Rethinking the Confederacy: Connor Williams’s New Book Challenges Long-Held Myths About the Civil War

What can a deeply divided modern America learn from the historical cataclysm of the Civil War? That is the driving question behind Connor Williams’s provocative and timely new book, The Confederacy Myth. Through a blistering historical exposé, Williams reframes our national understanding of the Confederacy, stripping away romanticized notions to reveal what it truly was: a relatively small insurrection of uncompromising fanatics that plunged the nation into its deadliest conflict.

Drawing heavily upon neutral and indisputable institutional sources—including the American Battlefield Trust, the National Park Service, and the Encyclopedia Virginia—The Confederacy Myth serves simultaneously as an eye-opening work of rigorous historical scholarship and an urgent reminder of civic duty in contemporary times. To understand the depth of this historical revision, one must look back to the very moments the Confederacy collapsed, beginning in the burning streets of Richmond in the spring of 1865.

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 through the smoldering ruins of Richmond, Virginia. Around him stood thousands of other weary men, survivors of a brutal civil war that was finally entering its closing days. For four years, more than a hundred thousand Confederates had perished across Virginia attempting to defend the city from the United States military. An equal number of United States soldiers, if not more, had died trying to capture it.

They had fallen side by side on the same blood-soaked fields, in towns as distant as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the breadth of the Shenandoah Valley. They had clashed in engagements much closer to the capital as well, including 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 surpassing the combined American fatalities of every other war the nation has ever fought, before or since.

Despite the ferocious resistance mounted by Confederate forces, Richmond itself had remained largely unscathed by the physical devastation of warfare for the vast majority of the conflict, even as the surrounding Southern landscape crumbled. Throughout the war, the city had been flooded with Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men recovering from battle, and the administrative apparatus supporting the insurrectionist leadership. It had even endured an effective, grueling 292-day siege. Yet the city’s physical infrastructure had endured remarkably well, escaping the widespread calamities that engulfed other regions—right up until the bitter end.

Everything changed on April 1, 1865. In frantic preparation to retreat during the final hours of the combined sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, Confederate soldiers set fire to their remaining tobacco warehouses and vital military stores. They preferred to see the goods burn to ashes rather than leave them intact for the United States forces.

Having torched the city’s supplies, the army abandoned the town and its civilian population, carrying whatever they could within their war-weary ranks. In their absence, the fires quickly raged completely out of control. Within hours, the flames engulfed much of downtown Richmond, incinerating local industry, domestic residences, and even the Confederates’ own precious war records.

The irony was stark and palpable. Despite standing defiantly throughout the entirety of the Civil War, Richmond now closely resembled many of the territories it had once led: depleted, deserted, and utterly destroyed—and all of it brought about by the very men who had claimed to be its dedicated defenders. Two days later, stubborn fires were still smoldering despite the concerted firefighting efforts of the city’s remaining inhabitants.

Yet the exhausted men walking through the debris-filled streets that day were jubilant. Crucially, these men were neither Confederates nor rebels. Some spoke German, others communicated in Gullah, and still others expressed themselves with an Irish lilt or an Italian accent. Many hailed from the South, though not in the contemporary sense where the terms "white" and "Confederate" are often erroneously conflated.

Their military service stands as a permanent reminder that few individuals fought against the Confederacy with greater ferocity, or possessed more to lose, than the nearly two hundred thousand Black men who took up arms—at least half of whom had spent the majority of their lives bound in chattel slavery. Despite their vast differences in background, language, and status, one undeniable truth united those men in Richmond: they were all soldiers of the United States.

These soldiers had been summoned directly into Richmond by the city’s mayor—previously a fierce Confederate partisan himself—to help extinguish the raging inferno his fleeing compatriots had ignited. Those scorched-earth Confederate tactics were ultimately pathetic, serving no military purpose other than to satisfy petty spite at the direct expense of the very civilians the regime claimed to protect.

By April 1865, the United States had transformed into an industrial and logistical juggernaut, so exceptionally well-supplied that its soldiers frequently fired dozens of cannons into Confederate positions simply to produce celebratory twenty-one-gun salutes honoring distant victories across the nation.

The Union simply had the resources to spare. By that advanced stage of the war, the federal government was shipping millions of pounds of supplies and war material daily to its front lines—including a substantial tobacco ration—while its relentless military victories had reduced the Confederate forces to desperately scavenging the cartridge boxes and haversacks of their own fallen comrades.

The United States had no need for the pitiful insurrectionary scraps that the retreating Confederates set ablaze. Putting a match to their own infrastructure and placing an occupied city in extreme danger was merely the final vindictive act executed by the myopic leadership of a devastatingly deadly, yet thoroughly failed, rebellion.

Beyond the immediate physical destruction, those raging fires generated a surreal and symbolically powerful historical tableau. During Richmond’s darkest and most vulnerable hour, United States soldiers sprang directly to duty, working tirelessly to save the very secessionist stronghold they had fought so long and hard to capture. They battled blazes deliberately set by the exact same foes who had previously fortified the perimeter against them.

The so-called enemy had proven to be the city’s ultimate 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 eighty years prior, the world had truly turned upside down.

That profound irony must have resonated with exceptional force among the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers walking through the ash 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, immediately enlisting to fight for the freedom of others. They did so knowing full well that capture meant execution. Official Confederate war policy classified them as rebellious slaves engaging in insurrection—a capital crime that the white Confederate leadership punished by death.

Indeed, documented massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and the violent kidnappings of free Black civilians had already demonstrated the practically boundless cruelty directed by the Confederacy against 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 pleading for assistance to quell the conflagrations set by an abandoning insurgent army. Those soldiers could easily have been forgiven for pulling out fiddles and playing a tune while Richmond burned around them.

Despite the deeply insulting irony, those Black soldiers—and the broader United States Army—did not hesitate to render aid. Over the preceding four years, these men alongside two million of their fellow Americans, Black and white, representing East and West, and in many cases North and South, had fought and died in staggering numbers. They had shed their blood for the fundamental principle 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, they maintained the deep conviction that, in a strictly constitutional sense, Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and every other Confederate state had never actually departed from the Union in the first place. Neither the founding fathers nor the Constitution had ever made legal accommodations for unilateral, state-by-state secession.

Although nearly 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 steadfastly maintained that no one in Richmond, Virginia, or the broader South had ever legally severed their ties to the United States. They were simply rebels within the nation and insurgents against its lawful authority.

In short, the great majority of the American public understood that no matter how skillfully Confederate propagandists attempted to dress up or rebrand their cause, secession was fundamentally impossible. Although Jefferson Davis’s desk on the United States Senate floor remained vacant, it had not vanished. His empty office, alongside those formally occupied by other secessionist lawmakers, had not ceased to exist; only the treacherous officeholders had disappeared.

The secessionists were entirely 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 remained 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 forces and political leaders marching west in retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated, the United States Army stood ready and willing to extend a helping hand to neighbors in desperate need.

On that historic day of April 4, even the commander-in-chief was present to witness the scene. Abraham Lincoln walked among the troops in the fallen capital—arguably the most exhausted, yet profoundly jubilant, man of them all.