Rethinking the Civil War: Connor Williams’s The Confederacy Myth Exposes the Reality of Secession

What can Americans learn about our divided country today from the Civil War that divided us in the past?

Connor Williams’s The Confederacy Myth answers that pressing question with a blistering historical exposé that reframes our understanding of the Confederacy. Moving past long-standing romanticized notions, the book examines what the Confederacy truly was: a relatively small insurrection of uncompromising fanatics that plunged the nation into its deadliest war. Citing the most neutral and indisputable sources possible—including the American Battlefield Trust, the National Park Service, and the Encyclopedia Virginia—The Confederacy Myth serves as both an eye-opening work of history and a timely reminder of the duties of citizenship today.

Below is an in-depth look at the book’s introduction, exploring the dramatic fall of Richmond and the enduring lessons of America’s greatest constitutional crisis.

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 smoking, broken ruins of Richmond, Virginia.

Surrounding him stood thousands of other exhausted men, 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 United States soldiers, if not more, had perished trying to take it. They had fallen on the same blood-soaked fields, in towns as far off as Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and throughout the Shenandoah Valley. They had also fought and died 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 lay dead—a staggering toll that exceeded the combined totals of every other war the United States has ever fought, both before and since.

Throughout it all, sustained by ferocious Confederate resistance, Richmond itself had remained largely unscathed by the direct destruction of warfare, even while the surrounding Southern landscape crumbled. During the conflict, the city had been swamped by Confederate soldiers on furlough, wounded men in recovery, and the administrative apparatus supporting the leadership of the insurrection. It had even endured an effective 292-day-long siege. Nevertheless, the structural city had endured remarkably well. In a region otherwise devastated by rebellion, Richmond had managed to escape the physical calamities that engulfed most everywhere else—right up until the very end.

Yet on April 1, 1865, in preparation for a desperate retreat during the final hours of the sieges of Richmond and Petersburg, retreating Confederate soldiers set fire to many of their remaining tobacco warehouses and military stores. Preferring to see the supplies burn rather than fall into the hands of the United States, they torched the assets 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 flames engulfed much of the downtown district, incinerating industry, homes, and even the Confederates’ own war records. The irony was practically palpable: Despite standing defiantly throughout the Civil War, Richmond suddenly resembled many of the lands it had once led—depleted, deserted, and destroyed, all due to the reckless actions of the men who had claimed to be its ultimate defenders. Two days later, stubborn fires were still smoldering despite the desperate efforts of firefighters and citizens to combat them.

Despite the devastation, the men walking through the debris-filled streets that day were jubilant.

Significantly, the troops walking through Richmond 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 narrow sense that equates the term "white" with "Confederate." Instead, their service stands as a powerful reminder that few individuals fought against the Confederacy with more ferocity, or with more at stake, than the close to two hundred thousand Black men—at least half of whom had lived most of their lives under the brutal system of enslavement—who took up arms for the Union. Regardless of their diverse backgrounds and languages, one undeniable bond united the men in Richmond that day: They were all soldiers of the United States.

These Union soldiers had been called into Richmond by the city’s mayor—formerly a fierce Confederate himself—to help put out the catastrophic fires that his fleeing allies had deliberately set. Those scorched-earth Confederate tactics were ultimately pathetic, serving no military purpose other than to satisfy a bitter spite, to the direct detriment of the very civilians they had pledged to protect. By April 1865, the United States had evolved into an industrial and military juggernaut, so well-supplied that its soldiers could afford to fire dozens of artillery pieces into Confederate positions simply to serve as celebratory twenty-one-gun salutes for victories won elsewhere across the nation.

The Union simply had no need for the meager insurrectionary scraps that the fleeing Confederates set ablaze. Putting the match to those stores and placing an entire town in grave danger was the final vindictive act by the myopic leadership of a devastatingly deadly, yet clearly failed, insurrection.

Beyond the physical destruction, those fires created a surreal and symbolically powerful moment: During Richmond’s darkest hour, United States soldiers sprang directly to duty. They now sought to save the secessionist stronghold they had struggled so long to capture, fighting fires started by the very foes who had once fought to fortify it. The so-called enemy had proven to be the city’s saviors, while its would-be protectors had nearly reduced it to ashes. Just like British Lord Cornwallis’s defeat at nearby Yorktown a little more than eighty years earlier, the world had truly turned upside down.

That profound irony must have resonated especially deeply with the Black, formerly enslaved United States soldiers now walking through the rubble. Legally declared "then, thenceforward, and forever free" by the Emancipation Proclamation, many of these men had physically liberated themselves by making their way to United States Army lines and immediately enlisting to fight for the freedom of others. They did so knowing full well that if captured, they would face execution. Confederate war policy officially classified them as rebelling slaves engaging in insurrection—a crime that the white Confederate leadership punished with death.

Indeed, massacres of surrendering Black soldiers and the kidnapping of free Black civilians had already demonstrated the boundless nature of Confederate cruelties against 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 cases, the very citizens who had once enslaved them—was asking for assistance in quelling the conflagrations that the retreating insurgent army had started. Those soldiers could easily have been forgiven for pulling out fiddles and playing a cheerful tune while Richmond burned.

Yet despite the insulting irony, those Black soldiers—and the United States Army more broadly—did not hesitate to help. After all, over 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 cases from both North and South, had fought and died in horrific numbers. They had done so to defend 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 would not vanish from the earth.

Furthermore, these troops believed that in a strictly constitutional sense, Richmond, the surrounding Old Dominion, and all the other Confederate states had never actually left the Union in the first place. Neither the framers of the Constitution nor the document itself ever made legal 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 years, the great majority of Americans maintained that no one in Richmond, Virginia, or the broader South had ever legally severed ties with the nation. They were viewed simply as rebels against America and insurgents operating from within its borders.

In short, the vast majority of Americans understood a fundamental truth: no matter how skillfully Confederates attempted to rebrand or present their cause, secession was legally impossible. Although Jefferson Davis’s desk on the United States Senate floor had remained vacant throughout the war, it had not vanished. His vacant office, along with others formerly occupied by Southern representatives, had not disappeared; only the officeholders had. The secessionists were illegitimate. The United States flag had not shed a single star. The international community never recognized the Confederacy as a legitimate sovereign nation. Their war was 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 soldiers and leadership marching west in retreat. With their constitutional vision fully vindicated, the United States Army stood ready and willing to lend a helping hand to neighbors in desperate need. On April 4, even the commander-in-chief was on hand to witness the historic moment. On that day, Abraham Lincoln walked among them through the streets of Richmond—the most exhausted, and perhaps the most jubilant, of them all.