Best of BackStory

The Time Ed Ayers Marched Into Richmond

02.21.20

As BackStory moves towards the end of its production, we’ve asked our hosts to select memorable moments from the show that we’re publishing as episodes once per month.

A founding host of the show, Ed Ayers has had hundreds of conversations on a huge variety of topics. But some of his favorite BackStory moments touched on anniversaries and events related to his own field in American history: slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

So on this best of BackStory, Ed presents three of his favorite interviews from his time on the show. You’ll take a deep dive into what the Confederacy means today, and learn about the newly opened Civil War Museum. Then, you’ll hear tape from a BackStory live show at the 150th anniversary of the liberation of Richmond, Virginia.

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Segments

The Seeds of Doubt

Former Civil War re-enactor and dyed-in-the-wool Southerner Waverly Adcock tells Ed Ayers why he changed his mind about his heritage.

American Civil War; Civil War reenactment; Confederate States of America (confederacy); ancestry

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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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.

A New Vision

Ed speaks to Christy Coleman the Chief Executive Officer of the new museum about the challenges of explaining the Civil War to 21st century visitors.

American Civil War; American Civil War Museum; museums

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers:
Throughout my time at BackStory, we’ve helped celebrate the opening of museums and commemorate important Civil War anniversaries. In other words, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about public history. These next two stories touch on the themes of historical memory and presentation.

Ed Ayers:
In this first segment, I travel to Richmond, Virginia for the opening of the brand new American Civil War Museum in May of 2019. The museum’s goal, is to tell an inclusive and balanced version of the Civil War. But that’s a tall order for an event that’s one of the most contentious topics in American history. I spoke with Christy Coleman, the museum CEO about the challenges of explaining the Civil War to 21st century visitors.

Ed Ayers:
So I have a personal investment in this story, I worked with Christy for seven years. I was founding chairman of the board, she was one of the CEOs, as we fused two museums, one, the museum of the Confederacy, which had been around for a hundred years. And another the brand new American Civil War Center, which was trying to tell the story from a more inclusive perspective.

Ed Ayers:
We had to build a new building, merge two boards, get the city along with it, and raise almost $50 million. So it was an interesting journey. But what this means is that when I spoke with Christy a few days before the museum opened, we were both filled with a sense of expectation and accomplishment, but a certain anxiety. After so much investment in such a place, would people actually like this museum?

Ed Ayers:
So here’s my conversation with Christy Coleman from the show, The Civil War in the 21st century, a New Museum Marks an Old Conflict. Christy Coleman is one of the most extraordinary museum curators in the country. As an African American woman, tasked with creating a new museum of the Civil War, she needs vision and diplomatic skills of plenty. And she told me she had a very early, very visceral immersion in Southern history.

Ed Ayers:
At Colonial Williamsburg we’re talk-

Christy Coleman:
This was at Colonial Williamsburg, yes. A summer job as a character interpreter, is what they were called.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah.

Christy Coleman:
And it was portraying a person of the past. Her name was Rebecca. She was an enslaved young woman about my age. I mean, they had to find somebody for me. And she was the property of John Blair. And the premise behind her story was that he was sick and dying and it was creating anxiety because young Rebecca didn’t know what was going to happen to her if he died.

Ed Ayers:
Wow. That’s a pretty heavy debut as an acting role, huh?

Christy Coleman:
It was. It was. So I did the summers, went away, worked at another museum, came back to Colonial Williamsburg, and eventually became director of African American Interpretations and Presentations. And one of the first actions in that role was the decision to re-enact an estate sale, which included the sale of slaves.

Ed Ayers:
Wow.

Christy Coleman:
And that’s the first time I was thrust into the public and the public relations and media spotlight when Colonial Williamsburg decided that I should be the face of this thing.

Ed Ayers:
That was very controversial at the outset.

Christy Coleman:
Yes.

Ed Ayers:
But it seemed that in some ways, you brought people along to understand why this would be a helpful scene?

Christy Coleman:
Absolutely, I mean, it was an extraordinarily important moment. Even though there was so much anxiety going into it, lots of controversy. People felt this isn’t appropriate to do in a museum setting in particular at colonial Williamsburg or whatever. But what it did in the post days of that, is that I received letters from academics around the nation, around the world really.

