Reframing the Civil War: New Book ‘The Confederacy Myth’ Challenges Longstanding Historical Misconceptions

What can contemporary Americans learn about a deeply divided nation by looking back at the Civil War? That is the driving question behind historian Connor Williams’s new book, The Confederacy Myth. Offering a blistering historical exposé, the work reframes our collective understanding of the Confederacy, stripping away romanticized myths to present it as what it truly was: a relatively small, uncompromising insurrection of fanatics that plunged the United States into its deadliest conflict.

Drawing heavily from the most neutral and indisputable historical sources available—including the American Battlefield Trust, the National Park Service, and the Encyclopedia Virginia—The Confederacy Myth functions simultaneously as an eye-opening work of historical correction and a timely reminder of the duties of modern citizenship.

Introduction: Victory

To understand the reality of the conflict and the true nature of the secessionist movement, one must look to the bitter, ash-choked end of the war. On April 4, 1865, an exhausted man walked through the smoking ruins of Richmond, Virginia.

Surrounding him were thousands of other exhausted men, the battle-worn survivors of a terrible civil war that was finally entering its closing days. For four long years, more than a hundred thousand Confederates had died across Virginia defending the rebel capital from the forces of the United States. Just as many 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 Shenandoah Valley. They had clashed in places as 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—a staggering total that exceeds the casualties of every other war the United States has ever fought, both before and since, combined.

Throughout the war, sustained by ferocious Confederate resistance, Richmond itself had remained largely untouched by the direct physical destruction of warfare, even as the surrounding Southern landscape slowly crumbled. During the four years of bloodshed, the city had been flooded with Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men recovering in makeshift hospitals, and the administrative apparatus supporting the insurrection’s leadership. It had even endured an effective 292-day-long siege by United States forces.

Despite these pressures, the city’s structural integrity had endured remarkably well. In a region otherwise devastated by rebellion, Richmond had miraculously escaped the physical calamities that engulfed most everywhere else—right up until the very end.

That illusion of protection shattered on April 1, 1865. In frantic preparation to retreat during the final hours of the joint sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, Confederate soldiers set fire to many of their remaining tobacco warehouses and military supply stores. Rather than allow these vital provisions to fall into the hands of the advancing United States forces, the departing troops chose to burn them. They then abandoned the town and its civilian population, carrying whatever they could within their dwindling, war-ravaged ranks.

In their absence, the flames quickly raged out of control. Within hours, the firestorm engulfed much of downtown Richmond, incinerating local industry, domestic spaces, and, ironically, the Confederates’ own war records. The bitter irony was practically palpable: despite standing defiantly throughout the entirety of the Civil War, Richmond suddenly resembled many of the very lands it had once led—depleted, deserted, and utterly destroyed. Moreover, this devastation was wrought not by the invading enemy, but by the hands of the men who had claimed to be the city’s heroic defenders. Two days later, despite the desperate firefighting efforts of residents and incoming troops, fires still smoldered in the ruins.

Yet the exhausted men moving through the smoke-filled streets that day were jubilant.

Crucially, the men walking through Richmond on that historic day were not Confederates. They were not rebels. Among their ranks, linguistic and cultural diversity abounded: some spoke German, others spoke Gullah, and still others expressed themselves with a distinct Irish lilt or an Italian accent. Many were Southerners, though not in the narrow sense that later mythmakers would imply, where the words "white" and "Confederate" are treated as interchangeable.

Instead, their presence served as a stark reminder that few groups fought against the Confederacy with greater ferocity, or with more at stake, than the close to two hundred thousand Black men who took up arms for the Union. At least half of these soldiers had spent the majority of their lives bound in legal enslavement. Yet, regardless of their vastly different backgrounds, one undeniable truth united every man in Richmond that day: they were all proud soldiers of the United States.

