Revisiting History: How Connor Williams’s ‘The Confederacy Myth’ Reframes the American Civil War and Today’s Divides

What can Americans learn about our divided country today from the Civil War that divided us in the past? It is a question that resonates deeply in contemporary political and cultural discourse, and it is answered with a blistering historical exposé in Connor Williams’s The Confederacy Myth. The book reframes our understanding of the Confederacy, cutting through decades of romanticized folklore to reveal what it actually 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 serves as both an eye-opening work of history and a timely reminder of our duties as citizens today. The narrative challenges long-held misconceptions, returning readers to the raw, unvarnished reality of the conflict’s closing days to understand the true nature of the American Union and the rebellion that sought to tear it apart.

Introduction: Victory

On April 4, 1865, an exhausted man walked carefully through the smoking, broken ruins of Richmond. Surrounding him stood thousands of other exhausted men, the weary 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 all over Virginia defending the city from the United States. Just as many United States soldiers, if not more, had perished trying to take it.

They had fallen on the same harrowing fields, in Virginia towns as far off as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the storied Shenandoah Valley. They had also fought and died 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 laid down their lives—a grim toll that surpassed the totals of every other war the United States has ever fought before and after, combined.

Throughout it all, and due to the sheer ferocity of Confederate resistance, Richmond itself remained largely unscathed by the structural destruction of warfare, even while the surrounding southern landscape crumbled. During the war, the city had been swamped by Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men in recovery, and all the administrative personnel supporting the leadership of the insurrection. It had even suffered through an effective 292-day-long siege.

Nevertheless, the city’s infrastructure endured remarkably well. In a region devastated by rebellion, Richmond had somehow escaped the physical calamities that engulfed almost everywhere else—right up until the very end.

Everything changed in the span of a few chaotic hours. On April 1, 1865, in preparation to 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 that their supplies burn to ashes rather than remain useful to the United States, they abandoned the town and its civilian population, carrying what they could within their war-ravaged ranks.

In their absence, the fires quickly raged out of control. Within hours, the flames engulfed much of the downtown district, incinerating industry, domesticity, and even the Confederates’ own war records. The irony was practically palpable: Despite standing defiantly throughout the Civil War, Richmond now suddenly resembled many of the lands it had once led—depleted, deserted, and destroyed, all due to the desperate efforts of the men who had claimed to be its protectors. Two days later, stubborn fires still smoldered despite the tireless efforts to combat them.

Yet the men now walking through the debris-filled streets were jubilant. For the soldiers patrolling Richmond that day 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 were Southerners, though not in the way the term is frequently misconstrued, in which "white" and "Confederate" are erroneously treated as synonyms. Instead, their service serves as a powerful reminder that few folks fought against the Confederacy with more ferocity or with more to lose than close to two hundred thousand Black men, at least half of whom had lived most of their lives under the brutal yoke of enslavement. Yet regardless of their diverse backgrounds and many differences, one defining aspect united those men in Richmond beyond a shadow of a doubt: They were all United States soldiers.

These troops had actually been called into Richmond by the city’s mayor—formerly a fierce Confederate himself—to help put out the raging fires his fleeing friends had deliberately set. Those "scorched earth" Confederate tactics were petty and served no legitimate military cause. Instead, they satisfied only spite, acting to the immense detriment of all the civilians the Confederate leadership had claimed to be fighting for and protecting.

By April 1865, the United States had evolved into a logistical and military juggernaut, so well-supplied that its soldiers routinely fired dozens of cannons into Confederate positions simply to serve as celebratory twenty-one-gun salutes for victories achieved elsewhere across the nation.

They could easily afford to do so. By that stage of the conflict, the United States was sending its soldiers millions of pounds of vital supplies and war matériel daily—including a substantial tobacco ration—while its relentless victories had reduced their Confederate enemies to scavenging the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own slain 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 the final, vindictive act by the myopic leadership of a devastatingly deadly but clearly failed insurrection.

Beyond all the physical destruction, those fires also created a surreal and symbolically powerful moment: During Richmond’s darkest hour, United States soldiers sprang directly to duty. They now sought to save the very secessionist stronghold they had struggled so long to capture, fighting the fires started by the exact same foes who had formerly fought to fortify it.

The so-called enemy had proven to be the city’s saviors, while its would-be protectors had nearly burned it to absolute ashes. Just like British Lord Cornwallis’s fateful defeat at nearby Yorktown a little more than four score years earlier, the world had truly 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 made "then, thenceforward, and forever free" by the Emancipation Proclamation, many of these men had physically liberated themselves by making a perilous journey to United States Army lines, immediately enlisting to fight for the freedom of others. They knew all too well that if captured, they would not be treated as ordinary prisoners of war; Confederate war policy explicitly charged them as rebellious slaves engaging in insurrection, a crime that the actual architects of the rebellion punished with swift execution.

Indeed, documented massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and the kidnapping of free Black civilians had already demonstrated the practically boundless nature of Confederate cruelties against Americans of color. For those Black Americans, every single engagement had been a fight to the death.

Yet now, the very city that perpetuated that brutal policy, and in some cases the very citizens who had once enslaved them, was asking for assistance in quelling the conflagrations that their own insurgent army had started while fleeing a superior force. Those soldiers could easily have been forgiven for breaking out their fiddles instead and playing a jaunty tune while Richmond burned around them.

Yet despite the bitter and insulting 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 cases North and South, had fought and died in horrific numbers. They had done so for the foundational principles that our 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, they firmly 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 was because neither the framers nor the Constitution had ever made accommodations for unilateral, state-by-state secession.

Although close to a million Confederate soldiers, driven by a fanatical devotion to the institution of slavery, had waged war against the United States for four bloody years, the great majority of Americans maintained that no one in Richmond, the rest of Virginia, or the entire South had ever legally departed from the nation. They were recognized simply as rebels against America and insurgents operating within its borders.

In short, the vast majority of Americans understood a fundamental truth: No matter how Confederates attempted to polish, disguise, or rebrand it, their secession was legally impossible. After all, although Jefferson Davis’s desk on the United States Senate floor had remained vacant throughout the conflict, it had not vanished. His vacant office, and all the other legislative seats formerly occupied by southern secessionists, had not disappeared; only the individual officeholders had walked away.

The secessionists were illegitimate. 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 high treason, and their self-proclaimed country was a legal fiction.

By April 1865, the greatest insurrection the United States had ever faced lay in literal ruins, with the tattered remnants of its defeated soldiers and shattered leadership marching westward in retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated, the United States Army was ready, willing, and able to lend a helping hand to neighbors in desperate need.

On that fateful day of April 4, even their commander-in-chief was on hand to witness the historic moment firsthand. Abraham Lincoln walked quietly among the troops and the liberated citizens—the most exhausted, and perhaps the most profoundly jubilant, of them all.