Both Jackson and Lee, dying, called for A.P. Hill. On the night of May 10, 1863, after the amputation of his left arm and the pneumonia that would kill him the next day, Stonewall Jackson — already half conscious — issued one of his last clear commands: "Order A.P. Hill to prepare for action." Hill commanded the division that had been Jackson's most active in nearly every battle since the Peninsula. Seven years later, on the night of October 12, 1870, in the final hours of his own illness, Robert E. Lee said quietly into the empty room: "Tell Hill he must come up." A.P. Hill had been dead five years. He had been killed at Petersburg on the morning of April 2, 1865, shot by a Union infantryman of the 138th Pennsylvania while trying to rally his fleeing troops six days before Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Hill was thirty-nine when he died. His III Corps after May 1863 had borne the brunt of fighting from Gettysburg through Petersburg. His Light Division before that — the unit that made him famous — had marched seventeen miles in less than eight hours from Harpers Ferry to Sharpsburg on September 17, 1862, and arrived at Antietam in the afternoon in time to drive back Burnside's IX Corps and save Lee's right flank from collapse. He was not the most talented Confederate corps commander — the chronic ill health he carried from his West Point years repeatedly affected his judgment under pressure, and his rash attack at Bristoe Station in October 1863 cost his command nearly fourteen hundred men in twenty minutes for no result. But he was the man Lee and Jackson, dying, asked for.

This W. Britain figure depicts Hill in the field uniform that made him instantly recognizable to his own men and to the enemy: the gray Confederate officer's frock coat worn open over a bright red battle shirt, dark blue trousers, high black field boots, the cavalry saber at his left hip and a Colt Army revolver holstered on his belt. The red shirt was deliberate. Hill habitually wore it going into a fight, partly as a flourish and partly because it made him visible to his own troops on a smoke-filled field. The slouch hat is held in his left hand; the paper in his right is a dispatch. His III Corps was the inheritor of Jackson's old corps after Jackson's death, and Hill made it the most active formation in the Army of Northern Virginia from Gettysburg onward — leading the Day 1 attack on McPherson's Ridge against John Buford's cavalry and the Iron Brigade, fighting through the Wilderness and Spotsylvania under Grant, and dying at last just outside Petersburg six days before Lee surrendered. Pair this figure with General Robert E. Lee, whose final delirium five years after Hill's death called for him by name; with Lt. Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, whose final clear order on his deathbed was to A.P. Hill; or with Brig. Gen. John Buford, the Union cavalry commander whose Day 1 stand at Gettysburg held off Hill's lead division on the morning of July 1, 1863.

Scale: 1/30 (60mm). Matte-painted metal. W. Britain model 31083. From the American Civil War range. Single foot figure, supplied painted and ready for display.