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