You will like these observations very much, especially the last part.
His accent is a mystery to me. It doesn’t sound like the Virginia accents I heard in Northern Virginia during the 1950s and 60s, which were much more exaggeratedly Southern. He speaks almost like a television announcer; and possibly did do speaking tours in his life due to his experiences. In his voice, I hear traces of Scotland and England;, and the emphasis, tone and phrasing similar to that which audiences heard in the first “talkie” movies of the 1920s and 1930s.
He sounds like he came from a good family, but middle class, not planters; and his story reveals he was very involved in his schooling.
That was the old Virginia accent. It changed after the Civil War. Maybe it was the Upcountry changing the Lowland accent, or maybe it came up from the Deep South as Virginians wanted to sound more “Southern.” Lowland and City people whose speech sounded more like British English before the war, may have tried to sound more “country” after the war because that was more “Southern.”