Stonewall Jackson's statue by D. H. Anderson, 1865. Source: Library of Congress

Contested Landscape

The Battle over Confederate Monuments

06.16.17

Communities from New Orleans to Charlottesville, Virginia have been debating the presence of Confederate monuments. On this episode of BackStory, Ed, Nathan and Brian discuss when and why many of the nation’s Confederate statues were erected, and what they stood for. They’ll examine the many meanings of the Confederate flag and hear a Civil War re-enactor take a closer look at his Southern heritage.

Civil War Memory; Confederate States of America (confederacy); Confederate flag; Confederate monuments

Segments

Monument Avenue

Historian Maurie McInnis and Brenda Stevenson, and journalist Michael Paul Williams weigh in on the history and controversy of the Confederate monuments along Richmond, Virginia’s Monument Avenue.

American Civil War; Confederate monuments; Confederate soldiers; Lost Cause of the Confederacy

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Speaker 1: Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining David Foundations.

Nathan Connolly: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Back Story.

Ed Ayers: Welcome to Back Story, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly. Each week, Brian, Ed, our colleague JoAnn Freeman and I, all historians, take a topic and explore its history.

Ed Ayers: Now, Brian, Nathan, let me take you back to 1890 in Richmond, Virginia. A large bronze statue of Confederate Robert E. Lee had just arrived from France. Now, this was 25 years after the end of the Civil War. The statue was transported on a boat up the James River.

Maurie McInnis: And then was hauled to the location and in the kind of ironies that you can only find in the South, mostly hauled now freed African American workers, who were the major laborers in the City of Richmond.

Ed Ayers: This is historian Maurie McInnis. She says the statue’s arrival caused a real stir.

Maurie McInnis: And the day of the unveiling was an enormous event in Richmond. The Capital of the Confederacy, tens of thousands of former Confederate soldiers returned to the city, dressed in their uniforms. There were parties and parades and speeches and events that consumed the city. Estimates were that more than 150,000 came to Richmond for the event.

Ed Ayers: In the decades that followed, more monuments appeared on what is now called Monument Avenue, a five mile long leafy boulevard, lined with ornate mansions.
In 1907, city leaders erected memorials to the Confederate leaders, Jeb Stuart and Jefferson Davis. Stonewall Jackson joined them in 1919 and a statue to Naval Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury was erected in 1929. And every time a new Confederate statue went up, White Richmonders flooded the streets to celebrate.

Maurie McInnis: It’s not just the presence of the work of art itself. It’s the activities that took place around the work of art. And it’s in those activities that the real meaning of the monuments were established.

Ed Ayers: Well, tell us about those meanings.

Maurie McInnis: Yeah, so these reunions that took place were martial reunions, these were military events. Former Confederate soldiers would dress up in uniform, the Calvary would be on horseback, bands would march in the front playing the music of The Civil War, flags were flying.

Ed Ayers: Their old officers showed up and gave them speeches?

Maurie McInnis: Exactly.

Ed Ayers: Yeah.

Maurie McInnis: And that sort of performance of Southern, White, military strength, both gave that meaning to those monuments, but also reminded African Americans in the City of Richmond of the power of the White majority.

Ed Ayers: Defeated what they had then.

Maurie McInnis: Supposedly defeated, but I think as the years went on, that defeat seemed less and less a reality.

Ed Ayers: White Southerners may have lost the war, but many refused to admit that they had been wrong. When powerful White leaders put up the monuments, they also popularized the idea of the lost cause.

Maurie McInnis: And there are a few basic kind of tenants to the narrative that gets written to explain the defeat in The Civil War. And one of the most important is that The Civil War was fought for state’s rights. And that the men who fought were brave and gallant. And they were not defeated on the battlefield, but instead they were overwhelmed by the greater might and numbers and money of the Union Army.

