Revisiting the Fall of Richmond: New Book Reframes the Confederacy as a Failed Insurrection

What can Americans learn about our divided country today from the Civil War that divided us in the past?

Connor Williams’s The Confederacy Myth answers that question with a blistering historical exposé that reframes our understanding of the Confederacy toward what it really was—a relatively small insurrection of uncompromising fanatics that plunged the nation into its deadliest war. Citing the most neutral and indisputable sources possible, including the American Battlefield Trust, the National Park Service, and the Encyclopedia Virginia, The Confederacy Myth stands as both an eye-opening work of history and a timely reminder of the duties of citizenship today.

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 ruins of Richmond, Virginia. Surrounding him stood thousands of other weary individuals, survivors of a terrible civil war that was finally entering its closing days. For four grueling years, more than a hundred thousand Confederates had perished across Virginia while attempting to defend the city from the United States. Just as many United States soldiers, if not more, had died trying to capture it.

They had fallen on the same bloody fields in Virginia towns as far off as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the Shenandoah Valley. They had also fought and died 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 ultimately lost their lives—a casualty toll higher than the totals of every other war the United States has ever fought before and after, combined.

Throughout the conflict, and driven by ferocious Confederate resistance, Richmond itself remained largely unscathed by the direct destruction of warfare, even as the surrounding southern landscape crumbled. During the war years, the city had been swamped by Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men in recovery, and the administrative apparatus supporting the leadership of the rebellion. It even endured an effective 292-day siege. Nevertheless, the structural integrity of the city held up remarkably well. In a region devastated by armed rebellion, Richmond had managed to escape the physical calamities that engulfed most everywhere else—right up until the very end.

However, on April 1, 1865, in preparation for a desperate retreat during the final hours of the sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, departing Confederate soldiers set fire to many of their remaining tobacco warehouses and military stores. Preferring to see the supplies burn rather than fall into the hands of the United States, they 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 fire had engulfed much of downtown Richmond, incinerating industry, homes, and even the Confederates’ own official war records. The irony was practically palpable. Despite standing defiantly throughout the entirety of the Civil War, Richmond suddenly resembled many of the lands it had once led: depleted, deserted, and destroyed—all due to the deliberate actions of the men who had claimed to be its ultimate defenders. Two days later, stubborn fires were still smoldering despite the frantic efforts of remaining citizens and incoming forces to combat them.

The exhausted men marching through the streets amid this devastation were jubilant, but they were not Confederates. They were not rebels. Some spoke German, others spoke Gullah, and still others expressed themselves with an Irish lilt or an Italian accent. Many of these soldiers were Southerners, though not in the way the term is frequently misconstrued, where the words "white" and "Confederate" are erroneously treated as synonyms. Instead, their service serves as a powerful reminder that few individuals fought against the Confederacy with greater ferocity, or had more to lose, than the close to two hundred thousand Black men—at least half of whom had lived most of their lives under the brutal bonds of enslavement. Yet, regardless of their diverse backgrounds and languages, one undeniable aspect united those men in Richmond: they were all United States soldiers.

These troops had been called into the burning city by Richmond’s mayor—previously a fierce Confederate himself—to help extinguish the raging inferno that his fleeing friends had ignited. Those scorched-earth Confederate tactics were ultimately pathetic, serving no military purpose other than to satisfy personal spite at the direct expense of the very civilians the regime claimed to be fighting to protect. By April 1865, the United States had evolved into a military juggernaut so thoroughly supplied that its soldiers could afford to fire dozens of cannons into Confederate positions merely to serve as celebratory twenty-one-gun salutes for victories achieved elsewhere across the nation.

They could easily afford such displays. By that advanced stage of the conflict, the United States was dispatching millions of pounds of supplies and war material to its troops daily—including a substantial tobacco ration—while Union victories had reduced their Confederate enemies to desperately scavenging the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own fallen soldiers. 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 the town in grave danger was nothing more than the final vindictive act by the myopic leadership of a devastatingly deadly, yet clearly failed, insurrection.

Beyond the sheer physical destruction, those fires also generated a surreal and symbolically potent moment: during Richmond’s darkest hour, United States soldiers sprang to duty to save the secessionist stronghold they had struggled for years to capture. They fought valiantly to suppress fires started by the exact same foes who had formerly labored to fortify 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. Just like British Lord Cornwallis’s decisive 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 exceptional force for the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers now walking through the ruins 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 were fully aware that if captured by Confederate forces, they would be summarily executed. Confederate war policy officially classified them as rebelling slaves engaged in insurrection—a capital crime that the actual insurrectionists, the white Confederates, punished strictly with death.

Indeed, documented massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and the violent kidnappings of free Black civilians had already demonstrated the boundless nature of Confederate cruelties directed against Americans of color. For those Black Americans, every engagement on the battlefield had been a fight to the death. Yet now, the very city that perpetuated that brutal policy—and in some instances, the very citizens who had once held them in bondage—was asking for assistance in quelling the conflagrations that their own insurgent army had set while fleeing a superior force. Those soldiers could easily have been forgiven for breaking out their fiddles instead, choosing to play a tune while Richmond burned.

Yet, despite the stinging irony, those Black soldiers—and the United States Army more broadly—did not hesitate to help. After all, for the preceding four years, these men and two million of their United States peers, spanning Black and white, east and west, and in some instances North and South, had fought and died in staggering numbers. They had made those ultimate sacrifices to uphold the foundational principles that the American union was perpetual, that secession was entirely illegal, and that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not vanish from the earth.

Moreover, those troops believed that in a strict constitutional sense, Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and all the other Confederate states had never actually left the Union in the first place. This conviction stemmed from the fact that neither the nation’s founders nor the Constitution ever made legal accommodations for a 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 years, the overwhelming majority of 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 simply rebels against America, operating as insurgents within its borders.

In short, the great majority of citizens understood that no matter how skillfully Confederates attempted to rebrand or present their cause, secession was an absolute impossibility. Although Jefferson Davis’s desk on the United States Senate floor had remained vacant throughout the war, it had not vanished. His vacant office, alongside all the other legislative spaces formerly occupied by southern officials, had not disappeared; only the officeholders themselves had left. The secessionists were illegitimate actors. The United States flag had not shed a single star, the international community never recognized the Confederacy as a legitimate sovereign nation, their war was fundamentally 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 remnants of its defeated military forces and political leaders marching west in retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated, the United States Army was ready and willing to lend a helping hand to neighbors in desperate need. On April 4, even the commander in chief himself was on hand to assist. On that momentous day, Abraham Lincoln walked among the troops and the citizens alike—the most exhausted, and perhaps the most jubilant, of them all.