Reframing the Past: How Connor Williams’s ‘The Confederacy Myth’ Challenges Our Understanding of the Civil War

What can Americans learn about a deeply divided nation today by examining the Civil War that tore the country apart in the past?

This is the central question explored in Connor Williams’s new book, The Confederacy Myth. Offering a blistering historical exposé, Williams reframes our understanding of the Confederacy, stripping away romanticized notions to reveal what it truly was: a relatively small insurrection of uncompromising fanatics that plunged the United States into its deadliest conflict. Grounding his work in neutral and indisputable sources—such as the National Park Service, the American Battlefield Trust, and the Encyclopedia Virginia—Williams delivers an eye-opening historical study that also serves as a timely reminder of civic duty in the modern era.

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 quietly through the smoke-choked ruins of Richmond, Virginia.

All around him stood thousands of other weary men, survivors of a catastrophic civil war that was finally entering its closing days. For four long years, more than a hundred thousand Confederate soldiers had died across Virginia attempting to defend the city from the United States military. An equal number of United States soldiers, if not more, had perished trying to capture it. They had fallen on the very same fields, in Virginia towns as distant 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 lost their lives during the conflict. This staggering death toll exceeded the combined casualties of every other war the United States had ever fought before and since.

Yet, despite the ferocious nature of the fighting and the proximity of the battlefields, Richmond itself had remained largely unscathed throughout most of the war while the surrounding Southern landscape crumbled. The city had served as a bustling hub, swamped by Confederate soldiers on furlough, recovering wounded men, and the vast network of individuals supporting the leadership of the insurrection. It had even endured an effective, grueling 292-day siege. Remarkably, the structural integrity of the city endured. In a region otherwise devastated by rebellion, Richmond had managed to escape the physical calamities that engulfed nearly everywhere else—right up until the final moments of the war.

That fragile preservation ended abruptly on April 1, 1865. In preparation for a hasty retreat during the dying hours of the joint sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, Confederate soldiers set fire to many of their remaining tobacco warehouses and military stores. Rather than allow these vital supplies to fall into the hands of the advancing United States forces, they preferred to see them burn. The retreating army then abandoned the town and its civilian population, carrying whatever they could within their war-weary ranks.

In their absence, the fires quickly raged out of control. Within hours, the blazes engulfed much of the downtown district, incinerating industry, domestic structures, and even the Confederates’ own war records. The irony was 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 destroyed. And this devastation was brought about not by invading armies, but by the very men who had claimed to be the city’s protectors. Two days later, stubborn fires were still smoldering despite the frantic firefighting efforts of residents and incoming troops.

The exhausted men walking through the debris-filled streets on April 4 were jubilant, but they were not Confederates. They were not rebels. Their backgrounds were remarkably diverse; 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 narrow sense that falsely equates "white" with "Confederate." Their service serves as a powerful reminder that few individuals fought against the Confederacy with greater ferocity, or with more at stake, than the close to two hundred thousand Black men who took up arms, at least half of whom had lived the majority of their lives under the brutal system of chattel slavery.

Despite their varied backgrounds, one definitive bond united these men as they marched through Richmond: they were all United States soldiers.

These troops had been called into the city by Richmond’s mayor—formerly a fierce Confederate partisan himself—to extinguish the raging fires that his fleeing compatriots had deliberately ignited. Those "scorched earth" Confederate tactics were ultimately pathetic, serving no military purpose other than to satisfy a petty desire for destruction at the direct expense of the very civilians the secessionist leadership claimed to be fighting for.

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

The federal forces simply had no need for the meager insurrectionary scraps that the retreating Confederates set ablaze. Putting a match to those stores and placing the civilian population in grave danger was nothing more than 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 hour, United States soldiers sprang to duty, striving desperately to save the very secessionist stronghold they had fought so long and hard to capture. They were fighting fires started by the soldiers who had once fortified the city. The designated enemy had suddenly become the city’s savior, while its self-proclaimed protectors had nearly reduced it to ashes. Just like British General Lord Cornwallis’s historic defeat at nearby Yorktown a little more than eighty years prior, the world had been turned upside down.

That profound irony must have resonated with particular force for the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers walking through the 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 understood the stakes: if captured by Confederate forces, they faced immediate execution. Official Confederate war policy classified them as rebellious slaves engaging in insurrection—a capital crime that the white Confederacy punished by death.

Indeed, documented massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and the kidnapping of free Black civilians had already demonstrated the boundless cruelty of Confederate policies toward Americans of color. For these Black soldiers, every engagement was literally a fight to the death. Yet now, the very city that had institutionalized that murderous policy—and in some cases, the very citizens who had once held them in bondage—was asking for assistance in quelling the inferno started by its own fleeing army. Those soldiers could easily have been forgiven for breaking out fiddles and playing a tune while Richmond burned around them.

Yet despite the bitter irony, those Black soldiers—and the broader United States Army—did not hesitate to help. For the preceding four years, these men and two million of their fellow United States soldiers, Black and white, from the East and the West, and in some instances even from the North and the South, had fought and died in staggering numbers. They had shed their blood for the foundational principles that the Union was perpetual, that secession was entirely illegal, and that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth.

Furthermore, these soldiers maintained a firm constitutional conviction: Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and every other seceded state had never actually left the Union in a legal sense. Neither the framers of the Constitution nor the document itself had ever made accommodations for a unilateral, state-by-state dissolution of the country. Even though 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 years, the overwhelming majority of Americans insisted that no one in Richmond, Virginia, or the wider South had ever legally departed the nation. They were merely rebels and insurgents operating from within.

The vast majority of Americans understood a fundamental truth: no matter how skillfully the Confederacy attempted to rebrand or present its cause, secession was legally impossible. Although Jefferson Davis’s desk on the United States Senate floor remained vacant, it had not vanished. His vacant office, alongside others previously occupied by Southern politicians, had not disappeared; only the officeholders had fled. The secessionists were fundamentally illegitimate. The United States flag had not shed a single star, the international community steadfastly refused to recognize the Confederacy, their war was an act of 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 remnants of its defeated military and political leadership marching desperately west in retreat. With their vision fully vindicated, the United States Army was ready, willing, and able to lend a helping hand to a neighbor in crisis. On April 4, even the commander-in-chief was on hand to witness the moment, as Abraham Lincoln walked the streets of Richmond among the troops—exhausted, yet perhaps the most jubilant of them all.