Reframing the Confederacy: A New Historical Account of America’s Deadliest Conflict and What It Teaches a Divided Nation Today

What can contemporary Americans learn about our deeply divided nation today by looking back at the Civil War that tore the country apart in the past?

Historian Connor Williams answers that pressing question with a blistering historical exposé in his new work, The Confederacy Myth. The book reframes our understanding of the Confederacy, stripping away romanticized mythologies to reveal what it truly was: a relatively small insurrection of uncompromising fanatics that plunged the nation into its deadliest and most destructive war.

Drawing heavily upon neutral, indisputable sources 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 rigorous historical scholarship and a timely, sobering reminder of our duties as citizens today. By examining the roots, the reality, and the ultimate collapse of the secessionist movement, the book challenges long-held popular misconceptions about the conflict and the nature of the American Union.

Introduction: Victory and the Ruins of Richmond

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 died across Virginia desperately defending the city from the armed forces of the United States. An equally staggering number of United States soldiers—if not more—had perished trying to capture it. They had fallen side by side on the same blood-soaked fields, in Virginia towns as far off as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the lush expanses of the Shenandoah Valley. They had clashed 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 lost their lives in the conflict. This staggering death toll exceeded the totals of every other war the United States has ever fought before and after, combined.

Despite the relentless violence and ferocious Confederate resistance, Richmond itself had remained largely unscathed by the direct destruction of warfare for most of the conflict, even while the surrounding Southern landscape crumbled. During the war years, the city had been perpetually swamped by Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men in recovery, and the vast network of individuals supporting the leadership of the insurrection. It had even endured a grueling, highly effective 292-day-long siege.

Nevertheless, the structural fabric of the city endured 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.

The Scorch-Earth Retreat and the Irony of Destruction

That fragile preservation changed drastically on April 1, 1865. In preparation for a desperate retreat during the final hours of the combined sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, retreating Confederate soldiers set fire to many of their remaining tobacco warehouses and vital military stores. Preferring to see their own assets burn rather than fall into the hands of the United States, they put the torch to the city and abandoned the town and its civilian population, carrying only what they could within their war-ravaged ranks.

In their absence, the fires quickly raged completely out of control. Within hours, the blazes had engulfed much of downtown Richmond, incinerating industry, domestic infrastructure, and even the Confederates’ own war records.

The historical irony was practically palpable. Despite standing defiantly throughout the entirety of the Civil War, Richmond suddenly resembled many of the lands it had once led: depleted, deserted, and thoroughly destroyed. Tragically, this devastation was caused entirely by the actions of the men who had long claimed to be its fierce defenders. Two days later, stubborn fires were still smoldering despite the desperate, concerted efforts to combat them.

Yet the exhausted men walking through the smoke-filled streets that day were jubilant. They were not Confederates. They were not rebels.

Some spoke fluent German, others communicated in Gullah, and still others expressed themselves with a distinct Irish lilt or an Italian accent. Many were Southerners, though not in the narrow, exclusionary way the term is frequently deployed today, in which the words "white" and "Confederate" are erroneously treated as interchangeable. Instead, their service stands as a permanent reminder that few groups fought against the Confederacy with more ferocity, or had more to lose, than the close to two hundred thousand Black men—at least half of whom had lived the majority of their lives under the brutal yoke of enslavement.

Regardless of their diverse backgrounds and languages, one undeniable aspect united those men in Richmond: They were all proud soldiers of the United States.

The Liberators as Saviors

These United States soldiers had actually been called into the city by Richmond’s own mayor—formerly a fierce Confederate partisan himself—to help put out the catastrophic fires that his fleeing friends had intentionally started. Those "scorched earth" Confederate tactics were pathetic, serving no military purpose other than to satisfy a petty desire for spite, directly to the detriment of the very civilian population they had vowed to fight for and protect.

By April 1865, the United States had transformed into an industrial and logistical war juggernaut, so thoroughly 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 such displays. At that late stage of the war, the United States was regularly shipping millions of pounds of essential supplies and war material to its troops daily—including a substantial tobacco ration—while its sweeping victories had reduced their Confederate enemies to desperately scavenging the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own slain comrades. The United States simply had no need for the insurrectionary scraps that the fleeing Confederates set ablaze.

Putting the match to those stores and placing the civilian town in grave danger was the final, vindictive act of a myopic leadership heading a devastatingly deadly but 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 to immediate duty. They sought to save the secessionist stronghold they had struggled so long to capture, fighting the very fires started by the foes who had once fortified it.

The so-called enemy had proven to be the city’s true saviors, while its would-be protectors had nearly burned it completely to ashes. Just like British Lord Cornwallis’s historic defeat at nearby Yorktown a little more than four score years earlier, the world had truly turned upside down.

The Perspective of Formerly Enslaved Soldiers

That bitter irony must have resonated with exceptional force for the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers now marching through the ruin and rubble. Having been 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, they would face immediate execution.

Official Confederate war policy categorized them as rebellious slaves engaging in insurrection—a capital crime that the actual architects of the insurrection, 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 virtually boundless cruelty of Confederate policies toward Americans of color. For those Black Americans, every single engagement had been a fight to the absolute death.

Yet now, the very city that perpetuated that brutal policy, and in some instances the very citizens who had once held them in bondage, was asking for assistance to quell the conflagrations that their own insurgent army had set while fleeing a superior force. Those soldiers could easily have been forgiven for breaking out their fiddles and playing a tune while Richmond burned.

Despite the stinging insult of the irony, those Black soldiers—and the broader United States Army—did not hesitate to lend a hand. After all, for the preceding four years, these men and two million of their fellow United States service members, Black and white, representing the East and the West, and in many cases both the North and the South, had fought and died in horrific numbers.

They had done so in defense of 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 should not vanish from the earth.

Reaffirming the Rule of Law and the Perpetual Union

Furthermore, these soldiers and the civilian majority believed that in a strict constitutional sense, Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and all the other Confederate states had never actually left the Union. Neither the Founding Fathers nor the text of the Constitution ever made accommodations for unilateral, state-by-state secession.

Although close to a million Confederate soldiers, driven by a fanatical devotion to the preservation of slavery, had waged war against the United States for four long years, the great majority of Americans maintained that no one in Richmond, Virginia, or the broader South had ever legally severed their ties to the nation. They were viewed simply as rebels against America and violent insurgents operating within it.

In short, the vast majority of citizens understood that no matter how hard the Confederates tried to polish or present their political theory, secession was fundamentally impossible. Although Jefferson Davis’s desk on the United States Senate floor had remained vacant, it had not vanished. His vacant office, alongside others formerly occupied by Southern representatives, had not disappeared; only the individual officeholders had walked away.

Secessionists were illegitimate actors. The United States flag had not shed a single star to accommodate their rebellion. The international community consistently refused to recognize their government. Their war was legally 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 political leaders marching west in retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated, the United States Army stood ready and willing to help a neighbor in need. On that pivotal April day, even their commander-in-chief was present to witness the aftermath.

Among the exhausted troops walking through the charred streets of Richmond was Abraham Lincoln—the most exhausted, and perhaps the most jubilant, of them all.