Reframing the Civil War: New Book ‘The Confederacy Myth’ Challenges Long-Held Misconceptions About the South’s Insurrection

What can contemporary Americans learn about a deeply divided nation today from the Civil War that fractured the country in the past?

That central, pressing question drives historian Connor Williams’s new work, The Confederacy Myth. Offering a blistering historical exposé, the book reframes our collective understanding of the Confederacy, stripping away romanticized myths to reveal what the movement truly was: a relatively small-scale insurrection of uncompromising fanatics that plunged the United States into its deadliest and most catastrophic war.

Drawing heavily upon neutral, indisputable sources—including the American Battlefield Trust, the National Park Service, and the Encyclopedia Virginia—The Confederacy Myth functions simultaneously as an eye-opening work of rigorous history and a timely reminder of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship today.

To understand the core of the argument, one must look back to the dying days of the conflict, a moment rich in irony, destruction, and ultimate vindication for the Union.

Introduction: Victory

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 terrible civil war that was finally entering its closing days. For four grueling years, more than one hundred thousand Confederate soldiers had died across Virginia, fighting desperately to defend the city from the advancing forces of the United States. Just as many United States soldiers—if not more—had perished trying to capture it.

They had fallen side by side on the same bloody fields, in Virginia towns as far off as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the sprawling Shenandoah Valley. They had clashed in places agonizingly close to the capital as well: 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—a grim total that exceeded the combined casualties of every other war the United States has ever fought, both before and since.

Throughout the vast majority of the struggle, and owing to ferocious Confederate resistance, Richmond itself remained remarkably unscathed by the physical devastation of warfare, even as the surrounding southern landscape crumbled into ruin. During the course of the conflict, the city had been swamped by Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men recovering in makeshift hospitals, and the sprawling bureaucratic apparatus supporting the insurrectionist leadership. It had even endured an effective 292-day-long siege by Union forces.

Nevertheless, the structural integrity of the city endured incredibly well. In a region deeply scarred and devastated by rebellion, Richmond had somehow managed to escape the physical calamities that engulfed almost everywhere else—at least, right up until the very end.

But on April 1, 1865, as part of a desperate preparation to retreat during the final hours of the combined sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, retreating Confederate soldiers made a fateful decision. They deliberately set fire to many of their remaining tobacco warehouses and vital military stores, preferring to see them burn to ash rather than fall into the hands of the United States and remain useful to the enemy.

Having torched their own stockpiles, the Confederate forces abandoned the town and its civilian population, carrying whatever supplies they could within their war-ravaged ranks. In their absence, the intentionally set fires quickly raged entirely out of control. Within a matter of hours, the inferno had engulfed much of the downtown district, incinerating local industry, domestic homes, and ironically, the Confederates’ own official war records.

The historical irony was practically palpable. Despite standing defiantly throughout the entirety of the Civil War, Richmond suddenly resembled many of the southern lands it had once led: depleted, deserted, and utterly destroyed—and all of this brought about not by Union bombardment, but by the direct actions of the men who had long claimed to be its fierce defenders. Two days later, stubborn fires were still smoldered across the landscape, defying the best efforts of firefighters to combat them.

Yet the exhausted men walking through the smoking streets that day were jubilant.

Significantly, the men walking through Richmond on that historic day were not Confederates. They were not rebels. They were a diverse tapestry of humanity. Some spoke German, others communicated in Gullah, and still others expressed themselves with a distinct Irish lilt or an Italian accent.

Many of them were Southerners—though not in the traditional, exclusionary sense of the term where "white" and "Confederate" are automatically conflated. Instead, their presence and service served 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 yoke of enslavement.

Regardless of their varied backgrounds and differences, one undeniable aspect united those men in Richmond: they were all proud soldiers of the United States.

These Union soldiers had actually been called into the burning city by Richmond’s mayor—formerly a fierce Confederate himself—in a desperate plea to put out the raging fires that his fleeing political and military allies had started. Those "scorched earth" Confederate tactics were utterly pathetic, serving no legitimate military purpose other than to satisfy petty spite at the direct expense of the very civilians the Confederacy had claimed to be fighting to protect.