Christy Coleman:
Other museum colleagues, particularly those at historic houses and plantation sites contacted me and said, “If they can do that, we at least need to have an honest conversation about the enslaved populations at our sites.” And so that began what I think was sort of the birth of us finally knowing the stories about Hemings and the other 300 plus people that were at Monticello. And learning about the 300 plus people that were in Mount Vernon and so forth and so on. I mean, that was the moment.

Ed Ayers:
When was that moment?

Christy Coleman:
1994.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah.

Christy Coleman:
Which is ridiculous, right? 25 years ago. But that was the moment.

Ed Ayers:
There aren’t many topics in American history that are still as contentious as the Civil War. So what were the issues that Christy and her staff faced creating this new institution?

Christy Coleman:
We had to completely reimagine the meaning of the war. We had to start there. And then from that it’s like, okay, well if you’re imagining the meaning of it, why it matters in contemporary life, then that means you really have to examine it the way that people lived it. So we started saying, “Okay, well how did they live it?” And then it was like, “Well, they lived in constant chaos.”

Christy Coleman:
There was always changing choices. There was never knowing what was going to happen around the next corner. There was this period for some of is this my moment? Is freedom coming? For others, there was just the basic question of where should my allegiance lie? And we also quickly realized that this conflict impacted native nations.

Christy Coleman:
While it wasn’t a global crisis, it had global impact because of the trades.

Ed Ayers:
Certainly.

Christy Coleman:
We acknowledged that if we’re thinking about this as constant chaos and death and destruction at a scale that had never been seen before, you’re also dealing with trauma. It is a high emotion thing. So how do you tell that story in an impactful way? And so it meant to me, that it could no longer be a story that was just fixated on the military or the political.

Christy Coleman:
It had to intertwine again, the way that people lived it. And so that meant there was this constant flow of impact. Something that’s happening in the society is going to affect a military action. Something that the politicians do, is going to end up impacting what happens on the battlefield. And what the community is railing against or rallying for is going to impact political actions.

Christy Coleman:
So all of these factors are constantly in play and people are changing their minds constantly about their support for the war or its aims and so forth. So creating that kind of fracturous environment, actually became sort of a visual vernacular for us.

Ed Ayers:
So in many ways, what you’re trying to do is tell the story both on a global and a personal scale at the same time?

Christy Coleman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ed Ayers:
It’s not that we’re not telling the stories of military history and political history, but we’re weaving them together into the stories of abandonment and of death on a battlefield and of homesickness, and of political conflict, right? So how is a museum the place that that story can be told in a way it can’t be told anywhere else?

Christy Coleman:
Well, every time Pew Research Center does a study on trusted institutions, museums always rank number two behind libraries. Which means that’s a tremendous amount of power and importance to help communities navigate.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah.

Christy Coleman:
And I tell people all the time, “History has never ever been for the dead.” It is about our lived experience. It is about our environment. And so museums have the capacity through its collections, through its storytelling strength to help people make sense of the past and make that usable. And because we use a variety of learning techniques, whether it is the text on the wall that can never be too much, whether it’s the visual image that has an emotional impact, whether it is the artifact, there is something about the real thing that people really relate to and it helps.

Ed Ayers:
And we have a ton of the real thing.

Christy Coleman:
And we have a ton of the real thing. That when they see it, it brings even more truth. And I think that those sort of, that center, that vision and that understanding is what helps us be successful and has enabled us to really re-examine every single program and event that we’ve done through that lens.

Ed Ayers:
So what’s this new building like? What were its priorities?

Christy Coleman:
Well, the priority certainly was, be mindful of the historic fabric of the site. There are original buildings here and there are industrial artifacts buried in the ground. I mean, we have tunnels and canals and all kinds of things that dot this nine acre site.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah, this is one of the largest industrial sites in the United States at the time.

Christy Coleman:
Absolutely. And we were also concerned what we would find when we started digging.

Ed Ayers:
So you’ve invested so much in this for so long.

Christy Coleman:
Yeah, yeah.

Ed Ayers:
Now you’re waiting just days until the world shows up.

