Revisiting the Fall of Richmond: How Connor Williams’s The Confederacy Myth Reframes the Civil War and Our Divided Present

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

That is the central, pressing question addressed in historian Connor Williams’s striking new work, The Confederacy Myth. Offering a blistering historical exposé, Williams reframes our modern understanding of the Confederacy, stripping away romanticized myths to expose it for what it truly was: a relatively small, uncompromising insurrection of fanatics that successfully plunged the nation into its deadliest conflict. Relying on the most neutral and indisputable sources possible—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, sobering reminder of the ongoing duties of citizenship in a fractured republic.

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 through the smoking, shattered ruins of Richmond, Virginia.

Surrounding him stood thousands of other weary men, the battle-tested survivors of a catastrophic civil war that was finally entering its closing days. For four grueling years, more than a hundred thousand Confederate soldiers had died across Virginia desperately defending the city from the United States military. An equally staggering number of United States soldiers—if not more—had perished trying to capture it. They had fallen on the same bloody fields, in towns as far away as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the storied Shenandoah Valley. They had clashed in locations 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 lost their lives—a grim total exceeding the combined casualties of every other war the United States has ever fought, both before and since.

Throughout it all, and largely due to ferocious Confederate defensive efforts, Richmond itself had remained remarkably unscathed by the physical destruction of warfare, even as the surrounding southern landscape crumbled into ash and ruin. During the conflict, the city had been flooded with Confederate soldiers on furlough, recovering wounded men, and the vast bureaucratic apparatus supporting the leadership of the insurrection. It had even endured a punishing, 292-day military siege. Yet the city’s physical architecture had endured remarkably well. In a region deeply scarred by rebellion, Richmond had somehow escaped the wide-scale physical calamities that engulfed almost everywhere else—right up until the very end.

However, on April 1, 1865, as part of their frantic preparations to retreat during the final hours of the sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, departing Confederate soldiers deliberately set fire to their remaining tobacco warehouses and military stores. They preferred to see their own city burn rather than leave valuable supplies behind for the United States forces. They then abandoned the town and its civilian population, carrying whatever they could within their depleted, war-ravaged ranks. In their absence, the flames quickly raged completely out of control. Within hours, the fire engulfed much of downtown Richmond, incinerating local industry, domestic residences, and even the Confederates’ own official war records.

The irony was palpable and heavy. Despite standing defiantly throughout the entirety of the Civil War, Richmond now closely resembled many of the lands it had once claimed to lead: depleted, deserted, and utterly destroyed—all brought about not by Union artillery, but by the reckless actions of the men who claimed to be its ultimate protectors. Two days later, stubborn fires were still smoldering despite the desperate, combined efforts to combat them.

Yet the exhausted men marching through the streets on that fateful day were jubilant.

Significantly, the troops walking through Richmond were not Confederates. They were not rebels. Some spoke German, others communicated in Gullah, and still others expressed themselves with a distinct Irish lilt or an Italian accent. Many were Southerners, though not in the narrow, exclusionary sense often implied by the terms "white" and "Confederate." Instead, their presence served as a powerful reminder that few individuals fought against the Confederacy with greater ferocity, or with more at stake, than the close to two hundred thousand Black men—at least half of whom had lived the majority of their lives under the brutal bonds of enslavement. Regardless of their diverse backgrounds and languages, one undeniable truth united the men marching through Richmond that day: they were all proud soldiers of the United States.

These Union soldiers had actually been summoned into Richmond by the city’s own mayor—formerly a fierce Confederate partisan himself—to help extinguish the roaring fires that his fleeing compatriots had deliberately ignited. Those "scorched earth" Confederate tactics were ultimately pathetic, serving no military purpose other than to satisfy a bitter spite at the direct expense of the very civilians the secessionist leadership had vowed to protect.

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

They could easily afford such displays of abundance. By that stage in the war, the United States government was sending its soldiers millions of pounds of vital supplies and military materiel on a daily basis—including a generous and substantial tobacco ration. Meanwhile, Union victories had reduced their Confederate adversaries to scavenging the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own slain comrades. The United States simply had no need for the insurgent scraps that the fleeing Confederates set ablaze. Putting a match to them and placing a historic city in imminent danger was merely the final, vindictive act by the myopic leadership of a devastatingly deadly, yet clearly failed, insurrection.

Beyond the immediate physical destruction, those raging fires also created a surreal and symbolically potent moment: during Richmond’s darkest hour, United States soldiers sprang to active duty to save the very secessionist stronghold they had struggled for years to capture. They fought valiantly to extinguish fires started by the exact same foes who had once fortified the city against them. The so-called enemy had transformed into the city’s saviors, while its would-be protectors had nearly reduced it to ashes. Much like British Lord Cornwallis’s historic defeat at nearby Yorktown a little more than four decades prior, the world had truly turned upside down.

That profound irony must have resonated with special 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 reaching United States Army lines and immediately enlisting to fight for the freedom of others. They were fully aware that if they were captured by Confederate forces, summary execution awaited them. Official Confederate war policy classified them as rebelling slaves engaging in insurrection—a capital crime that the white Confederate leadership punished with swift death.

Indeed, documented massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and the violent kidnappings of free Black civilians had already demonstrated the practically boundless cruelty directed by the Confederacy against Americans of color. For those Black Americans, every single engagement had been a fight for survival. Yet now, the very city that had institutionalized and perpetuated that brutal policy—and in some cases, the very individuals who had once held them in bondage—was openly asking for assistance in quelling the raging conflagrations that the fleeing insurgent army had left behind. Those Union soldiers could easily have been forgiven for breaking out musical instruments and playing a celebratory tune while Richmond burned around them.

Yet despite the bitter, insulting irony, those Black soldiers—and the United States Army as a whole—did not hesitate to render aid. After all, over the preceding four years, these men and two million of their fellow United States service members, Black and white, representing both East and West, and in many instances even North and South, had fought and died in staggering numbers. They had made those supreme sacrifices for foundational principles: that the American union was perpetual, that unilateral secession was fundamentally illegal, and that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth.

Furthermore, they firmly believed that in a strict constitutional sense, Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and every other Confederate state had never actually left the Union in the first place. This was because neither the nation’s founders nor the Constitution 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 slavery, had waged war against the United States for four bloody years, the vast majority of loyal Americans maintained that no one in Richmond, the rest of Virginia, or the broader South had ever legally departed from the United States. They were viewed simply as rebels against the nation and armed insurgents operating within it.

In short, the great majority of citizens and leaders understood that no matter how skillfully the Confederacy tried to dress up its ideology, secession was legally and practically impossible. Although Jefferson Davis’s desk on the United States Senate floor had remained vacant throughout the conflict, it had not vanished. His vacant office, alongside all the other legislative spaces formerly occupied by Southern representatives, had not disappeared; only the individual officeholders had. The secessionists were illegitimate actors. The United States flag had not shed a single star to accommodate them. The international community consistently refused to grant them diplomatic recognition. Their war was high treason, and their self-proclaimed country was nothing more than a legal fiction.

By April 1865, the largest and most destructive insurrection the United States had ever confronted lay in literal ruins, while the ragged remnants of its defeated military forces and political leadership trudged westward in retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated, the United States Army stood ready and willing to extend a helping hand to neighbors in desperate need. And on that momentous day of April 4, even their commander-in-chief was on hand to witness the scene. Walking among the troops was Abraham Lincoln himself—perhaps the most exhausted, yet most quietly jubilant, man of all.