Ed Ayers: This lost cause narrative went hand in hand with the assertion of White Supremacy in the South.
Two years after The Civil War, the Federal Government began radical reconstruction in the South. Black men would vote, hold office, and help write new constitutions for their states. White Southerners fought against these changes in every way they could. And eventually, reconstruction collapsed.
Decades later, White Southern state leaders rewrote those Constitutions from reconstruction to strip the vote from African Americans and to create an oppressive system of segregation.
This is the political background, McInnis says, for the construction of Richmond’s Civil War monuments.

Maurie McInnis: I would argue that in many ways, though they are monuments to The Confederacy, they really tell us much more about the history of Jim Crow South of the desire by White Richmonders to reassert their social and political superiority.

Nathan Connolly: City leaders around the country have been debating the presence of their own Confederate monuments. Leaders in New Orleans have just taken down statues of Confederate leaders. In Charlottesville, Virginia, the City Council voted to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee and rename the park where it stands. But that effort has been challenged in court.

Brian Balogh: Today on the show, we’re gonna revisit stories from an episode we did in November 2015 about Confederate symbols in America. We’ll look at the monuments, statues, and the famous Confederate flags that got the American landscape. We’ll examine the history behind these symbols and we’re gonna explore what they mean to us today. We’ll also ask how they fit in America’s future.

Ed Ayers: But first, let’s return to that tree lined boulevard in Richmond, with its seven Confederate statues.

Michael W.: They sit without irony.

Ed Ayers: This is Michael Paul Williams, a columnist for The Richmond Times Dispatch.

Michael W.: People must visit Richmond and say, “Don’t they know they lost?” When Robin Williams came, did you hear what he said? He drove down Monument Avenue and he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite so many second place trophies in my life.”

Ed Ayers: Williams grew up in segregated Richmond and lived through the city’s racial turmoil in the 1960’s. He says that some of these tensions played out on Monument Avenue.

Michael W.: There was actually a movement in the 1960’s to expand Monument Avenue by seven additional Confederate monuments, if you can imagine that.

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Michael W.: It wasn’t clear exactly who would be honored, and in fact, I think at least one Times Dispatch or news leader editorial, questioned, “Well, where will we get these seven additional funds?” But just the idea that this was, even in the late 1960’s, in the midst of The Civil Rights Movement, that this was a potential insult to the African American community, did not seem to occur to anyone.

Ed Ayers: So, do you think was a reaction to The Civil Rights Movement? This is sort of the White South playing offense?

Michael W.: I could not dispel that, because frankly what happened on Monument Avenue was a reaction to the first reconstruction.

Ed Ayers: Right.

Michael W.: So, it stands to reason that there would be a reaction after The Civil Rights Movement and the approval of the Civil Rights Act and The Voting Rights Act, and the sense that something is slipping away.

Ed Ayers: The statues of Monument Avenue have stood untouched for a century. But in 1996, the city did add a statue of African American tennis champion, Arthur Ashe, who grew up in Richmond.
Two years ago, Michael Paul Williams wrote a column, saying it was time to remove the Confederate Statues on Monument Avenue. Williams was moved to publish that editorial after a White Supremacist murdered eight African American people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Michael W.: It was kind of an aha moment. We can’t, as a nation, wade through the contradiction of a Confederate imagery in the public sphere and profess to be a freedom loving nation.

Ed Ayers: Williams think the monuments belong in a museum. He would like to see new monuments of African American heroes, such as abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner, who led a failed rebellion of enslaved people.

Michael W.: If you’re gonna tell the entire story of Monument Avenue and Confederacy and Virginia history, you’ve got to include those who fought for their freedom, the oppressed and enslaved who fought for the freedom. One man’s lead of a bloody slavery revolt is another man’s freedom fighter. And if we’re gonna value life, we’ve got to acknowledge that life is equal and we have to add balance to the story.

Brenda S.: And the South is much more than just The Confederacy.

Ed Ayers: This is UCLA historian, Brenda Stevenson. She grew up in Virginia during the era of segregation.

