15mm ACW Georgia Brigade from Various Manufacturers

 I've not yet put up much of my ACW collection. Apart from Sword and the Flame, this was my second big productive push into wargaming, but with multi-figure basing. They were built for Johnny Reb - five stands a regiment, with the number of figures on each stand indicating how many men in the regiment. 

Stuart chose the Union, I, the Confederates. We did mostly meeting encounter games with the hook being that we could use whatever we had painted up. So it was a mad arms race. He had Berdan's sharpshooters fielded fairly quickly, and then he was going to build massive 1000-man regiments for sheer staying power. Luckily, he never did the latter, but Berdan's held their own against units much bigger than themselves. Otherwise, it was mostly even with a mix of artillery and probably too much cavalry. Like our historical predecessors, we had trouble finding space to make cavalry effective over Stuart's stunningly large table, adorned with an equally large Geo-Hex collection. I wish we had pics of some of those games - they were marvelous in appearance, as I recall it. 

Until my Fresno group in the 2000s, all my gaming was with Stu in the 80s and 90s. We mostly did Colonials: Sudan, FFL, and Zulu War), ACW, French and Indian War, and a little WW2 with Command Decision towards the end. Whatever had a stirring movie attached - Khartoum, March or Die, Zulu/Zulu Dawn, Gettysburg/Glory, Last of the Mohicans. Being a horse and musket guy, I don't consider WW2 one of "my" periods, but too many to name. 

What moved us away from unpainted Airfix ACW battles was the 1988 release of the Essex American Civil War line, which I fell in love with immediately. Confederettes and Minifigs were around, but these Essex models had such clean, crisp castings and multiple different poses. Jessica at Viking Hobby had plenty in stock and we bought up all we could. 

I had had experience painting arabs, legionnaires, dervishes, etc, but doing properly uniformed troops was new and the painting references were few and far between in these pre-Internet days. Stu and I both just created generic units organized by brand and the action the unit was taking - marching, firing, charging, etc. We didn't bother trying to create particular regiments unless the figure sculpts demanded it like the Iron Brigade. After the movie Glory, I did the 54th Massachusetts and three other black regiments, erroneously brigading them together. They never saw tabletop combat, unfortunately. We also were under the apprehension that zoave uniforms were common in regimental strengths instead of the more typical company-level strengths. I'm sure we would have caught this had we done more reading, but we were teens with no mentors other than the glossy wargames mags from the UK.

As for brigades, it was pretty loosey-goosey. I never thought of numbering any of the regiments, just called them all (as in this case) "Georgia Regiments" or just a generic Confederate regiment. Whatever I painted was in one brigade until I had enough to form a second one. I mostly had 4-5 regiments per brigade of various strengths. In any event, here is the first unit I ever completed: a "500-man" zoave-like regiment that I used a lot of drybrushing and washes on. I got better very quickly, but this one was in every battle we ever fought. 

500 Essex Zoaves

I don't remember where I got the uniform reference for this one, but I'm sure Georgia never fielded anything similar at any time during the war, before or after.

This one was painted much later; perhaps it was the last one I painted before moving off to college. I guess that because the painting is much better though I don't have any particular memory of it. 

500 Old Glory Charging

Even while our enthusiasm with Essex was still high, Old Glory 15s came out and dominated my attention ever after. Sure, the bayos are ridiculous, but the animation, the dynamism, the period hair, the sheer variety of individual soldiers was, until then, unheard of. There may be a duplicate figure in here, but I doubt it. I doubt it for most of the OG units. 

Plus, one could make each stand a diorama of its own and we both really focused in on telling a story with each base - not so much with Minifigs units or some of the other brands out there. We collected everything: Stone Mountain, Battle Honours, Frontier, Freikorps too. The more the merrier. 

Some details of this Old Glory unit:

I was convinced Confederate slouch hats were mostly gray like their uniforms. I wouldn't do that today, nor would I make the tunics and pants so matchy-matchy. I notice I was a very tidy painter with this unit in particular. 

These have already been featured on this blog, but they are a part of the Georgia force, so I include them for completeness. These were finished somewhere in the middle, not the first, nor the last. 

Next are a result of the arms race nature of our competition: I needed more forces, but the bigger regiments took too long. They may also be driven by the number of figures I had on hand - especially for this Essex Unit. 8 figure a bag? Looks about right. 

The Essex command in great coats didn't exist or was sold out?

Minifigs drums and flag/officer. I would not leave it black in the flag folds like this today. Thin your paints, bro! White is much easier to handle today than it was then. 

Finally, another small stinker of a unit to round out the brigade: 

Most flags were hand-painted in those days (though that first OG one was painted over a highly pixelated print). Georgia got off easy and her colors mostly look fine - I have a lot of other errors cemented in place in the other brigades. 

