By the morning of May 1, 1863, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was nearly surrounded. Joseph Hooker had marched 70,000 men around Lee's flank to Chancellorsville and was bringing the rest of the Army of the Potomac up against the Confederate line at Fredericksburg. Lee had perhaps 60,000 men available — barely two thirds of Hooker's force, and even those were split between two positions twelve miles apart. Every principle of military doctrine called for Lee to retreat south, reunite his army, and fight on better terms. What he did instead was unprecedented. He left ten thousand men under Jubal Early at Fredericksburg to pin Hooker's southern force in place with a token defense, and turned the rest of his army west to face Hooker's flanking column directly. Outnumbered nearly two to one, Lee then divided his army again. He sent Jackson's corps of twenty-eight thousand men on a fourteen-mile flank march around Hooker's right, retaining only seventeen thousand to face Hooker's main body of seventy thousand. There was no theoretical justification for it. If Hooker had attacked Lee's holding force, the war could have ended in an afternoon. Hooker did not attack. Lee had calculated correctly that Hooker, having surrendered the initiative by stopping to consolidate the day before, would not seize it back. On the evening of May 2, Jackson's flank attack struck Hooker's XI Corps from the west and rolled it up in three hours. The Army of Northern Virginia, outnumbered, had won the most one-sided operational victory of the war. Lee later called it his greatest mistake — because it cost him Jackson, shot the same night returning from reconnaissance by his own pickets, dead within eight days. The operational masterpiece broke Lee's command structure for the rest of the war. This W. Britain figure depicts Lee mounted on Traveller, his primary horse for the duration of the war. Traveller was a gray American Saddlebred born in 1857 in Greenbrier County, Virginia, originally named "Jeff Davis" by his first owner, and acquired by Lee in February 1862 for around two hundred dollars. He was sixteen hands high, deep-chested, surefooted, and famously hard-mouthed — Lee was the only person who handled him easily. Traveller carried Lee at every major engagement from the Seven Days through Appomattox. He spooked exactly once in Lee's presence: at Second Bull Run on August 30, 1862, when artillery fire startled him and Lee was thrown, fracturing both bones in his right wrist and requiring him to direct the Maryland Campaign that followed with his arm in a sling. After the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Lee rode Traveller back through the Confederate lines as his army cheered him; he kept the horse for the rest of his life. Traveller outlived Lee by less than a year — he stepped on a rusty nail in 1871 and died of tetanus. Lee himself wears the standard Confederate general's gray frock coat with the three stars-in-wreath of a full general on the collar, the wide black slouch hat, and the buff sash — the same iconic kit as the foot figure, here in active command from the saddle. Pair this figure with Lt. Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson Mounted on Little Sorrel, the corps commander Lee sent on the fourteen-mile flank march at Chancellorsville and lost the same night — a matched pair of Confederate commanders on their named horses; with Maj. Gen. Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker, the Union commander whose Chancellorsville plan Lee broke; or with Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant Mounted on Cincinnati, the opposite number Lee surrendered to at Appomattox — completing a matched mounted trio of the war's two commanding generals and Lee's most trusted subordinate, each on his named warhorse. Scale: 1/30 (60mm). Matte-painted metal. W. Britain model 31451. From the American Civil War range. Single mounted figure, supplied painted and ready for display.
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