Brenda S.: When you look around in the South and you see the monuments and the highways and the schools and the namings that I’m saying of these events, you would think that from 1607 until 2015, that this was The Confederacy. Not just from 1861 to 1865.

Ed Ayers: Stevenson says debates over Confederate monuments aren’t just about the past; they’re also about the present.

Brenda S.: And so, within the context of African Americans feelings as if economically we are taking steps back, within the criminal justice system that we are taking steps backwards, and so this debate about the Confederate monuments really comes within this really broader context.

Michael W.: And those monuments are a manifestation of the symbolism that created the world we live in today.

Ed Ayers: Michael Paul Williams is a columnist for The Richmond Times Dispatch. We also heard from historians Brenda Stevenson at UCLA and Maurie McInnis at The University of Texas at Austin.
Hey, Nathan, Brian, will you guys help me out on something?

Should They Stay or Go?

Ed, Nathan and Brian talk about what to do with Confederate statues, and how we should think about them.

Confederate monuments; monuments; white supremecy

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Nathan Connolly: Yeah, sure.

Brian Balogh: You bet.

Ed Ayers: Okay. Now, this topic is pretty close to things that I have to talk about a lot, so let me ask you this: What are your thoughts about what we might best do with the Confederate monuments that are all around the country?

Nathan Connolly: Well, I think right off the top, obviously these monuments continue to be rightfully so, kind of lightening rods for contemporary debates. And for my money, I feel it’s really important to be able to have an honest conversation about when these statues were build, what they represented at the time they were built, and what exactly people are hanging onto when they’re hanging onto a statue of Robert E. Lee or a Stonewall Jackson, right?
I mean, I also study this period because it’s a period of White Supremacy, right? It’s the period of Jim Crow. And I think a lot of people presume that this is only a 19th Century problem and don’t acknowledge that it’s a 20th Century problem. But it’s-

Ed Ayers: Yeah, and with all those statues that were put up in the 20th Century, now that I think about it.

Nathan Connolly: No, but I actually do believe that it’s important to think about statues and what they represent and what would it mean to put up for instance, a monument to slavery, a monument to reconstruction, a monument to The Civil Rights Movement, at every site where there currently stands a monument to a Confederate General. And let’s see what that conversation then sparks, right?
Because I think part of what the problem is, is that there is a singularity to a monument or a statue. When in fact, those statues are sites of conflict and contestation. So, let the monuments reflect that debate.

Brian Balogh: I would give similar advice in even simpler terms. My view of history is that is additive. It’s about adding not subtracting. And so, because Monument Avenue has created its own history, in essence, a commemoration of White Supremacy, I think it’s really essential that we add back in those tens of thousands of voice that were muted at the very time that those statues were being celebrated and that the regime of Jim Crow was being created, at the expense of African Americans.

Ed Ayers: I wonder what you would say to people who celebrate the speech of Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, who gave this eloquent speech about why he had overseen the removal of the three statues there. To many people, that’s the new baseline. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re going to get right with this history. What would you say to them?

Brian Balogh: I understand that, Ed, and I understand that thinking, but I disagree with it, because if we remove the symbols of some of the greatest oppression in our history, it becomes very hard to explain why so much racism endures today.

Nathan Connolly: I thought a lot about this a couple years ago when I was asked the trustees at Princeton University to consider Woodrow Wilson, and whether or not to put forward another kind of monument to take Wilson’s name down. And I was of the mind then to think about erecting a monument to the US occupation of Haiti, which Wilson helped orchestrate.

Brian Balogh: Right.

Nathan Connolly: Or to reconstruction, which Wilson was clearly opposed to, as a way of kind of counterbalancing the weight of that one great man.
The thing about those kinds of even conversational approaches, and again, this is me feeling very ambivalent about it still, is that rarely does the secondary marker really compete at the scale of that first monolithic figure, right? So, it’s a struggle, honestly, for me to think through this. And I tend to wonder what would it look like to open up the commemorative space of the monument itself to public art projects? What would it take to possibly think about the fact that these monuments, as artifacts of Jim Crow, what would it mean to basically juxtapose Jim Crow iconography with some of that stuff, right?

