4th Continental Dragoons

This is another unit I painted up years ago and failed to blog about (another being the Knyphausen Fusilier Regt, which I painted 12 years ago and then realised the cuffs were in the wrong colour - I'll sort that out shortly).

It wasn't until December 1776 that Congress, after much lobbying by George Washington, authorised the formation of regular cavalry units.  Washington arranged four regiments and this was approved by Congress in March 1777.  Washington gave command of the 4th regiment to Stephen Moylan, an Irish Roman Catholic who had held a variety of senior staff positions, including acting as Washington's secretary and the Continental Army's Quartermaster General, and later fell out badly with Count Pulaski.  The 4th recruited mainly from Pennsylvania and Maryland and seems to have mustered its troops much more quickly that the other 3 regiments.  However, sources suggest that none of the dragoon regiments ever reached their full strength and most only had between 120 and 150 effectives at any one time. 

In the "British Grenadier!" scenario books the 4th Dragoons appear only once - a 4 figure unit at  Whitemarsh, a large battle fought in December 1777 near Philadelphia.   As these are Perry figures they come in packs of 3, so I thought I might as well just paint up all 6.  I was planning on doing all necessary American cavalry units with the lovely Eureka figures (which come with interchangeable hats), but then the Perries came out with specific figures for each of the Continental dragoon regiments so I decided to use those.  That said, strictly speaking, these figures are in their later uniform and so different to how they would have looked at Whitemarsh.  When the regiment was formed it was given a stock of British uniforms that had been captured at Saratoga, so red coats faced blue and leather caps.  Washington ordered the troopers to wear linen hunting shirts over these coats to avoid confusion (given that the coats were the same colour as the British 16th Light Dragoons).  Some time in 1778 or 1779 the uniform was changed to the green faced red coats and tarleton helmets that you see here.

When I was painting these figures and the Perry militia cavalry (and also a Warlord Games model of Napoleon's carriage, which I painted but then couldn't work out how to put together) I tried to make the greys a bit more "lifelike" by using photos I'd taken of a troop of grey horses in Vienna as a reference.  I'm quite pleased with the result, which involve a lot of "wet blending" and trying to get the dapples in a realistic pattern.  Did all American trumpeters ride greys (or grays if you prefer)?  Who knows,  but I like painting grey horses.

6 figures.  Painted August-September 2017.