Reimagining the Civil War: Connor Williams’s The Confederacy Myth Reframes the Nation’s Deadliest Conflict

What can Americans learn about a deeply divided country today by looking back at the Civil War that tore the nation apart in the past?

Historian Connor Williams answers that pressing question with a blistering historical exposé in his new book, The Confederacy Myth. The work forcefully reframes our understanding of the Confederacy, stripping away romanticized mythologies to reveal what it truly was: a relatively small, uncompromising insurrection of fanatics that plunged the nation into its most catastrophic war. Grounding his arguments in the most neutral and indisputable sources possible—including the American Battlefield Trust, the National Park Service, and the Encyclopedia Virginia—Williams has crafted a work that serves simultaneously as an eye-opening historical correction and a timely, sobering reminder of the ongoing duties of citizenship.

INTRODUCTION: VICTORY

"Acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances."

— Abraham Lincoln, March 1861

"There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war; only patriots—or traitors."

— Senator Stephen Douglas, April 1861

On April 4, 1865, an exhausted man walked cautiously through the smoking ruins of Richmond, Virginia.

Surrounding him stood thousands of other weary men, the hardened survivors of a brutal civil war that was finally entering its closing days. For four grueling years, more than a hundred thousand Confederate soldiers had died across the expanse of Virginia, desperately trying to defend the rebel capital from the United States Army. An equal number of United States soldiers—if not more—had perished trying to capture it. They had fallen side by side on the same blood-soaked fields, in Virginia towns as far off as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the storied Shenandoah Valley. They had clashed in places as agonizingly close to the capital as Petersburg, Mechanicsville, Cold Harbor, Gaines’ Mill, and Savage’s Station.

Across the entire nation, an estimated seven hundred thousand Americans ultimately lost their lives in the conflict. That devastating toll exceeded the combined fatalities of every other war the United States had ever fought before or would ever fight after.

Throughout it all, sustained by ferocious Confederate resistance, Richmond itself had remained largely unscathed by the direct destruction of warfare, even as the surrounding southern landscape crumbled into ruin. During the peak of the conflict, the city had swamped with Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men recovering in makeshift hospitals, and the administrative apparatus supporting the leadership of the insurrection. It had even endured a grueling, highly effective 292-day siege. Nevertheless, the structural integrity of the city endured remarkably well. In a region otherwise ravaged by rebellion, Richmond had miraculously escaped the physical calamities that engulfed almost everywhere else—right up until the very end.

Yet on April 1, 1865, in preparation for a hasty retreat during the final hours of the combined sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, Confederate soldiers set fire to many of their remaining tobacco warehouses and military supply stores. Preferring to see the materials burn rather than fall into the hands of the advancing United States forces, they deliberately torched the heart of the city before abandoning the town and its civilian population, carrying whatever they could within their war-weary ranks.

In their absence, the flames quickly raged completely out of control. Within hours, the fire had engulfed much of downtown Richmond, incinerating industry, homes, and even the Confederates’ own official war records. The irony was palpable and bitter: despite standing defiantly throughout the entirety of the Civil War, Richmond suddenly bore a tragic resemblance to the very lands it had once led—depleted, deserted, and destroyed—all brought about not by Union artillery, but by the reckless actions of the men who had claimed to be its fierce defenders. Two days later, stubborn fires still smoldered across the district, despite the tireless firefighting efforts of the citizens and soldiers left behind.

The exhausted men moving through the debris-filled streets on that April day were jubilant, but they were certainly not Confederates. They were not rebels. Among their ranks, a remarkable mosaic of languages and cultures echoed through the ruins: some spoke German, others communicated in Gullah, and still others expressed themselves with a distinct Irish lilt or an Italian accent. Many of the soldiers were Southerners, though not in the narrow sense that the term is frequently misused today, where the words "white" and "Confederate" are erroneously treated as interchangeable.

Instead, their service stands as a permanent historical reminder that few individuals fought against the Confederacy with greater ferocity or stood to lose more than the close to two hundred thousand Black men who took up arms, at least half of whom had lived the majority of their lives under the brutal yoke of enslavement. Yet, regardless of their many cultural, geographic, and racial differences, one unifying reality bound those men in Richmond together beyond any doubt: they were all proud soldiers of the United States.

These Union soldiers had actually been invited into Richmond by the city’s mayor—formerly a fierce, unyielding Confederate himself—specifically to put out the raging fires his fleeing friends and political allies had ignited. Those desperate "scorched earth" Confederate tactics were ultimately pathetic, serving no military purpose other than to satisfy a petty, vindictive spite at the direct expense of the very civilian population they had pledged to protect.