Ed Ayers: Right.

Nathan Connolly: To literally put a Whites Only sign, or to mark them as being a feature of segregation. I mean, clearly, they are indeed products of a very specific moment, trying to settle very specific battles.

Ed Ayers: As it turns out, The Richmond Times Dispatch did a poll, non-scientific, asking people what they thought about what should be done with the statues and people could vote as many times as they wanted to, so it was not really a scientific sample. But 80-some thousand votes said that nothing should be done with them, 60-some thousand votes said they should be taken down, less than 1% said they needed to know more about the issue.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

Ed Ayers: So, people seem to have really settled this issue in their own minds. But what’s not been settled is the legal, political, class, racial, geospatial context of which all of these things are going to be decided. So, people are gonna have to keep thinking about this issue whether they want to or not. And I think both of you just gave us new ways to think about them.

Nathan Connolly: It’s time to take a short break. When we get back, the many lives of The Confederate Battle Flag. But first, a word from today’s sponsor.

Flags of Our Forefathers

American Civil War Museum historian John Coski walks Ed Ayers through the evolution of the Confederate flag’s design—from the original “Stars and Bars” to the “rebel flag” we know today, and its long, twisty path to becoming a pop culture icon.

American Civil War; Confederate States of America (confederacy); Confederate flag

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: We’re back, talking about the role of Confederate symbols in American society. We’re gonna turn now to the history of the Confederate flag, but it’s probably not the one that you’re picturing.

John Coski: There was an amazing variety of Confederate flags, plural.

Ed Ayers: This is John Coski, author of The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem, and historian at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. For full disclosure, I should mention here that I’m Chair of the Board at that museum. Anyway, I met John at the museum, where it is true, there is an incredible array of Confederate flags.

John Coski: One thing about Confederate flags for people who study 1860’s Confederate flags, there were lots and lots of them.

Ed Ayers: The story of the flag or flags began in 1861. That’s when The Confederate Congress formed a committee to solicit designs for a national flag, one that could rally the South to its cause. Some fought for a design that was entirely new and distinctively Southern, such as a Palmetto tree. But most Confederates preferred something that looked familiar.

John Coski: White Southerners of the Confederacy in 1861 still thought of themselves as Americans, very much as citizens of The United States, who helped form The United States. And they did not want to yield to The Yankees the symbols of the once United Nation. So, they needed to be weaned, if you will, from the symbols of the old United States.

Ed Ayers: The committee ended up picking a design that looked a lot like The United States flag. Coski showed me the design. 13 white stars on a blue canton, in the upper left hand corner. Instead of 13 red and white stripes, however, there are just three.

John Coski: Three big bars; red, white, and red, from top to bottom.

Ed Ayers: One of the flags that was rejected was designed by South Carolina Congressman, William Porcher Miles. His design eventually became the Confederate flag that we think of today. A red field, a cross of blue stripes, filled with white stars. Miles was furious with the committee’s choice.

John Coski: Miles could not believe that his own nation and his own committee would choose that flag because it resembled the stars and stripes, and in so many words told them that, “You’ll regret it,” and they did.

Ed Ayers: It turns out that choosing a flag in wartime was a complicated business. Now typically, national flags are also battle flags.

John Coski: And of course, a battle flag by definition was supposed to be something distinctive that allowed leaders on the field to maneuver their troops, identify and distinguish friend from enemy.

Ed Ayers: Imagine you’re a soldier, facing enemy fire. You can barely hear your orders over the gunfire. You can’t see through the smoke. But you do see flashes of color waving over the melee. Is that the flag of the enemy, heading straight for you?

John Coski: It was a dramatic moment to see these flags. And of course on the receiving end, it was scary as hell to see these units coming at you.