Christy Coleman:
Yep.

Ed Ayers:
What do you want them to take away from this experience?

Christy Coleman:
I want them to be awed and inspired. Look, this thing is beautiful. It’s beautiful. It’s impactful. From the moment you walk through the doors of the new building, you know you’re in someplace different. Because immediately, you see the honoring of the past. Because we built this building around a ruin of the original Foundry here.

Ed Ayers:
So what if you’re a relatively recent arrival to America, you don’t really feel any investment in this story. Why in the world would you come to the American Civil War museum?

Christy Coleman:
Because as soon as you walk through the door, and not only would you potentially see people of your ancestral ethnic group, but you would also immediately begin to understand just how much this particular conflict and its aftermath impacts American life. You will begin to recognize whether it’s an ideologies, whether it is the way sort of American culture, particularly political and social culture evolves. You will see it. It will be very apparent to you.

Christy Coleman:
Anyone that wants to understand America and who and what she is, will get a glimpse of that because of this conflict. And let’s not forget, I mean the American Civil War was an attempt at a birth of a new freedom, but it is the saving of a Republic, it is the saving of an idea. And that, I think is inescapable.

Ed Ayers:
Christy Coleman was the chief executive officer of American Civil War Museum in Richmond. She’s now executive director at the Jamestown Yorktown Foundations.

Richmond is a Hard Road to Travel

At a live performance marking the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Union troops in the capital of the Confederacy, Ed, Peter, and Brian discuss how the memory of Richmond’s fall has changed, and take questions from the audience.

1865; African-American soldiers; American Civil War; Richmond; USCT

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers:
Finally, I want to take you back to April 3, 1865. On that day, Union soldiers marched into Richmond, Virginia and captured the Confederacy’s capital city. This momentous occasion set off a chain of events that shaped everything from the end of the Civil War to the creation of a lost cause mythology.

Ed Ayers:
In 2015, BackStory took part in a live show commemorating the 150th anniversary of the city’s liberation. It featured myself, Brian Balogh and former BackStory host Peter Onuf. We also got some help from Tony Field, the shows senior producer at the time. This day was an important one for Richmond. A lot of people, including myself, had been working for five years to have Richmond remember the Civil War, remember emancipation in a fuller way than it was frankly anywhere else in the United States.

Ed Ayers:
We felt a special responsibility having been the capital of the Confederacy and the center of the domestic slave trade. The governor of Virginia gave us the state Capitol and its grounds to help remember that day. United States colored troops re-enactors marched up the same street that black troops had marched up in April 1865, before they were put to work putting out the flames that the Confederates had set as they fled Richmond.

Ed Ayers:
BackStory was honored to have the opportunity to participate in this program. We were given a large room in the Virginia State Capitol, set up for a question and answer period and the room was filled with people who wanted to talk about what this day meant for Richmond, for Virginia and for the country. Brian and Peter and I were delighted to have a chance to answer some questions.

Ed Ayers:
In the clip I’m about to share with you, we play and discuss two short recordings before transitioning to an audience question and answer session. Brian starts us off in this segment. It appeared in the episode 1865: United States of Uncertainty.

Brian Balogh:
This next clip of tape that we’re going to hear gets at, I think a very familiar and common trope that has been used many times in the past. This is John Boudreau and he had many ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. And when our producer caught up with him, he was wearing a Confederate battle flag as a lapel pin, and our producer asked him about it.

John Boudreau:
It’s heritage, not hate. I love the South. I love the South. And if we understand the context in which we look at those symbols of our heritage, then I don’t think anybody should have a problem with that. The battle flag is not a political statement, it’s a soldier’s flag. It’s not a symbol of hate. I don’t express it that way. That’s a part of the South to me that needs to have been left behind way more than 150 years ago.

Peter Onuf:
Well, that I think encapsulates the traditional view and that is everybody’s got a good war that they can remember. Heritage, not hate. It’s a nice turn of phrase. The idea that Wars could take place and we could reenact them and somehow the hate would disappear, would not be part of the memory that we’re sustaining. It’s a hard one for me to get my mind around.

