Reframing the Past: New Book Expose Challenges Enduring Myths of the Confederacy

What can contemporary Americans learn about a deeply polarized nation by looking back at the Civil War? That is the driving question behind Connor Williams’s new historical work, The Confederacy Myth. The book offers a blistering historical exposé that fundamentally challenges traditional and romanticized notions of the Confederacy, reframing it away from the myth of a noble lost cause and toward what historical records demonstrate it actually was: a relatively small-scale insurrection of uncompromising fanatics that plunged the nation into its deadliest conflict.

Drawing extensively from neutral and indisputable sources—including the National Park Service, the American Battlefield Trust, and the Encyclopedia Virginia—The Confederacy Myth serves as both an eye-opening work of historical correction and a timely reminder of civic duty in a divided modern era. The following is a featured look into the introduction of the book, capturing a pivotal and symbolic moment in the final days of the American Civil War.

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 ruined streets of Richmond, Virginia. Surrounding him stood thousands of other weary men—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 the expanse of Virginia defending the city from the United States. Nearly as many, if not more, United States soldiers had perished trying to take it.

They had fallen on the same blood-soaked fields, in towns as far off as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the 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 ultimately lost their lives—a staggering total exceeding the combined American casualties of every other war the nation has ever fought, both before and since.

Despite the relentless violence and the ferocious determination of the Confederate defense, Richmond itself had remained remarkably unscathed by the direct destruction of warfare while the rest of the southern landscape steadily crumbled. Throughout the conflict, the city had been flooded with Confederate soldiers on furlough, recovering wounded men, and the administrative apparatus supporting the leadership of the insurrection. It even endured a punishing 292-day siege. Yet, the physical infrastructure of the city held up remarkably well. In a region otherwise devastated by rebellion, Richmond had miraculously escaped the physical calamities that engulfed almost everywhere else—right up until the very end.

That illusion of durability shattered on April 1, 1865. In preparation for a hasty retreat during the final hours of the combined sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, departing Confederate soldiers deliberately set fire to their remaining tobacco warehouses and vital military stores. They preferred to see the goods incinerated rather than leave them intact for the advancing United States forces.

The retreating troops then abandoned the town and its civilian population, carrying whatever supplies they could manage within their war-weary ranks. In their absence, the fires quickly raged completely out of control. Within hours, the flames engulfed much of the downtown district, destroying local industry, domestic homes, and ironically, the very war records of the Confederacy itself.

The symbolism was stark and palpable. Despite standing defiantly throughout the entirety of the Civil War, Richmond suddenly came to resemble the very lands it had once led: depleted, deserted, and destroyed—all through the direct actions of the men who had claimed to be its fierce defenders. Two days later, stubborn fires were still smoldering despite the desperate efforts of citizens and arriving forces to combat them.

Yet the exhausted men moving through the smoky streets that day were jubilant. They were not Confederates; they were not rebels. Among them were soldiers of diverse backgrounds—some spoke German, others communicated in Gullah, and still others spoke with an Irish lilt or an Italian accent. Many were Southerners, though not in the restrictive sense where the terms “white” and “Confederate” are mistakenly treated as synonymous.

Instead, their presence served as a powerful reminder that few groups fought against the Confederacy with greater ferocity, or had more to lose, than the nearly two hundred thousand Black men who took up arms for the Union—at least half of whom had spent most of their lives trapped under the brutality of enslavement. Despite their vast differences, these men in Richmond shared one undeniable identity: they were all United States soldiers.

These troops had been summoned into the burning city by Richmond’s own mayor—formerly a staunch Confederate—in a desperate bid to put out the raging fires his fleeing allies had deliberately set. Those scorched-earth Confederate tactics were ultimately pathetic, serving no military purpose other than satisfying spite at the direct expense of the very civilians the regime claimed to be protecting.

By April 1865, the United States had evolved into an overwhelming industrial and military juggernaut. Its supply lines were so robust that Union soldiers routinely fired dozens of cannons simply to produce celebratory twenty-one-gun salutes for victories achieved elsewhere across the nation.

They could easily afford such displays. At that stage of the conflict, the United States was dispatching millions of pounds of essential supplies and war matériel daily—including substantial tobacco rations—while its battlefield victories had reduced the enemy to scavenging the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own fallen comrades. The United States simply had no need for the insurgent scraps that the fleeing Confederates set ablaze. Putting the match to those stores and placing the civilian population in grave danger was merely the final, vindictive act of a myopic leadership presiding over a collapsing rebellion.

Beyond the physical destruction, those fires created a surreal and symbolically potent moment: during Richmond’s darkest and most vulnerable hour, United States soldiers sprang to duty to save the secessionist stronghold they had fought so long and hard to capture. The troops worked tirelessly to extinguish fires started by the very foes who had previously fortified the city. The designated enemy had suddenly proven to be the city’s saviors, while its would-be protectors had nearly reduced it to ashes. Much like British Lord Cornwallis’s defeat at nearby Yorktown just over eighty years prior, the world had turned completely upside down.

That profound irony must have resonated with particular force for the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers walking through the ash 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 knew all too well that if they were captured by Confederate forces, execution awaited them. Official Confederate policy classified Black soldiers as rebellious slaves engaging in insurrection—a capital offense that the white leadership punished strictly with death.

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 had been a fight for survival. Yet now, the very city that had institutionalized that deadly policy—and in some instances, the very citizens who had once held them in bondage—was asking for assistance in quelling the conflagrations ignited by the retreating insurgent army. Those soldiers could easily have been forgiven for breaking out instruments and playing a tune while Richmond burned around them.

Yet despite the bitter irony, those Black soldiers—and the United States Army more broadly—did not hesitate to render aid. For the preceding four years, these men and roughly two million of their fellow United States service members, spanning Black and white, east and west, and even North and South, had fought and died in staggering numbers. They had shed blood for the foundational principles that the Union was perpetual, that 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 held the firm constitutional conviction that Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and every other Confederate state had never actually departed the Union in the first place. Neither the framers nor the Constitution 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 institution of slavery, had waged war against the United States for four years, the overwhelming majority of Americans maintained that no one in Richmond, Virginia, or the broader South had ever legally severed ties with the nation. They were viewed simply as rebels against America and insurgents operating from within its borders.

In short, the vast majority of citizens understood that no matter how skillfully Confederate leaders tried to rebrand or defend their actions, secession was a legal impossibility. Jefferson Davis’s desk on the Senate floor had remained vacant throughout the war, but it had not vanished. His empty office, along with those of other departed southern representatives, had not ceased to exist; only the officeholders had abandoned their posts.

The secessionists were illegitimate. The United States flag had not shed a single star. The international community consistently refused to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate nation. Their war was legally and historically treason, and their self-declared country was a fiction.

By April 1865, the largest insurrection the United States has ever faced lay in literal ruins, with the remnants of its defeated military and political leadership retreating westward. With their vision completely vindicated, the United States Army stood ready and willing to help a neighbor in desperate need. On April 4, even the commander-in-chief was present to witness the aftermath. On that historic day, Abraham Lincoln walked among the troops in Richmond—the most exhausted, and perhaps the most jubilant, of them all.