By April 1865, the United States had evolved into an unstoppable industrial and military juggernaut, so thoroughly supplied that its soldiers routinely fired dozens of cannons into Confederate positions simply as celebratory twenty-one-gun salutes to mark victories occurring elsewhere across the nation.

The Union simply could afford such a display. At that advanced stage of the war, the federal government was dispatching millions of pounds of essential supplies and war material to its soldiers daily—including a substantial tobacco ration—while their Confederate adversaries were reduced to desperately scavenging the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own fallen comrades just to keep fighting. The United States had no need for the meager insurrectionary scraps that the retreating Confederates chose to set ablaze. Putting the match to the city and placing innocent civilians in grave danger was merely the final, spiteful act of a myopic leadership presiding over a devastatingly deadly but utterly failed insurrection.

Beyond the physical destruction, those raging fires also created a surreal and symbolically powerful historical moment: during Richmond’s absolute darkest hour, United States soldiers sprang directly to duty. They now sought desperately to save the secessionist stronghold they had struggled for four long years to capture, fighting fiercely against fires started by the very same foes who had once fortified it against them. The so-called enemy had unexpectedly proven to be the city’s saviors, while its would-be protectors had nearly burned it completely to ashes. Much like British General Lord Cornwallis’s fateful defeat at nearby Yorktown a little more than four score years earlier, the world had truly been turned upside down.

That profound irony must have resonated with particular force among the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers now marching through the ruin and rubble. Legally declared "then, thenceforward, and forever free" by the Emancipation Proclamation, many of these men had physically liberated themselves by escaping to United States Army lines and immediately enlisting to fight for the freedom of others. They did so knowing full well that if they were captured by Confederate forces, summary execution awaited them. Official Confederate war policy classified them as rebelling slaves engaged in insurrection—a capital crime that the actual architects of the insurrection, the white Confederate leadership, punished mercilessly with death.

Indeed, documented massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and the violent kidnappings of free Black civilians had already demonstrated the practically boundless cruelty of Confederate policies directed against Americans of color. For those Black Americans, every engagement of the war had been a fight for survival. Yet now, the very city that had institutionalized that cruel policy—and in some cases, the very citizens who had once held them in bondage—was asking them for assistance in quelling the fires that their own retreating insurgent army had set. Those soldiers could easily have been forgiven for breaking out their instruments and playing a tune while Richmond burned around them.

Yet, despite the glaring and insulting irony, those Black soldiers—and the wider United States Army—did not hesitate to lend a hand. After all, for the preceding four years, these men and nearly two million of their fellow United States service members, Black and white, from the east and the west, and in many cases from both North and South, had fought and died in horrific numbers. They had shed their blood for foundational principles: that the American union was perpetual, that unilateral secession was completely illegal, and that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth.

Furthermore, they held the firm constitutional conviction that Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and every other Confederate state had never actually legally left the Union in the first place. Neither the founding fathers nor the text of the Constitution had ever made legal accommodations for unilateral, state-by-state secession. Although close to a million Confederate soldiers, driven by a fanatical devotion to the preservation of chattel slavery, had waged war against the United States for four years, the overwhelming majority of Americans maintained that no one in Richmond, Virginia, or the broader South had ever truly severed their legal ties to the nation. They were viewed simply as armed rebels and violent insurgents operating from within.

In short, the great majority of citizens understood that no matter how hard the Confederacy tried to polish, rebrand, or legitimize its cause, secession was an absolute impossibility. Even though Jefferson Davis’s desk on the United States Senate floor had remained vacant throughout the war, it had not vanished. His empty office, along with all the other legislative seats formerly occupied by southern secessionists, had not disappeared; only the officeholders had abandoned their posts. The secessionists were fundamentally illegitimate. The United States flag had not shed a single star to accommodate their rebellion. The international community steadfastly refused to grant them diplomatic recognition. Their war was legally and morally treason, and their self-proclaimed country was a legal fiction.

By April 1865, the greatest armed insurrection the United States had ever faced lay in literal ruins, with the tattered remnants of its defeated soldiers and political leaders marching hopelessly west in retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated, the United States Army stood ready and willing to help a neighbor in dire need. On April 4, even their commander-in-chief was on hand to witness the scene and offer assistance. On that historic day, Abraham Lincoln walked among the troops in Richmond—the most exhausted, and perhaps the most profoundly jubilant, of them all.