Ed Ayers: In an effort to strike at the morale of the enemy, you fire into the crowd, hoping to hit the flag bearer. But then you realize that you fired on your own troops, because your flag and your enemy’s flag are so hard to tell apart.

John Coski: And when you have two flags that look so much like each other, especially in this mode of battle, it defeated the purpose.

Ed Ayers: Fortunately, individual divisions of armies designed and carried their own flags. There was the first Florida Volunteer Division, Third Kentucky Mounted, Tenth Tennessee Irish Infantry, and on and on. Out of this profusion, William Porcher Miles’s flag was chosen as the battle flag for the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee’s army.

John Coski: The one that gave the South its most stunning victories and in the long run kept the South alive.

Ed Ayers: Lee’s success made Mile’s flag hugely popular throughout The Confederacy.

John Coski: The Confederate Nation, the populous saw in that flag not only the sacrifices of the men who fought under it, but the hopes for actually winning this war and achieving Confederate independence.

Ed Ayers: In 1863, the Confederate Congress incorporated the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia into the official flag of The Confederacy. At Mile’s request, the tilted blue cross and red background were placed in the upper left hand corner. The rest of the flag was white. Did no one point out that it looked like a flag of surrender at the time?

John Coski: Not at the time. It wasn’t until late 1864 that the voices rose more loudly to point out that it looks like a flag of surrender, which of course was a little too close to the truth about that time, as The Confederacy began to collapse. And it would be so nice for compromise today if we could say that flag was the flag of the solider and not the flag of a nation.

Ed Ayers: That’s exactly what today’s flag defenders say, that it’s for the soldier, not for The Confederacy. Here’s Jeff O’Cain, former head of The Sons of Confederate Veterans on NBC News two years ago. Now, this was when South Carolina took down the Confederate battle flag from its State House grounds. The flag had flown there for 54 years.

Jeff O’Cain: It’s a war memorial to honor 25,000 men. A quarter of the men in South Carolina died to protect this state.

Ed Ayers: But there’s a lot more to the story.

John Coski: It meant so much to those men who fought and marched under it, that emotional attachment that battle flags have. But because it was emblazoned on the national flag, it also did stand for The Confederate Nation. You cannot separate the two. There’s no way around it. There is no clean break between the flag of the soldier and the flag of the nation. And that’s not John Coski, historian, looking back. That is true because of the act of the Confederate leaders themselves.

Ed Ayers: But in the 150 years since The Civil War, the meaning of the Confederate battle flag has morphed. Coski says fights over the flag’s symbolism are rooted in a misunderstanding of its history.

John Coski: And for some people it is the history of the Confederate soldier on the battlefield. For others, it is the history of The Dukes of Hazzard. For others, it’s the history of a motorcyclist trying to make a statement about his independence. And for others, very clearly, it’s the experience of encountering that flag in the hands of people who meant to do them harm.

Ed Ayers: John Coski says that all these meanings depend on which part of the flag’s history you’re talking about.

John Coski: One thing about the evolution of the Confederate flag over time is that it’s not a substitution of meanings. It’s an accretion, an aggregation of meanings, one after another.

Ed Ayers: So, we’re going to chart those many meanings through, let’s call it, three acts in the flag’s evolution. Act one, a sacred artifact of war.

Maurie McInnis: The move towards that is already beginning in 1890.

Ed Ayers: This is historian Maurie McInnis. We heard from her earlier in the show. She says that after The Civil War, flags that had been flown in battle were locked up in The War Department in Washington. Some were controlled by heritage organizations, such as The United Daughters of the Confederacy. And these flags were only unfurled during solemn commemorative ceremonies, such as funerals, reenactments, and statue dedications.
Remember that towering bronze Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond? McInnis says that on the day it was unveiled in 1890 …

Maurie McInnis: The Confederate battle flag was on massive display. The city was overwhelmingly draped in the Confederate flag, Confederate music, Confederate uniforms.

