were definitely fighting for home and hearth and for our state’s rights to protecting ourselves from that Yankee hoard that Lincoln had sent down. We didn’t feel it was right for him to try to tell one state how they should live.

Ed Ayers:
So to what extent did you consider slavery to be a cause of the war?

Waverly Adcock:
Well, I always felt that, yeah, slavery was one of the causes of the war, but you really want to wash it over. You just want to cover that up. You know it’s there, but man, you just don’t want to bring that up because you know it’s sensitive to a lot of people.

Ed Ayers:
But in 2013, Adcock started having second thoughts. It was during the anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg.

Waverly Adcock:
We had a reporter embedded with us at the 150th anniversary, which was a mega event, I think about the 11 or 12,000 re-enactors.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah, right.

Waverly Adcock:
And discussion started turning towards how do you feel about slavery and how you think your ancestors would’ve thought about it and things like that.

Ed Ayers:
Right, right.

Waverly Adcock:
And I started thinking about my perceptions of the war and was I really being accurate or was I really being honest with myself about why I portrayed a Confederate soldier. And it started putting a few seeds of doubt in my head.

Ed Ayers:
Right, right.

Waverly Adcock:
And then, last year about this time, I discovered, doing a little family research, I found out that one of my ancestors founded Augusta County. John Lewis.

Ed Ayers:
Wow.

Waverly Adcock:
And then I found out that his son, Thomas, who was my seventh grandfather, petitioned the court to have one of his slaves castrated.

Ed Ayers:
Oh, wow.

Waverly Adcock:
And that had a huge, huge effect on me. And I started seeing that this became very real. And that was kind of another eyeopener for me. It’s okay to love the South, but how do you celebrate the Confederate soldier and still deal with the sins of slavery? That’s a complex thing. I love the South. I love my ancestry.

Waverly Adcock:
It’s always been something that’s been beat into my head since I was a child, is that you revere these men and women that brought you to this place. But I can’t condone for their actions sometimes. Like Thomas Lewis, I can’t condone that. But I also realize that’s a sin that he has to deal with.

Ed Ayers:
But you know, a lot of your compatriots would have said, “I can tell you exactly how I’ll live with that. It’s heritage, not hate.”

Waverly Adcock:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). I disagree. I think it’s a heritage of hate. And my litmus test for people who say heritage not hate is, “Well, who was your ancestor? And what unit did he fight with?” I would say the vast majority of them cannot answer that question. And then I said, “Then that’s not a part of your heritage.” Then I tried to explain to them that the whole reason this war was fought was so, whether you call it state’s rights was for the right of people to own slaves, that states could determine how they controlled other people’s lives.

Ed Ayers:
So it’s the not hate part?

Waverly Adcock:
Yeah.

Ed Ayers:
Do you doubt that, that’s sincere?

Waverly Adcock:
I don’t think it’s sincere. I’m sure they love their heritage and I can’t disparage them that, but I think people are misguided when they say it’s not hate. There’s a lot of people out there who believe that the blacks are at fault for how the war ended.

Ed Ayers:
How was that?

Waverly Adcock:
Well, because you’re a poor Southern man, you fought for four years, you come back, everything you’ve known has been changed, taken from you. And now, you have to compete with a freed black man.

Ed Ayers:
Trying to [crosstalk 00:06:53]

Waverly Adcock:
And so there has to be some animosity there. There has to be some hatred.

Ed Ayers:
So once you sort of started down this road, it sounded like it kind of snowballed a little bit.

Waverly Adcock:
It did. It did. Every year at Memorial Day, we always did a Confederate Memorial at the Cemetery in Stanton. So for the last 13 years, I’ve always been asked to be a speaker. When I was speaking to the audience about the Confederate Battle Flag, I had to mention the fact that there’s much more to the South than just the Confederate Battle Flag, that we have a great culture of literature, of food and music and of course, whiskey. That to me, is much more important than basing your southerness on a piece of fabric.

Ed Ayers:
A few people in the crowd walked out, but most were polite. Adcock also wrote and op ed in his local newspaper. “We cannot pick our history” he said, “We must embrace the entire story of our past.”

Waverly Adcock:
And then three days later, we had the shootings in South Carolina. Then everything seemed to erupt. There was just so much vitriol and hatred being thrown back and forth. And I felt that I needed to make a statement about that. So using Facebook, I made my comment about how I felt the flag should be treated and that’s when things really got kind of hot.

Ed Ayers:
What sort of things did people say?

Waverly Adcock:
Well, there were some threats, but there was, for the most part, people just kept telling me how wrong I was because I said I felt it was appropriate to take the Confederate flag down in South Carolina. They interpreted that as that I wanted to take every flag down, that I felt that the flag no longer had a place.

Ed Ayers:
So why is it you think that the flag has become the symbol to both sides that’s so no compromise on the flag? There’s other stuff about the Civil War, but the flag. Why is that, you think?

Waverly Adcock:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Southerners place so much power in symbolism. And I think that flag was very important to the soldiers. Because that was the designation for their unit. I guess it wouldn’t be any different-

Ed Ayers:
Right. It was literally what they rallied around on a battle field.

Waverly Adcock:
Exactly. They rallied to that flag. But it should only feel important to those soldiers. Why have we embraced it today? That people are willing to cause physical violence on other people because of that flag that they have no connection to aside from that their great, great, great grandfather carried it.

Ed Ayers:
And as we’ve seen, the Confederate Battle Flag has spread to lots of places where it’s very unlikely that somebody’s great, great grandfather carried. Right?

Waverly Adcock:
Exactly. Yeah.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah. So what has this meant for your reenacting?

Waverly Adcock:
It means I have retired from reenacting. I’ve taken something that I’ve loved and done for 13 years and had to walk away from it completely.

Ed Ayers:
That’s got to come with some sense of loss, right?

Waverly Adcock:
It is a huge sense of loss. It means walking away from a lot of friends and walking away from a lot of weekends spent in camaraderie with these people.

Ed Ayers:
Say, you originally got into reenacting because you felt a connection with your ancestors. Do you feel less of a connection with them now that you’ve made this break?

Waverly Adcock:
No, I still feel a strong connection to my ancestors. I think we as human beings make a lot of mistakes. We do things that we regret, but I think sometimes we learn and we grow from these things. And I think my ancestors are just like me, you know? I’m sure maybe they had these epiphanies at some point, maybe some they didn’t.

Ed Ayers:
That they could look around, they could see the reality too?

Waverly Adcock:
I think so.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah.

Waverly Adcock:
I think so. I think they would probably be more proud of me for standing up for my convictions, then to just go along with the crowd.

Ed Ayers:
Waverley Adcock is a former Confederate re-enactor from Whitehall, Virginia.