Peter Onuf:
And I think that John was testifying there certainly identifies with and loves his region. This is the meaning of patriotism, if you go back into the 18th century and before. Its a connection to the crown, to the country. You love your country and what could be more precious to you than your country. But what is the South? And I’d only suggest that something like the idea of a team, this is a totalizing concept.

Peter Onuf:
He knows what the South is. Well, there are many Souths and I think that’s the challenge for us. If there is going to be a South today, which is our challenge, not to recover a South of yesterday. How can that South of today bring together the people who actually live here? I’m sorry I got so loud.

Ed Ayers:
No, that’s the paradox. I mean, I believe him when he says he hates no one. I believe this is what he means. But the idea of heritage as like a big treasure chest that you can sort of rifle through and take out the parts that you like and call that your heritage is very convenient. Instead, people who’ve inherited things know you inherit debt as well as you inherit the silverware.

Ed Ayers:
That you don’t just get the things that you want, you get the mistakes that your ancestors made. And I think that what the challenge that folks like John find is that he says, “I look in my own heart. I don’t hate anybody, but I can’t understand why other people can’t just accept that that’s the case. And the fact that this symbol has been used in such hurtful and dangerous and threatening, deadly ways, I just asked them to ignore it.” And it just seems too much to ask anybody.

Peter Onuf:
I think in that slip, if it was a slip, we should have gotten over this business of hating when we celebrate the Confederacy, but he’s implicitly admitting that that has been what the Confederacy has stood for. He’s telling us it shouldn’t have to stand for that. Well, how’s that going to happen until we come to terms with what the Confederacy was?

Ed Ayers:
Part of the challenge is what other symbol would you use to show that you are a proud southerner? That you love the place where you live.

Peter Onuf:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ed Ayers:
And I think that what you hear, there’s a kind of a pain and confusion, “Well, everybody else gets to be proud of where they’re from. Why don’t we get that?” And I think that-

Peter Onuf:
No, I’m from new England and I’m not proud. I’m full of conviction of original sin. Okay. And I just want to tell you, I’m sorry. Okay.

Ed Ayers:
On behalf of the rest of the nation we accept.

Brian Balogh:
I think as we go on, play a few more clips from our producers, I think you’ll see glimpses of this newer picture. It’s a picture of an old story, but these newer interpretations that are beginning to appear and really make an impact on some of the folks who are walking around over the last couple of days. Tony, why don’t we listen to the one from Roz Faines, she’s an African American woman who is talking here about how excited she was to see the United States Colored Troops March in to Richmond reenacting something that I’m sure was not part of the commemoration 50 years ago.

Roz Faines:
The previous picture was slaves marching across the 14th street bridge or being marched across from North Carolina. So we can be active in knowing that we helped bring about the ending of slavery. And for African Americans, that’s very, very important. I’m sure we have a lot of school children that don’t realize the active part that African Americans played in the war.

Ed Ayers:
It really was touching today to see the USC team marching in, followed by men and women from Fort Lee. And to see that continuity demonstrated. And to hear Major General Weitzel read the words he actually said out there, in which they recognize in this moment, that they are changing the view of the world and making people understand. “Not only did you free these 30,000 people” he said, “But you have demonstrated to the world that black men have fought to make this nation free.”

Ed Ayers:
And I think, in all honesty, if you’d asked people in Richmond three years ago, who set the fire? They would assume that it was the Yankee soldiers. And who put it out? They would have assumed somehow there were still Confederates here even though they fled. And if you told anybody that it was African American soldiers who walked in here and put the fire out, I just don’t think they would have known that.

Ed Ayers:
If you know that simple fact, the entire history of Richmond looks different.

Brian Balogh:
We concluded our program at the state Capitol in Richmond by taking a few questions from the audience. Here’s a little bit of our exchange.

Rob Nelson:
I’m Rob Nelson, so the question is, I could frame a couple of ways. The bicentennial, looking forward 50 years when you’re all dead, hopefully, cross my fingers.

Ed Ayers:
Thank you for that.

Rob Nelson:
I am there. Do you have-

Ed Ayers:
You don’t have to hope Rob, I will be dead in 50 years.