Ed Ayers: Northern journalists in attendance were shocked to see so many flags being waved so passionately.

Maurie McInnis: Many of them were writing about the Flag of Treason, that they could not believe that the Flag of Treason was being almost worshiped as an idolatrous god.

Ed Ayers: The event, which lasted a week, didn’t escape the notice of African American journalists, either.

Maurie McInnis: And they too were so distressed at the reappearance of the Confederate flag. What was the meaning of this for them? Because at the time in 1890, they were still feeling fairly hopeful about their political futures and their inclusion in the citizenship.

Ed Ayers: Commemorations such as this troubled African Americans and Northerners, but the flag was rarely displayed outside of such formal events.
By the middle of the 20th Century, however, the flag started appearing in other places. And as that image spread, heritage organizations lost control of its meaning.

Brian Balogh: Which brings us to act two, college football.

John Coski: College teams seemed to be the best beginnings of proliferation.

Brian Balogh: Specifically, college students at Kappa Alpha, a fraternity formed at Washington and Lee University in 1970. This was just after Robert E. Lee died. The fraternity was founded as a heritage organization, and the flag was a symbol of Kappa Alpha pride.

John Coski: By the 1920’s Kappa Alpha was … Chapters around the South were using it in their college rituals.

Brian Balogh: When latter day members of Kappa Alpha were drafted in World War II, they brought along the Confederate flag. And that’s when they lost control over its meaning. Other soldiers adopted the flag as a symbol for all things White and Southern.
When Southern soldiers returned from the war and went to college under The GI Bill, they brought the flag to one of peace time’s most contested grounds: The Gridiron.
In 1947, Harvard’s football team traveled south to play The University of Virginia. UVA fans waved the flag of Southern Pride with gusto, as was their tradition. But this time, things were different.

John Coski: Harvard had an African American football player named Chester Pierce, a star football player.

Brian Balogh: Taking to the field, Pierce and his teammates looked up and saw a sea of Confederate battle flags, and rowdy students.

John Coski: And very widely in the Northern Press, it was assumed that this was some kind of gesture, if not a racist gesture. It was taunting of Chester Pierce with Confederate battle flags.

Brian Balogh: The team worried about Pierce’s safety and braced for racist threats. But according to Pierce, the game was pretty much like any other.

John Coski: And UVA stalwarts were very defensive in saying, “No, this has been part of our football tradition in recent years.”

Brian Balogh: Coski says in the late 1940’s, the flag’s meaning was ambiguous.

John Coski: And so, it was at a pivotal point in the flag’s history where it was … It anticipated a time in which the flag had a more sinister meaning. Even if the UVA fans who used that flag did not mean it in a sinister way, others were beginning to do so.

Nathan Connolly: Which brings us to act three in the flag’s afterlife: desegregation. In 1948, the Confederate flag’s more sinister meaning resurfaced. That was the year that The Democratic Party formally included Civil Rights in its platform. Now, some White Southerners protested and formed the State’s Rights Democratic Party, commonly referred to as The Dixiecrats.
That first convention in Birmingham, Alabama was awash in Confederate battle flags. They were carried into the convention by college students.

John Coski: So, there was a direct pipeline, if you will, from colleges already accustomed to use of the battle flag as a football symbol, for example, and part of collegiate life, to make it a very highly charged political symbol in The Dixiecrat Party.

Nathan Connolly: It would surprise no one that The Ku Klux Klan had also embraced the flag at this time. Today, it’s a common argument that the flag is only a racist symbol when it’s in their hands. But Coski points out that if Klansmen were the only ones using the flag as a symbol of hatred, it would be easier to ignore.
the trouble is …

John Coski: It wasn’t just The Klan. Almost every major and minor incident of The Civil Rights Era, ordinary White Southerners were using that flag to speak to their opposition to Civil Rights.

