Reframing the Civil War: How Connor Williams’s The Confederacy Myth Challenges Modern Understandings of America’s Bloodiest Conflict

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 discourse, where polarization and regional tensions frequently evoke the rhetoric of a nation fracturing at the seams.

Connor Williams’s new book, The Confederacy Myth, addresses this pressing question head-on with a rigorous historical exposé that reframes our understanding of the Confederacy. Rather than depicting it as a legitimate alternative government or a vast, organic nation, the book presents the Confederacy for what historical evidence suggests it truly was: a relatively small insurrection of uncompromising fanatics that plunged the United States into its deadliest war. Drawing upon neutral and indisputable sources such as the American Battlefield Trust, the National Park Service, and the Encyclopedia Virginia, The Confederacy Myth serves simultaneously as an eye-opening work of history and a timely reminder of civic duty in the modern era.

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 carefully through the smoldering ruins of Richmond, Virginia.

Surrounding him stood thousands of other exhausted men, the weary survivors of a horrific civil war that was finally entering its closing days. For four grueling years, more than a hundred thousand Confederates had perished across the Virginia landscape in a desperate bid to defend the city from the United States. A comparable, if not greater, number of United States soldiers had died trying to capture it. They had fallen side by side on the same fields, in Virginia towns as far distant as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the storied Shenandoah Valley. They had also fought and bled in locations much closer to the capital, including 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 grim toll that exceeds the combined totals of every other war the United States has ever fought, both before and since.

Throughout the vast majority of this turmoil, and owing to ferocious Confederate military resistance, Richmond itself remained largely untouched by the physical destruction of warfare, even as the surrounding southern landscape steadily crumbled. During the course of the conflict, the city had been repeatedly swamped by Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men recovering from battle, and the administrative apparatus surrounding the leadership of the insurrection. It had even endured an effective, grueling 292-day siege. Nevertheless, the structural integrity of the city 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.

However, on April 1, 1865, as part of preparations to retreat during the final hours of the combined sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, retreating Confederate soldiers made a fateful decision. They set fire to many of their remaining tobacco warehouses and vital military stores, choosing to put them to the torch rather than leave them intact for the advancing United States forces. Having done so, they hastily abandoned the town and its civilian population, carrying whatever supplies they could within their war-ravaged ranks.

In their absence, the blazes quickly raged entirely out of control. Within hours, the flames engulfed much of the downtown district, incinerating local industry, domestic spaces, and even the Confederates’ own official war records. The historical irony was practically palpable: despite standing defiantly untouched throughout the entirety of the Civil War, Richmond suddenly came to resemble many of the lands it had once claimed to lead—depleted, deserted, and utterly destroyed. Moreover, this devastation was wrought entirely by the efforts of the very men who had long claimed to be the city’s dedicated protectors. Two days later, despite the frantic and concerted efforts of local citizens and incoming forces to combat them, numerous fires still stubbornly smoldered.

Yet the exhausted men moving through the debris-filled streets on that fateful April day were jubilant.

Crucially, the men walking through Richmond that day were not Confederates. They were not rebels. Some spoke German, others communicated in Gullah, and still others expressed themselves with an Irish lilt or an Italian accent. Many were Southerners, though not in the narrow sense often implied where the terms “white” and “Confederate” are treated as synonymous. Instead, their service serves 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 who took up arms, at least half of whom had lived the majority of their lives under the brutal yoke of enslavement.

Regardless of their diverse backgrounds and myriad differences, one defining aspect united those men in Richmond beyond a shadow of a doubt: they were all soldiers of the United States.

Remarkably, these United States soldiers had been called into Richmond by the city’s own mayor—formerly a fierce Confederate partisan himself—to help extinguish the raging fires that his fleeing compatriots had deliberately ignited. Those “scorched earth” Confederate tactics were not only desperate; they served no legitimate military cause. Instead, they satisfied little more than petty spite, carried out to the direct detriment of the very civilian population the Confederate leadership had long claimed to be fighting for and protecting.

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

The Union forces could readily afford such displays. By that advanced stage of the conflict, the United States was dispatching millions of pounds of essential supplies and war materiel to its troops on a daily basis, including a substantial and reliable tobacco ration. Meanwhile, Union victories had reduced their Confederate adversaries to scavenging through the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own slain comrades just to find ammunition.

The United States simply had no need for the insurrectionary scraps that the departing Confederates set ablaze. Putting the match to those stores and placing an entire urban center in mortal danger was nothing more than the final, vindictive act of a myopic leadership presiding over a devastatingly deadly, yet undeniably failed, insurrection.

Beyond the sheer physical destruction, those fires also 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 secessionist stronghold they had struggled for years to capture, fighting desperate fires started by the very foes who had previously fortified it. The designated enemy had unexpectedly proven to be 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 eighty years prior, the world had quite literally been turned upside down.

That profound irony must have resonated with exceptional force among the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers now marching 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 acutely aware that if they were captured by Confederate forces, execution awaited them. Official Confederate war policy classified them as rebellious slaves engaging in insurrection—a capital offense 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 boundless nature of Confederate cruelty directed against Americans of color. For those Black Americans, every engagement had inherently been a fight to the absolute death. Yet now, the very municipal administration that had perpetuated that brutal policy—and, in some instances, the very local citizens who had once held them in bondage—was asking for assistance to quell the raging conflagrations that the retreating insurgent army had left behind. Those soldiers could easily have been forgiven for breaking out their own fiddles and playing a jaunty tune while Richmond burned.

Yet despite the bitter and insulting irony of the situation, 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 roughly two million of their fellow United States service members, Black and white, representing eastern and western theaters and even northern and southern origins, had fought and died in staggering numbers. They had made those ultimate sacrifices to uphold foundational principles: that the American Union was perpetual, that unilateral secession was entirely illegal, and that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth.

Furthermore, they operated under the strong constitutional conviction that Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and every other seceding state had never actually left the Union in a legal sense. This was because neither the nation’s founders nor the Constitution itself had ever made provisions for unilateral, state-by-state secession. Although nearly 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 loyal Americans maintained that no individual in Richmond, Virginia, or anywhere else in the South had ever legally severed their ties to the United States. They were viewed simply as armed rebels against the nation and violent insurgents operating within its borders.

In short, the vast majority of citizens understood a fundamental truth: no matter how skillfully Confederate apologists tried to polish or rebrand their cause, secession was legally and practically 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, alongside those of other departed southern representatives, had not ceased to exist; only the individual officeholders had removed themselves.

The secessionists were fundamentally illegitimate. The United States flag had not shed a single star to accommodate their claims. The international community consistently refused to recognize the Confederacy as a sovereign nation. Their war was legally and morally treason, and their self-proclaimed country was little more than a political fiction.

By April 1865, the greatest internal insurrection the United States had ever faced lay in literal ruins, with the tattered remnants of its defeated military forces and political leadership marching westward in retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated, the United States Army stood ready, willing, and able to lend a helping hand to neighbors in desperate need. And on that momentous day of April 4, even their commander-in-chief was personally present to assist. For on that day, Abraham Lincoln walked among them—standing as perhaps the most exhausted, yet most profoundly jubilant, American of them all.