why the interest in A.P. Hill

A question via email that has been asked numerous times.  Why the interest in A.P. Hill? 

One of the first books I read about the Civil War was D.S. Freeman’s classic three volume set Lee’s Lieutenants.  For those not familiar with this masterwork, following his four volume Pulitzer prize winning biography of Robert E. Lee, Freeman set about writing a history of the Army of Northern Virginia’s high command.  The trilogy proceeds in chronological order from the first days of the War all the way to the very end at Appomattox.  Lee’s various generals — from Longstreet to Jackson to Stuart to Gordon — all make appearances and are given roles in the drama.

It is here I first encountered A.P. Hill.  Most of Lee’s generals can be distilled down to a word or a phrase or a nickname.  For example, Longstreet is Lee’s “War Horse” — reliable, dependable, solid.  Jackson can be summed up as the “eccentric genius” — difficult, yet brilliant.  Stuart is the cavalier — the superb horseman, the Knight of the Golden Spurs.

A.P. Hill had a nickname too.  Friends and family referred to him as “Powell” and his nickname during the War was “Little Powell.”  Nevertheless, that nickname only suggests a slightness of stature.  It doesn’t give a clue or key to the man like “Old War Horse” or “Old Blue Light” or “Marble Man” or “Tige.”

Hill came across to me as a sort of shadowy character.  He clearly had a volcanic temper that would erupt when he felt he had been slighted.  His fascinating personal “battle” first with Longstreet, then with Stonewall Jackson reflects that.  On the other hand, Hill was well loved by his men.  A courier remembered that “of all the generals, only A.P. Hill never failed, even during the heat of battle, to have a kindly word and perhaps a little joke for the couriers.”

As a general, Hill could be brilliant.   His career was marked by several successes — the highest among them arriving in the nick of time at Sharpsburg.  Yet to counterbalance those brilliant days, Hill had his share of bad days — the most notable being the disaster at Bristoe Station.

I came to the study of the War in the mid 1990s, one of the many people who had their interest in Civil War history ignited by the movie Gettysburg.  (Gettysburg was, of course,  not one of Hill’s better battles.)  While some people may have found their interest passed quickly, mine didn’t.  The more I read about the Civil War, the more I wanted to know.  I became entranced by the period and wanted to know everything I could.  And it was the people who intrigued me the most.  It was as if the War was a grand tragedy written by a great mind like Shakespeare, with this colorful cast of characters — rouges and villains, heroes and idols.  Yet, it was all real, it had all really happened.  You could even travel to Gettysburg and walk over the same ground that Meade and Lee had ridden over.  You could stand on Cemetery Ridge and even crouch behind the stonewall and imagine what it was like to see Pickett’s and Pettigew’s men emerge from the tree line on July 3.

I had a healthy interest in battlefield tactics, and to this day enjoy poring over maps and trying to figure out which regiment was where, how a brigade ended up where it was, of principles of war.  I like to picture battle lines in my head.  But what really captured my imagination was trying to understand the people.  How did men face fire like that and not run?  What was it really like to be there?

In 1997, I signed on to the internet for the first time and discovered there was much out there already about the Civil War.  By that time, I had developed an interest in A.P. Hill.  For whatever reason, I found that I liked this shadowy character who wore a red shirt into battle, dared to pick fights with Longstreet and Jackson, was unquestionably very brave, yet was also significantly flawed.  While there was quite a bit out on the internet about the War, I found there was precious little about A.P. Hill in the new world.

Back before everyone could have a blog and broadcast their thoughts to the world, we had websites.  Websites were also fairly easy to set up and run (though not as easy as a blog), and like blogs you could pretty much publish anything you wanted about any topic.  That said, most websites weren’t personal thought collections like many blogs or little blurbs about what the author is thinking about at any given time.  Rather, they were topical.  I thought it would be neat to give Hill a big, interesting website.  Maybe he had been forgotten, or mostly forgotten anyway, in the books, but I decided that would not be in the new electronic age.

And so I started reading about Hill and then writing about him.  The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. At first, I was more interested in Hill as a general.  But the more I learned about him, the more I wanted to know him as a person.

I wanted Hill to have a nice looking website.  So I learned first HTML, then XHTML, then CSS so I could have a decent looking website.  I studied web design a little bit.  I scanned in pictures and I kept on reading anything I could find with even just a passing reference to Hill.

My site started out small, then grew into a behemoth.  When my dad bought me a copy of the Official Records on CD-Rom, I painstakingly added the reports of not only Hill, but all his subordinates to my site.  When I received a copy of the Southern Historical Society Papers, I again carefully combed through looking for interesting articles about Hill or the men who served under him.

As an internet subject for someone’s first real history project, Hill turned out to be a good subject.  There is a good amount of information available about him, but not an insurmountable amount.   He also had enough paradoxes about him that even people who might not otherwise be interested in history could find Hill an intriguing and interesting fellow.

By the time I graduated from college in 2002, my website was mainly complete, though I still add to it from time to time when I find something interesting or read something interesting about Hill.

And so in that roundabout way, I return to the question — why A.P. Hill?  I could have picked any character — after all, there was no website about John Sedgwick or John Gordon or even of Winfield Scott Hancock.  I think I picked A.P. Hill because he was an interesting person.  Not because he was the War’s best general.  He was not.  Not because he was the War’s worst general.  He was not.  Not because he was saintly.  Hill was not.  Rather, I picked him because he human.  I liked the balance between good and bad qualities.  Human beings are not all good or all bad.  Well, at least most of us aren’t.  Most of us are a mixture of both flaws and good qualities.  In the words of Nietzsche we are “Human, All Too Human.”

Hill was definitely human.  And, I think that’s why he still interests me even today.