Nathan Connolly: Around this time, the Confederate battle flag became an embedded symbol of pop culture.

Brenda S.: The Confederate flag was everywhere. It wasn’t in the Black community, but as soon as you left the Black community-

Nathan Connolly: This is historian Brenda Stevenson, who we heard from earlier. She grew up in Virginia in the 1960’s as the country was struggling to integrate.

Brenda S.: And even when we integrated the schools, when we first came into contact with White children on a daily basis, Confederate flags were everywhere; in their lockers, they would draw them on their notebooks, shirts, T-shirts that had them, et cetera. And it was a great symbol, of course, of the Confederacy, and also of apartheid, of the racial apartheid we had all been living in.

Ed Ayers: It’s worth remembering that leaders of The Confederacy struggled to apply one meaning: the identity of a Confederate Nation to many flags throughout the war. Today, Americans have a different challenge: what to do with this one flag that has so many meanings.
Brenda Stevenson says that struggle is especially difficult, because so many people are so invested in the flag’s many meanings.

Brenda S.: There is a place for people whose ancestors were in The Confederacy, fought for The Confederacy. There is a place for that history in US History. It’s part of US History. But it has to be in conversation with the other heritages, even those that are oppositional, and particularly those that are oppositional to that Confederate heritage.

Ed Ayers: Brenda Stevenson is a historian at UCLA. Also helping us tell that story were John Coski, historian at The American Civil War Museum in Richmond, and Maurie McInnis, provost at The University of Texas at Austin.

Nathan Connolly: It’s time to take a short break. When we get back, a long time Confederate re enactor takes a closer look at his Southern heritage. But first, this quick message.

Confederate States of Mind

Multimedia producer Logan Jaffe talks with three Americans for whom the Confederate flag represents three very different things.

American Civil War; Confederate States of America (confederacy); Confederate flag

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Ed Ayers: Okay, Nathan. What do Princess Leia, James Brown, and Donald Trump all have in common?

Nathan Connolly: Okay, I got this. They all had an awesome 1970’s. Yeah? No. It’s the hair. We know them by their hair.

Ed Ayers: Well, I think we would give you credit for both of those, but as it turns out, hair is what we’re talking about today.

Nathan Connolly: All right.

Ed Ayers: Yes, they all have signature hairstyles, and their locks say something about who they are. I was wondering, have you ever had signature hair, Nathan?

Nathan Connolly: Absolutely not. I play it real straight.

Ed Ayers: You kept it close to the vest or-

Nathan Connolly: That’s right, close to the scalp. That’s right.

Ed Ayers: Well, if some of you are more interesting than Nathan on this front and if you wear your heart in your hair, we wanna know, what does your hairstyle say about you? How does your hair convey your identity? Or are you happy like Nathan, that it doesn’t?

Nathan Connolly: That’s right.

Ed Ayers: Send us a 30 second voice memo from your smartphone, to backstory@virginia.edu.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll hair some of your responses. No, air your responses on an upcoming show about the history of hair in America.

Brian Balogh: We’re gonna close this show today with a perspective that we don’t often hear. It’s the voice of someone who actually changed his mind.

Ed Ayers: Waverly Adcock’s love of Civil War history dates back to the 5th 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. 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 right to … Protecting ourselves from that Yankee horde that was coming, 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 11,000 or 12,000 reenactors. And the discussion started turning towards, “How do you feel about slavery? And how do you think your ancestors would have thought about it?”, and things like that.

Ed Ayers: 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.

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 is 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 affect 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? It’s a complex thing. I love the South, I love my ancestry. It’s always 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. 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 live with that.” It’s heritage, not hate.

Waverly Adcock: 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 say, “Then that’s not a part of your heritage.” Then I try 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 for people to own slaves, that states could determine how they controlled other peoples’ lives.

Ed Ayers: And 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. And I can’t disparage on 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 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 share-

Ed Ayers: Try to compete.