Rob Nelson:
Yeah, yeah. What would your dream for what that bicentennial would look like? Another way of putting that might be like if you’re thinking about your counterpart 50 years from now planning the bicentennial events in 2061, 2065, any advice you’d give them? Like if they’re digging out this recording at some point?

Ed Ayers:
Fortunately, we have a guy who lives in the 21st century. What’s it going to be like in 50 years, Brian?

Brian Balogh:
I can tell you what I hope it’s like. I hope we are not as surprised to discover the story of the role of African Americans in the Civil War. Because that has become a basic part of the story. And I hope in many ways, that we treat it and Peter may push back here, I’m stealing a bit of his thunder. I hope that we treat it a little bit more like we treat the Revolutionary War.

Brian Balogh:
In other words, it’s not in some ways as big a deal because it’s not addressing current problems as much 50 years from now. And by that, I mean current racial problems. I think one of the reasons that this remarkable commemoration, and I’ll go ahead and say it, celebration, has so much energy, is because these questions of racial tension in the United States have not gone away.

Brian Balogh:
And so I really hope that’s not the central focus 50 years from now because I believe that will be one indication that those issues really have gone away to a much greater degree than today.

Ed Ayers:
I just have one final comment about that. The trick is going to be that we never forget the visceral suffering of slavery and of the war itself. One danger of thinking of the war a two different teams is that we forget just how much profound suffering America inflicted on itself, sort of unintentionally. Thank goodness slavery ended as a result, but that would not have been known at the beginning.

Ed Ayers:
So the trick is going to be simultaneously to forget and to remember.

Rob Nelson:
Yeah, that’s good.

Ed Ayers:
And I think that’s the challenge of all history.

Brian Balogh:
Peter, I think we’re looking at the modern future.

Peter Onuf:
This is future, right?

Brian Balogh:
For our last question, I can’t think of a better young man. What’s your name?

Evan:
My name is Evan [crosstalk 00:34:25].

Brian Balogh:
Hi, Evan.

Evan:
My question is when Abraham Lincoln came here, did he come here guarded or unguarded?

Brian Balogh:
That’s a great question. I’m going to defer to our Civil War historian for that.

Peter Onuf:
Yeah.

Ed Ayers:
I’ll tell you this, Evan. It kind of scary to think about. So he’d been down the river, Hopewell. And when he heard that Richmond was falling and he took a big boat up the James, but it couldn’t get very far because of obstructions. And so they put him in a big rowboat. I’m not kidding. And with soldiers who rowed him, and he did have his big hat on and he was always six-foot-five or whatever. What do you think? Would that be very protected in a rowboat in the middle of the river with that on the other side?

Peter Onuf:
No, don’t think so.

Ed Ayers:
And then they landed not far from here and nobody knew they were coming. And so they just get out and walked through the city, all over the city. I mean, walked literally right here on his way to the White House of the Confederacy. He goes up and sits in Jefferson Davis’ chair to. It’s sort of like, all right. So since it turned out okay, we can be happy because he was surrounded by all the people who just the day before had been held in slavery.

Ed Ayers:
And now they were able to come up and some of them called him Father Abraham. They knew that without him to help hold the United States together, that they wouldn’t be there today. We all know he didn’t have much longer to live after that, right? It’s ironic isn’t it? That he can come and walk around the former capital of the Confederacy and survive, but can’t go to the theater just a few days later.

Ed Ayers:
So he was not protected and it tells you a lot about what kind of man he was that he wanted to experience what so many people had suffered for, for so long to bring to an end.

Brian Balogh:
Well, I want to thank you all for joining us today. This has been a very special day for me and thank you for helping us make it so special.

Ed Ayers:
Thanks everybody.

Ed Ayers:
That was an excerpt of a live event that BackStory hosted in April 2015 in Richmond, Virginia. The event commemorated the start of emancipation in the former capital of the Confederacy.

Ed Ayers:
That’s going to do it for us today. Thanks for joining me in this look back at some of my favorite moments from BackStory. I’d love to know what you thought about these segments or what some of your favorite BackStory moments have been. You’ll find this at BackStoryRadio.org or send an email to BackStory@Virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio.

Ed Ayers:
BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

Speaker 11:
Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.