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

What can contemporary Americans learn about a deeply divided nation by looking back at the Civil War? That is the central, pressing question at the heart of The Confederacy Myth, a blistering historical exposé by author Connor Williams. The newly released work aims to fundamentally reframe our collective understanding of the Confederacy, casting it not as a legitimate government or a noble lost cause, but as a relatively small-scale insurrection of uncompromising fanatics that ultimately plunged the nation into its deadliest conflict.

Drawing heavily on neutral, indisputable sources—including the American Battlefield Trust, the National Park Service, and the Encyclopedia Virginia—the book serves as both an eye-opening work of historical correction and a timely, sobering reminder of civic duty in a modern era marked by polarization.

To understand the core argument of The Confederacy Myth, one must look back to the foundational moments of the conflict’s closure. As Abraham Lincoln noted in March 1861, acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, depending on the circumstances. Not long after, in April 1861, Senator Stephen Douglas declared that there were only two sides to the question, asserting that every man must be for the United States or against it, leaving no room for neutrals—only patriots or traitors.

These historical realities are vividly captured in the opening chapters of Williams’s book, which transports the reader to April 4, 1865, as an exhausted man walked quietly through the smoldering ruins of Richmond, Virginia.

Surrounding him that day stood thousands of other exhausted men, the weary survivors of a terrible civil war that was finally entering its closing days. For four grueling years, more than a hundred thousand Confederates had died across Virginia defending the city from the United States. Just as many federal soldiers—if not more—had perished trying to capture it. They had fallen side by side on the same brutal fields, in Virginia towns as far off as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the Shenandoah Valley. They had fought and died in places as close to home 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 during the conflict. That devastating toll exceeded the combined totals of every other war the United States had ever fought before and after.

Throughout the hostilities, and largely due to ferocious Confederate resistance, Richmond itself remained remarkably unscathed by the direct physical destruction of warfare, even while the surrounding southern landscape crumbled. During the war, the city had been perpetually swamped by Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men in recovery, and the administrative apparatus surrounding the leadership of the insurrection. It even endured an effective 292-day-long siege. Nevertheless, the physical infrastructure of the city endured incredibly 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.

The turning point came on April 1, 1865. In preparation for a desperate retreat during the final hours of the joint sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, retreating Confederate soldiers set fire to many of their remaining tobacco warehouses and military stores. Preferring to see their own supplies burn rather than fall into the hands of the advancing United States forces, they 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 flames engulfed much of the downtown district, incinerating local industry, domestic residences, and even the Confederates’ own official war records. The irony was practically palpable. Despite standing defiantly throughout the entirety of the Civil War, Richmond suddenly resembled many of the lands it had once claimed to lead: depleted, deserted, and utterly destroyed—all brought about not by Union artillery, but by the very men who had professed to be its defenders. Two days later, stubborn fires were still smoldering despite the best firefighting efforts.

Yet the men now walking through the ruined streets were jubilant. 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 frequently misused to imply that "white" and "Confederate" are synonymous. Instead, their service serves as a powerful reminder that few individuals fought against the Confederacy with more ferocity, or with more at stake, than close to two hundred thousand Black men. At least half of those soldiers had lived the majority of their lives under the brutal institution 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.

These federal troops had actually been invited into Richmond by the city’s mayor—formerly a fierce Confederate partisan himself—to help extinguish the raging fires that his fleeing compatriots had recklessly ignited. Those scorched-earth Confederate tactics were ultimately pathetic, serving no military purpose other than to satisfy a bitter spite at the direct expense of the very civilians the secessionists had claimed to be fighting to protect.

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

They could easily afford such displays. By that stage of the conflict, the United States was forwarding millions of pounds of essential supplies and war materiel to its front lines daily—including a substantial tobacco ration—while federal victories had reduced their Confederate adversaries to scavenging the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own slain comrades. 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 civilian town in grave danger was nothing more than the final, vindictive act of a myopic leadership presiding over a devastatingly deadly, yet clearly failed, insurrection.

Beyond the physical destruction, those fires created a surreal and symbolically powerful historical moment. During Richmond’s darkest hour, United States soldiers sprang directly to duty, seeking to save the secessionist stronghold they had struggled for years to capture. They fought fires started by the very foes who had previously fortified the city against them. The so-called enemy had unexpectedly proven to be the city’s saviors, while its would-be protectors had nearly reduced it 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.

That profound irony must have resonated with extraordinary force for the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers now marching through the ruin 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 did so knowing full well that if they were captured by Confederate forces, execution awaited them. Confederate war policy classified them as rebellious slaves engaging in insurrection—a capital offense that the white leadership of the Confederacy punished with death.

Indeed, documented massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and the kidnapping of free Black civilians had already demonstrated the practically boundless cruelty of Confederate policies toward Americans of color. For those Black Americans, every single engagement had been a fight to the death. Yet now, the very city that had perpetuated that brutal policy—and in some instances, the very citizens who had once held them in bondage—was asking for assistance in quelling the conflagrations that the retreating rebel army had left behind. Those soldiers could easily have been forgiven for breaking out fiddles and playing a tune while Richmond burned.

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 two million of their fellow federal soldiers, representing every background and region, had fought and died in staggering numbers. They had sacrificed their lives for the core principles that the American Union was perpetual, that unilateral secession was entirely illegal, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not vanish from the earth.

Furthermore, they maintained the constitutional conviction that Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and every other Confederate state had never actually left the Union in the first place. Neither the framers of the Constitution nor the foundational documents of the republic had ever made legal accommodations for unilateral, state-by-state secession. Although close to a million Confederate soldiers, fanatically devoted to the preservation of slavery, had waged war against the United States for four years, the overwhelming majority of Americans insisted that no one in Richmond or the broader South had ever legally departed from the nation. They were viewed simply as armed rebels and insurgents operating from within.

Ultimately, the vast majority of Americans understood that no matter how hard Confederate apologists tried to rebrand or polish the narrative, their attempt at secession was fundamentally impossible. Although Jefferson Davis’s desk on the United States Senate floor had remained vacant throughout the war, it had never vanished. His vacant office, alongside those of his fellow secessionist lawmakers, had not disappeared; only the individual officeholders had.

The secessionists were illegitimate. The stars on the United States flag had never been reduced. The international community consistently refused to recognize the Confederate government as a sovereign entity. Their war was legally and morally treason, and their self-proclaimed country was a legal fiction.

By April 1865, the largest insurrection the United States had ever faced lay in literal ruins, with the tattered remnants of its defeated military and political leadership marching west in permanent retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated, the United States Army was prepared to lend a helping hand to neighbors in desperate need. On April 4, even the Commander-in-Chief was present to witness the aftermath, as Abraham Lincoln walked among the troops in Richmond—exhausted, yet perhaps the most jubilant of them all.