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

They could easily afford such displays of abundance. By that late stage of the war, the United States government was sending its soldiers millions of pounds of essential supplies and war materiel on a daily basis—including a substantial daily tobacco ration. Meanwhile, Union victories and blockades had reduced their Confederate enemies to desperately scavenging the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own slain comrades just to keep fighting.

The United States simply had no need for the insurrectionary scraps that the departing Confederates set ablaze. Putting a match to them and placing the civilian town in grave danger was nothing more than the final vindictive act executed by the myopic leadership of a devastatingly deadly, but clearly failed, insurrection.

Beyond the sheer physical destruction they caused, those uncontrolled fires also created a surreal and symbolically powerful moment: during Richmond’s darkest and most vulnerable hour, United States soldiers sprang directly to duty. They actively sought to save the very secessionist stronghold they had struggled so long and hard to capture, fighting valiantly to extinguish fires started by the exact same foes who had formerly fought to fortify it.

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

That profound irony undoubtedly resonated most deeply with the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers who were 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 knew all too well that if they were captured by Confederate forces, they would not be treated as regular prisoners of war; instead, Confederate policy mandated their execution, charging them as rebellious slaves engaging in insurrection—a crime that the actual white leaders of the insurrection punished with immediate death.

Indeed, horrific massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and the violent kidnappings of free Black civilians had already demonstrated the practically boundless nature of Confederate cruelties directed against Americans of color. For those Black Americans, every single military engagement had literally been a fight to the survival.

Yet now, the very city that had institutionalized and perpetuated that cruel policy—and in some instances, the very individual citizens who had once claimed ownership over them—was actively asking for assistance in quelling the conflagrations that their own fleeing insurgent army had ignited. Those Black soldiers could easily have been forgiven for breaking out musical instruments and playing a tune while Richmond burned around them.

Yet despite this biting and insulting irony, those Black soldiers—and the broader United States Army as a whole—did not hesitate to render aid. After all, over the preceding four years, these men and two million of their fellow United States peers, spanning Black and white, east and west, North and South, had fought and died in staggering, horrific numbers. They had done so not for personal glory, but for 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 shall not perish from the earth.

Furthermore, they firmly believed that in a strict constitutional sense, Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion of Virginia, and all the other rebel states had never actually left the Union in the first place. This was because neither the founding fathers nor the Constitution itself had ever made any legal accommodations or provisions for a unilateral, state-by-state secession.

Although close to a million Confederate soldiers, driven by a fanatical devotion to the preservation of chattel slavery, had waged war against the United States for four bloody years, the great majority of loyal Americans maintained that no one in Richmond, the rest of Virginia, or anywhere else in the South had ever legally departed from the United States. They were viewed simply as armed rebels against America and dangerous insurgents operating from within it.

In short, the vast majority of citizens understood a fundamental truth: no matter how skillfully Confederates tried to polish or present their political rhetoric, their secession was soundly, legally 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 all the other legislative offices formerly occupied by southern secessionists, had not disappeared; only the individual officeholders had fled.

The secessionists were fundamentally illegitimate. The United States flag had not shed a single star to accommodate them. The international community consistently refused to recognize their short-lived government. Their entire war effort was, at its legal core, treason. And their self-proclaimed country was nothing more than a dangerous legal fiction.

By April 1865, the greatest domestic insurrection the United States had ever faced lay in literal ruins, with the tattered remnants of its defeated soldiers and discredited leaders marching despondently west in retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated by history, the United States Army was ready and willing to extend a helping hand to neighbors in profound need.

On April 4, even their commander-in-chief was personally on hand to witness and assist in the unfolding reality. On that momentous day, Abraham Lincoln walked among the troops and the citizens in the ruined capital—arguably the most exhausted, yet profoundly jubilant, man of them all.