Reframing the Past: New Book ‘The Confederacy Myth’ Challenges Popular Misconceptions of the Civil War

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 modern political discourse, echoing through contemporary debates over national identity, unity, and historical memory. Connor Williams’s The Confederacy Myth answers that question with a blistering historical exposé that reframes our understanding of the Confederacy toward what it truly 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 stands as both an eye-opening work of history and a timely reminder of the duties of citizenship today. The book delves into the complex realities of the conflict, stripping away romanticized myths to expose the stark truths of secession, rebellion, and the preservation of the Union.

INTRODUCTION: VICTORY

“Acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances,” wrote Abraham Lincoln in March 1861, capturing the legal and constitutional dilemma facing a fracturing republic.

Months later, Senator Stephen Douglas reinforced the uncompromising nature of the looming conflict, stating in April 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.”

On April 4, 1865, an exhausted man walked through the smoking ruins of Richmond, Virginia. Surrounding him stood thousands of other exhausted men, survivors of a terrible civil war that was then entering its final, decisive days. For four 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 died 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 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—more than 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 remained largely unscathed by the destruction of warfare, even while the surrounding southland crumbled. During the war, the city had been swamped by Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men in recovery, and all the people surrounding and supporting the leadership of the insurrection. It even suffered through an effective 292-day-long siege. Nevertheless, the structural city endured incredibly well. In a region devastated by rebellion, Richmond had escaped the physical calamities that engulfed most everywhere else—right up until the very end.

However, 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. They preferred that the supplies burn rather than remain useful to the United States. Then they abandoned the town and its people, carrying what they could within their war-ragged ranks. In their absence, the fires quickly raged out of control and within hours engulfed much of the downtown, 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, and all due to the efforts 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. For the men traversing Richmond were not Confederates; they were not rebels. Some spoke German, others spoke Gullah, while still others expressed themselves with an Irish lilt or an Italian accent. Many were Southerners, although not in the way the term is often used, in which “white” and “Confederate” are implied. Instead, their service reminds us 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. Yet regardless of their many differences, one aspect united those men in Richmond beyond 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 fires his fleeing friends had started. Those “scorched earth” Confederate tactics were pathetic and served no cause but to satisfy their spite, to the detriment of all the civilians they had claimed to be fighting for and protecting. By April 1865, the United States had become a war 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 elsewhere throughout the nation.

They could afford to do so. By that point in the war, the United States sent its soldiers millions of pounds of supplies and war matériel daily—including a substantial tobacco ration—while its 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 them and placing the town in danger was the last vindictive act by the myopic leadership of a devastatingly deadly but clearly failed insurrection.

Beyond all their destruction, those fires also created a surreal, symbolically powerful moment. During Richmond’s darkest hour, United States soldiers sprang to duty. They now sought to save the secessionist stronghold they had struggled so long to capture, fighting fires started by the same foes who had formerly fought to fortify it. The so-called enemy had proven the city’s saviors, while its would-be protectors had almost burned it to ashes. Just like British Lord Cornwallis’s defeat at nearby Yorktown a little more than four score years earlier, the world had turned upside down.

That 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 having made it to United States Army lines and then immediately joining its ranks to fight for the freedom of others. They knew that if 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 shown the practically boundless nature of Confederate cruelties against Americans of color. For those Black Americans, every fight had been a fight to the death. But now the very city perpetuating that policy, and in some cases the very citizens who had once enslaved them, asked for assistance 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 previous 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 principles that our union was perpetual, that secession was illegal, and that 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 around it, and all the other Confederate states as well had never actually left the Union, because neither the founders nor the Constitution ever made accommodations for unilateral, state-by-state secession. Although close to a million Confederate soldiers fanatical in their devotion to slavery had made war against the United States for the last four years, the great majority of Americans had maintained that no one in Richmond, the rest of Virginia, or the entire South had ever actually 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 Confederates had tried to polish it or present it—their secession was soundly 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 simply illegitimate. The United States flag had not shed any stars. The international community never recognized them. Their war was treason. And their country was a fiction.

By April 1865, the greatest insurrection the United States had or has 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 hose to its neighbor in need. And on April 4, even their commander in chief was on hand to help out. For on that day, Abraham Lincoln walked among them. He was the most exhausted—and perhaps the most jubilant—of them all.