Filthy, revolting Americans...and their law abiding neighbours

I never seem to play enough games using my American War of Independence collection, but that's never an impediment to accumulating more units. The 'filthy, revolting Americans' in question, are the rather excellent range of Ragged Continental figures from Eureka Miniatures. I acquired these last year and now they are finished.

As usual they have been put together with the Sharp Practice rules in mind. So, this has given me three groups of eight, plus an officer, an NCO, drummer and ensign.

From what I understand, the uniform items that were rarely replaced were breeches and small clothes, so I've tried to reflect that in the figures by adding some variety in colours, presuming the men had used civilian clothing as a substitute.

I've also assumed the officers and NCOs were similarly attired. 

I like the way the Eureka sets include different hats, or in some cases, no hats at all.

While their attire might not pass inspection on the parade ground, these represent hardened campaigners. The sort of men who fought at Cowpens and were not afraid to go face to face with British regulars. In Sharp Practice terms this gives me an additional three groups with leaders to add to my force of Continentals.

They will join my rather better attired Continentals, in this case from the Perry plastic figure set.

Their law abiding neighbours are, of course, Loyalists and in this case these are represented by the Queens Rangers. I've wanted to create a Loyalist force for my Sharp Practice games for some time and the Queens Rangers are one of the first units that spring to mind. Not least because Perry Miniatures have some very fine figures in their range. 

Initially, I bought a dozen of their riflemen with the intention of using them as Loyalist skirmishers. They were lovely figurers to paint and I was very happy with them.

However, as I've learned to discover with this period, things are rarely quite as simple as they seem, particularly when it comes to finding accurate depictions of uniforms. It turns out these riflemen were a good case in point.

Brendan Morrissey very helpfully took time to highlight some of the issues - "the starting point for confusion over the Queens Rangers is the painter Charles Lefferts, who mis-identified them as the same unit that was raised in the 1790s in Canada; this latter unit WAS entirely rifle-armed and many, many authors (and figure manufacturers) have followed this error since the Bicentennial in 1976, including Mollo/McGregor".

I have the Mollo/McGregor book and have found it a font of information, but they too have relied on work by contemporary and later painters for their sources, with the inevitable inaccuracies creeping in.

It seems no matter where you look you will find conflicting descriptions.

Having said all that, the Queens Rangers did indeed have riflemen, but only one detachment, with somewhere between 12-16 men. Good to know my efforts were not entirely wasted and I'm glad I hadn't bought too many of those figures, as I can pretty much do the detachment at a figure ratio of 1:1.

The Queens Rangers were raised early on in the war as a straightforward infantry battalion, with the usual two flank companies (grenadiers and lights) and eight centre companies. At this time, the whole battalion seems to have worn the same hat as the regulars. I used inspiration from various sources to create a fairly generic loyalist unit using the plastic Perry AWI sets with the uniform loosely based on the New York Regiment. As it happens these would pass as Queens Rangers centre company men, but only in 1780 (it seems there's always a 'but' when it comes to AWI uniforms) .

So, if I want a degree of accuracy and use the Perry figures, my unit needs to cover the period 1780 onwards, when the distinctive leather caps were issued. It looks like the centre companies and light companies will look similar in appearance and only the grenadiers and highland companies will have a more distinctive uniform.

With that I have put together four groups of eight figures that can serve as either centre or light company men. These are all from the Perry metal range.

 As the figures are to be used for Sharp Practice there are also the leaders and a trumpeter.

I have also added two groups of Grenadiers with an NCO as a leader figure, once again all from the Perrys.

That gives me options to field light infantry, skirmishers, centre company and grenadiers, or any combination of those.

The next mission is to get these on the table in 2026 with more frequency than I managed in 2025. Let's see how we go. Naturally, that's not necessarily the end of the force - there are highlanders, cavalry and artillery that could be added.....