American Civil War In The Continental Style

Giles Brown, original founder of Dorset Soldiers, describes how some of his favourite ACW figures came into existence

- Giles Brown

The inspiration for this article came from a collector who saw a Mignot set of French WWI engineers in my shop and asked if I could produce something similar for the American Civil War union troops.

I did some research and decided that generally working parties in this war wore the sack coat, their everyday wear.

Taking a figure from the Dorset Soldiers Spaghetti range, which was in scale with Mignot figures (about 50mm), I refashioned the kepi to improve the crumpled ACW look. The trousers on the figure needed to be lengthened down to the boot and some straps filed off. I also took the opportunity to fatten the master figure up a little. The arms were adapted to give the ‘bend me where you want me’ position.