A Texas and a North? South? Carolina brigade are awaiting photography, as are some stray regiments and cavalry - more to come! 

As always, thanks for looking - questions, comments and followers are welcome and encouraged! I'm doing more and more on Facebook so follow my page there too! https://www.facebook.com/One-of-My-Men-Became-Restless-100659928063858

Autumn Morning at Antietam

Rather than loafing about this Saturday morning, I took the 80-minute drive up to Harper's Ferry to tour some famous locations from War of Rights, er, the American Civil War. 

Harper's Ferry was pretty crowded by 8:30, such that I couldn't get a parking space, and thus couldn't take any pictures. It has some of the spots seen in War of Rights, and I took a ridiculously narrow road up to the church up the hill. The stone stairs are there; the walled churchyard has a large ruin in it that is not in the game, and I was almost certain I wasn't supposed to be where I was, given how narrow the street was. And I don't have a big car and thought I'd need to do some hairy, three-point turns just to take a corner. If you've been there, you may know it. I couldn't see an easy way to get to where the cemetery should have been, so I carried on back to the main street, Shenandoah Street.

Since I couldn't find parking, I couldn't take the walking trail up to the railway split. Yes, there's more Visitor Parking out of town a bit with a free shuttle, but I didn't see enough to make me want to take all that time. So I fell back to Bolivar for a lovely breakfast before taking a different route into town to see what else I could see. There's a Civil War-themed street (Potomac?), but everything was still closed my second time through. No worries, cute town, glad I saw it. On to Antietam!

Burnside's Bridge was my first target. Lovely morning, very few people around.

This is from the defensive positions on the Confederate side of the bridge

Still on the CSA side - it really is striking how narrow this thing is - an absolute funnel of death.

From the bridge looking up the embankment. In WoR, it's a good position to hide from Union artillery

In WoR, this is covered in brush and trees and where you want to position a confederate unit to prevent Union incursions to this side of the river. 

The tops are just wood.

Here's where many CSA units congregate when Union units make their push. It usually has piles of bodies all over it.

The scyamore - witness to history - still standing and healthy.

From the Union side

Good resource for painting stone work - very valuable since it doesn't say ALAMY all over it. 

Next, I drive over to the Sunken Road/Bloody Lane: 

More excellent stonework references - note the tops are flat. 

There are a number of names for this type of fencing that are so common in the DMV and Pennsylvania areas. Split rail, worm, snake or buck and rail. The last is probably most associated with these with the Xs at the corners. There'll be a lot of good resource pics below for modelers out there. 

One thing hard to see unless you are right on top of them is how tight the angle is. As a hobbyist I want to imply lengths of fencing while using as few materials as possible. That usually means from a top-down view, it's more flat than jagged. In reality, the angles are closer to 60 degrees, which would make the width of a fence base very thick indeed, requiring an awful lot of rails.

Sorry - finger in the frame at top left!

Here are some shots for the modelers who want a better sense of the construction of these fences. Recall I did a tutorial here. My angles are not as tight and I would paint them entirely differently today. I also recall fiddling with the X-beams, but I couldn't figure out how to model the ends so they could be connected to the fence next to it, so I opted for simpler versions. 

Fences are not brown. Wood is often not brown. If the sculpting is detailed enough, this looks like a Black/brown (ProAcryl?) with a light gray dry brushed over it.  

From here I head over to Dunker/Dunkard Church.

Patches of "rough terrain" - Note to self: get some rust colored tufts. It's important that gamer/modelers go outside once in a while and observe the colors and textures one sees in nature. Even I don't get grass quite right. 

Oh bugger! And on No Kings day too. 

Seeing this thing for the first time with my own eyes was quite an experience. 50 years ago I saw the famous image of this church in half the Civil War books I had and would pick up over the years. Amazing to think they were selling ice cream and sandwiches out of it in the 1950-60s. 

Seriously, god bless the American Battlefield Trust and all the preservationists who raise money and maintain this and all the historic sites around the country. Without these good folks fighting to save these places, we'd be allowing future generations to forget, not through malice, but simply because the evidence of our history would be paved over and gone.

I don;t know if the doors are normally open, but I did get some terrible shots through the window as I wound my way around the place. 

One last look ...

As I alluded, this was just a quick jaunt to see the highlights. I saw the Sherrick and Otto farms, too, but there was too much vegetation to get clear shots from the car. I may have also missed the Cornfield, so I'll have to go back and do it properly. War of Rights does a good job of teaching the history of this engagement between fights, but I really would like to read more in-depth to appreciate all the locations, signage, and memorials. It's got to be impossible to comprehend the place without coming to it with more background under your belt. 

As always, thanks for looking - questions, comments and followers are welcome and encouraged! I'm doing more and more on Facebook so follow my page there too! https://www.facebook.com/One-of-My-Men-Became-Restless-100659928063858