These soldiers had been called directly into Richmond by the city’s own mayor—himself a formerly fierce Confederate—to help extinguish the raging fires that his fleeing comrades had left behind. Those "scorched earth" Confederate tactics were ultimately pathetic, serving no military objective other than satisfying petty spite at the direct expense of the very civilians the leadership had vowed to protect.

By April 1865, the United States had evolved into a logistical and military juggernaut, so well-supplied that its soldiers could afford to fire dozens of heavy cannons into Confederate positions simply to mark celebratory twenty-one-gun salutes for victories won elsewhere across the nation.

They could afford such extravagance because, by that stage of the conflict, the United States was shipping millions of pounds of supplies and war matériel daily to its troops—including generous tobacco rations. Meanwhile, Union victories had reduced their Confederate enemies to desperately scavenging the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own slain comrades. The United States simply had no need for the insurrectionary scraps that the retreating Confederates set ablaze. Putting the match to those stores and placing an entire civilian town in mortal danger was merely the final, vindictive act of a myopic leadership presiding over a devastatingly deadly, yet clearly failed, rebellion.

Beyond the physical destruction they caused, those fires created a surreal and symbolically powerful moment. During Richmond’s darkest and most vulnerable hour, United States soldiers sprang directly to duty. They actively sought to save the very secessionist stronghold they had struggled for years to capture, fighting desperate blazes started by the exact same foes who had once fortified it.

In a startling reversal of fortunes, the so-called enemy had proven to be the city’s saviors, while its would-be protectors had nearly burned it completely to ashes. Much like British Lord Cornwallis’s historic 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 for 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, immediately enlisting to fight for the freedom of others. They well knew the mortal peril they faced; under official Confederate war policy, captured Black soldiers were classified as slaves engaged in insurrection—a capital crime that the white Confederate leadership punished with summary execution.

Indeed, documented massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and the violent kidnappings of free Black civilians had already demonstrated the boundless cruelty of Confederate policies toward Americans of color. For those Black Americans, every engagement on the battlefield had been a fight to the death.

Yet, when the very city that perpetuated those oppressive policies—and in some instances, the very citizens who had once held them in bondage—appealed for assistance in quelling the infernos ignited by their own fleeing army, those Union soldiers did not hesitate. They could easily have been forgiven for stepping back, or perhaps breaking out fiddles to play a tune while Richmond burned around them.

Instead, despite the glaring insult of the situation, those Black soldiers—and the broader United States Army—stepped forward without hesitation. For the preceding four years, these men and roughly two million of their fellow Union peers, Black and white, from the East and the West, and in some cases from both North and South, had fought and died in staggering numbers. They had shed their blood for the foundational principles that the American Union was perpetual, that unilateral secession was wholly illegal, and that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth.

Furthermore, these soldiers firmly believed that in a strict constitutional sense, Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and every other seceded state had never actually left the Union in the first place. Neither the framers of the Constitution nor the foundational document itself 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 bitter years, the great majority of loyal Americans maintained that no one in Richmond, Virginia, or the wider South had ever legally departed the nation. They were merely rebels and insurgents operating from within its borders.

In short, the vast majority of Americans understood a fundamental truth: no matter how skillfully Confederate apologists tried to polish or present their cause, secession was legally impossible. Although Jefferson Davis’s desk on the United States Senate floor had remained vacant throughout the war, it had not vanished. His vacant office, and all the others formerly occupied by Southern lawmakers, had not disappeared; only the officeholders had walked away.

The secessionists were fundamentally illegitimate. The United States flag had not lost a single star, the international community never recognized the Confederacy as a legitimate sovereign nation, their war was an act of treason, and their self-proclaimed country was a legal fiction.

By April 1865, the largest insurrection the United States had ever faced lay in literal ruins, with the tattered remnants of its defeated military and political leaders marching west in retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated, the United States Army stood ready to lend a helping hand to neighbors in desperate need. On April 4, even their commander-in-chief was on hand to witness the historic moment, as Abraham Lincoln walked quietly among the troops through the ashes of the fallen capital—exhausted, but undeniably jubilant.