Book Review: The Confederate Myth: How an Insurrection of Slaveholders Tried to Destroy the United States
The Confederate Myth: How an Insurrection of Slaveholders Tried to Destroy the United States. By Connor Williams. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2026. Hardcover, 304 pp. $30.00.
Reviewed by Samuel Flowers
By the title alone, one can correctly assume that this interpretation of the American Civil War will ruffle some feathers. That being said, Connor Williams is most likely used to this kind of contention. Back in 2021-2022, he served as lead historian for the United States Congress’ Naming Commission, which changed the names of several military bases from their original Confederate namesakes. This book seeks, in some ways, to provide a deeper explanation and exposé of the former rebellion and what most of the public seems to get wrong.
Confederate Myth is not the first book in the historiography of debunking Lost Cause myths, but it certainly adds to the existing scholarship by Gary Gallagher, Alan Nolan, Edward Bonekemper, and David Blight. Although one may argue that the recent scholarship is saturated with subjects of Lost Cause or memory, Williams seeks to salvage a memory of the conflict that seems to be bubbling beneath the surface of Southern nostalgia. According to Williams, Confederate Myth argues that the Lost Cause radically concealed major tenets of why secession occurred, how the South was governed and waged war, and how vital slavery was to its survival. The introduction aims to change the public’s perception of the Confederacy. Instead of a Southern independence movement fighting valiantly for state sovereignty, Williams deems it a fringe-led slaveholder insurrection that pursued a violent defense of chattel slavery.
The book is divided into five chapters and a conclusion that outlines the basic myths of the Lost Cause. The first two chapters focus on the buildup to the Secession Crisis and the crisis itself. Williams starts off by arguing that the Lost Cause idea of the South being trampled by an abusive federal government is flawed due to the political and legal benefits that the United States provided to the institution of slavery. Rather than focusing solely on the secession documents to explain why the Confederacy was formed, the author debunks the myth that secession was a legal option for the Southern states. To do this, Williams lays out the pre-war opinions of the doctrines of nullification and secession, ranging from James Madison and Andrew Jackson to the failed Nashville Convention of 1850. These, according to Williams, argue that the concept of leaving the Union was considered unconstitutional and illegal by both the Framers and other nineteenth-century contemporaries.
The third chapter examines the respective strategies of the Confederacy and the United States, stating that the United States’ evolution toward emancipation was just as significant as military attrition and policies toward prisoner exchanges. Williams, in Chapter Four, focuses more on the war itself and states that Confederate victories, although substantial, were greatly disproportionate to the Union military’s success across all theaters. The last chapter looks at the legitimacy, or lack thereof, according to Williams, of the Confederacy as a nation. Williams understands that the Lost Cause seeks to argue that the Confederacy, as a rebellion, should be seen as legitimate, like the colonists of the American Revolution, but disagrees. In both the introduction and the final chapter, he asserts that this comparison is flawed, given that the British did not recognize the United States until the war ended in 1783, not 1776.
In conclusion, Confederate Myth explicitly seeks to debunk Lost Cause myths, almost to the point where it can be speculated that Williams is writing from a biased and political standpoint. Although this is more than likely bound to occur and will elicit some discomfort, this book seeks to probe both the public and historians about what exactly our priors are about the history of the Confederacy, what it stood for, and how it is remembered. The Lost Cause, even in the twenty-first century, continues to shape understandings of secession, strategy, motivation, leadership, and nation-state legitimacy. Connor Williams is blunt in recognizing the Confederacy as nothing short of a slaveholder’s insurrection but still asks the reader to nationally regain the memory of the war and examine the nation’s most tumultuous era through the sources and quotes of those who lived it.
Confederate Myth will be released in mid-October 2026.
If this author really does try to pretend that legality of secession was settled prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Texas v White, 74 US 700 (1869), and claims the Framers considered it to be so, I hope he explains how the New England states threatened James Madison with secession over his decision to invade Canada in the War of 1812. The generation that drafted, debated and ratified the Constitution –including Madison–was still alive and clearly there were leaders in those states who didn’t consider it “unconstitutional and illegal.” If he claims this was NOT a hotly debated issue of Con Law in the 9th century, he is as reliable a “historian” as Nicole Hannah-Jones. Which is to say, not at all. As a Government major and graduate of a Top 10 law school, I believe it was not legal, but any claim that the argument was some kind of baseless fiction cooked up by southerners during the Secession Crisis is itself baseless fiction. Based on this review, and the author’s own past, I’d put this slop up there with “The 1619 Project.”
Agreed. More woke drivel.