A.P. Hill: The Red Battle Shirt, a Hidden Illness and a Standing Burial

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Ambrose Powell Hill Jr. was born in 1825 in Culpeper, Virginia, into a planter family whose wealth rested on enslaved labor. At West Point he clashed with his rigid classmate Thomas Jackson, and on an 1844 furlough he contracted gonorrhea, forcing him to repeat a year. The infection was never cured and left him with chronic prostatitis, urethral strictures and kidney damage that shadowed his career. This episode follows Hill from a broken engagement to Ellen Marcy, who later married his roommate George McClellan, to command of the Light Division, which marched without coats, knapsacks or wagons to move faster than any other Confederate force.

Hill challenged James Longstreet to a duel, was arrested repeatedly by Stonewall Jackson, and saved Lee's army at Antietam after a 17-mile forced march from Harpers Ferry. As a corps commander his record faltered at Fredericksburg, Gettysburg and the Wilderness, and the episode weighs the Peter Principle against the effects of uremia. Killed at Petersburg on April 2, 1865, he left a will asking to be buried standing up. His remains sat beneath a Richmond statue in a traffic intersection for over 130 years until they were moved to Culpeper in 2023.

• Soldiers who saw Hill pull on his red calico shirt said Little Powell had his battle shirt on and began fixing bayonets.
• After Antietam, Hill joked that Ambrose Burnside owed him $8,000 for making his men march so fast.
• At Fredericksburg he left a 600-yard gap in a swampy wood, and George Meade's troops broke through it.
• Corporal John W. Mauk of the 138th Pennsylvania fired the shot that killed Hill at age 39, one week before Appomattox.
• Fort A.P. Hill was renamed Fort Walker in 2023 under a Defense Department directive on Confederate base names.