Reframing the Rebellion: A New Look at the Civil War and the Reality of the Confederacy

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, such as 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.

Introduction: Victory

To understand the scope of the conflict and the reality of how it concluded, one must look back to the spring of 1865. On April 4 of that year, an exhausted man walked through the ruins of Richmond.

Surrounding him stood thousands of other weary individuals, the survivors of a terrible civil war that was then entering its final, decisive days. For four harrowing years, more than a hundred thousand Confederates had died across 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 fields, in Virginia towns as far off as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the Shenandoah Valley. They had also fought and died in places as close as Petersburg, Mechanicsville, Cold Harbor, Gaines’ Mill, and Savage’s Station. Across the entire nation, an estimated seven hundred thousand Americans lay dead—a staggering toll exceeding the totals of every other war the United States has ever fought before and after, combined.

Throughout it all, and due to ferocious Confederate resistance, Richmond itself had remained largely unscathed by the direct 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 surrounding and supporting the leadership of the insurrection. It had even suffered through an effective 292-day-long siege.

Nevertheless, the structural city endured remarkably well. In a region devastated by rebellion, Richmond had managed to escape the physical calamities that engulfed almost everywhere else—right up until the very end.

However, the situation shifted dramatically in a matter of hours. On April 1, 1865, in preparation to retreat during the final hours of the sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, Confederate soldiers set fire to many of their remaining tobacco warehouses and military stores. Preferring that their supplies burn rather than remain useful to the United States, they abandoned the town and its people, carrying what they could within their war-ravaged ranks.

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

Yet the exhausted men walking through the streets that day were jubilant. Notably, 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 were Southerners, though not in the way the term is often casually used, where "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 enslavement.

Regardless of their many differences, one fundamental aspect united those men in Richmond beyond a shadow of a doubt: They were all United States soldiers.

These soldiers had been called into Richmond by the city’s mayor—formerly a fierce Confederate himself—to put out the catastrophic fires his fleeing friends had started. Those "scorched earth" Confederate tactics were petty and served no strategic cause other than to satisfy their spite, coming at the direct expense of all the civilians they had claimed to be fighting for and protecting.

By April 1865, the United States had become a logistical and military juggernaut, so well-supplied that its soldiers fired dozens of cannons into Confederate positions simply to serve as celebratory twenty-one-gun salutes for other victories happening simultaneously across the nation. They could easily afford to do so. By that point in the conflict, the United States sent its troops millions of pounds of supplies and war material 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 Confederates set ablaze. Putting the match to those stores and placing an entire town in danger was the final vindictive act by the myopic leadership of a devastatingly deadly, yet clearly failed, insurrection.

Beyond all their 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 sought to save the secessionist stronghold they had struggled so long to capture, fighting fires started by the very 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 reduced it to ashes. Just like British Lord Cornwallis’s defeat at nearby Yorktown a little more than four score years earlier, the world had truly turned upside down.

That profound irony must have especially resonated with the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers now walking 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 it to United States Army lines and immediately joining its ranks to fight for the freedom of others. They knew full well that if they were captured, they would be executed. Confederate war policy charged them as slaves engaging in insurrection, a crime that the actual insurrectionists—the white Confederates—punished with death.

Indeed, massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and kidnappings 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 policy, and in some cases the very citizens who had once enslaved them, asked for assistance in quelling the conflagrations their own insurgent army had started while fleeing a superior force. Those soldiers could well have been forgiven for breaking out their fiddles instead and playing a tune while Richmond burned.

Yet despite the insulting irony, those Black soldiers—and the United States Army more broadly—did not hesitate to help. After all, for the past four years, these men and two million of their United States peers, 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 the Union was perpetual, that secession was illegal, and that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not vanish from the earth.

Moreover, they believed that in a constitutional sense, Richmond, the Old Dominion surrounding it, and all the other Confederate states as well had never actually left the Union. Neither the framers nor the Constitution had ever made accommodations for unilateral, state-by-state secession.

Although close to a million Confederate soldiers, fanatical in their devotion to the institution of slavery, had waged war against the United States for four long 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 United States. They were simply rebels against America and insurgents within it.

In short, the great majority of Americans understood that no matter how the Confederates tried to polish or present their cause, secession was legally and practically impossible. After all, although Jefferson Davis’s desk on the Senate floor had remained vacant, it had not vanished. His vacant office, and all the others formerly occupied by Confederates, had not disappeared; only the officeholders had. Secessionists were illegitimate. The United States flag had not shed a single star. The international community never recognized the Confederacy. Their war was treason, and their country was a fiction.

By April 1865, the greatest insurrection the United States had ever faced lay in literal ruins, with the remnants of its defeated soldiers and leaders marching west in retreat. With their vision vindicated, the United States Army was ready and willing to lend a helping hand to neighbors in need. On April 4, even their commander-in-chief was on hand to witness the moment. Walking among the troops that day was Abraham Lincoln, the most exhausted—and perhaps the most jubilant—of them all.