Waverly Adcock: Compete with a freed Black man. And so, there has to be some animosity there. There has to be some hatred.

Ed Ayers: So, once you started down this road, it sounds like it kind of snowballed a little bit?

Waverly Adcock: 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 that 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 an oped 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. And then everything seemed to erupt. There was just so much bigotry all 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 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 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 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 it that do you think?

Waverly Adcock: 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 think-

Ed Ayers: It was literally what they rallied around on the battlefield.

Waverly Adcock: Exactly, they rallied to that flag. But it should only feel important to those soldiers. Why have we embraced it? That 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 it.

Waverly Adcock: Exactly.

Ed Ayers: 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: So 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. I’m sure maybe they had these epiphanies at some point, and maybe some they didn’t.

Ed Ayers: But they could look around and 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, than to just go along with the crowd.

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

Nathan Connolly: So guys, I wanna actually make a confession and during the course of listening to Mr. Adcock’s interview, I’ve also had a change of mind, frankly. I’ve argued as recently as 20 minutes ago that we should have a multivocal approach to these kinds of monuments, markers right alongside statues of Robert E. Lee and the like, I’ve actually argued that in print relative to iconography around someone like Woodrow Wilson.
But the more I think about it and the more I place the origins of these kinds of monuments and markers, these really are Jim Crow monuments, right? The creation of Confederate statues in the 1890’s, the redrafting of state Constitutions disenfranchising African Americans, the 1940’s with the rolling out of The State’s Right Democratic Party, and again, other kinds of backlash. These really are Jim Crow monuments. They’re not really monuments of the Confederacy. And if you think about the kinds of signs that went up in the Jim Crow Era, Whites Only signs around water fountains, Colored Only signs in bus waiting rooms, all of that stuff had to come down for the country to move forward.
And it’s my sense now, I think quite clearly, that if we’re gonna have any chance at all of having a workable democracy, we have to take down these monuments to an earlier era. I mean, as a Black historian, as a reasonable Black man in America, I’m always encouraged to think about the other side. And in this case, even the feelings of those White Americans who might have a certain kind of emotional attachment to this kind of iconography, but I think we all have to really grow up frankly, and try to pull some of this stuff down, and really think about what it would mean to turn the page on the old Jim Crow order.

Brian Balogh: Well, Nathan I’m heartened that you’ve taken Ed’s point about all of us needing to learn more about this to heart, but I have to disagree with you on this. Which is to say that I haven’t changed my mind in the last 20 minutes. Yes, these monuments do represent the Jim Crow Era, and I think we all need to remember that Jim Crow Era.

Ed Ayers: It strikes me that Nathan pointed to a really important fact, that these statues are the product of a political process in which White people were the only ones who had access to power and to public places. We need to always remember that.
But the thing is now is the reason we’re having this conversation is that democracy has become more open. And sometimes people bemoan these kind of conflicts over the flags and these statues, but I believe this is democracy’s growing pains. This is what it looks like, I think, when more people have more say about what the symbols that represent us might look like. I think this is all good for us.

Nathan Connolly: That’s gonna do it for today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about American History. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter @backstoryradio. And if you liked the show, feel free to review it in Apple Podcasts. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh: This episode of Back Story was produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McCarthy, Nina Ernest, Emily Gadduck, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher.
Additional help came from Emma Greg, Courtney Spania, and Robin Glug. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorbur. Other music in our show came from Paddington Bear, Ketza, and Gizar. And thanks to the Johns Hopkins University studio in Baltimore.

Ed Ayers: Back Story is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. We’re a proud member of the Panoply Podcast Network.
Major support is provided by anonymous donors, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

Speaker 1: Brian Balogh is professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. JoAnn 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.
Back Story was created by Andrew Wyndham, for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Seeds of Doubt

Former Civil War re-enactor and dyed-in-the-wool Southerner Waverly Adcock talks Ed Ayers about his mixed feelings about the cause for which his ancestors fought.

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

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