Diorama Michigan home guard lancer.

[major bill]

Major Bill want to make some Michigan Civil War soldiers. Major Bill picked this one.
The Home Guard (St. Joseph, St. Joseph County) was formed in 1861 by young men in the town of St. Joseph. Captain Ed Aiken as elected as the commander. They selected red, white and blue uniforms which would display their patriotism: red shirts, white pants and blue caps.i​ For arms they carried lances tipped with small American flags. One report said their uniforms were neat and tasty. The patriotism of the young men soon waned and this company did not survive for very long.
i St. Joseph Traveler, July 3 1861, p. 3, col. 1.

I have set this one aside for a while as I think about it.

It still needs plenty of work. Still Major Bill is wondering if it is worth finishing. To start with, a while back Major Bill asked about the differences between lances and pikes. I went with a 10 foot lance with a small American flag about the size of a lance pennon. I started with the lance 12 feet long but it did not look right. The cap does not fit properly. The upper hand could get reworked.

Major Bill could just set this aside and start a different figure.

 

[FedericoFCavada]

I'd be guessing seven-feet long... eight feet tops.

Red shirts pre-war and during the war puts me in mind of Garibaldi.

 

[Booner]

Major Bill want to make some Michigan Civil War soldiers. Major Bill picked this one.
The Home Guard (St. Joseph, St. Joseph County) was formed in 1861 by young men in the town of St. Joseph. Captain Ed Aiken as elected as the commander. They selected red, white and blue uniforms which would display their patriotism: red shirts, white pants and blue caps.i​ For arms they carried lances tipped with small American flags. One report said their uniforms were neat and tasty. The patriotism of the young men soon waned and this company did not survive for very long.
i St. Joseph Traveler, July 3 1861, p. 3, col. 1.

View attachment 446616

I have set this one aside for a while as I think about it.

It still needs plenty of work. Still Major Bill is wondering if it is worth finishing. To start with, a while back Major Bill asked about the differences between lances and pikes. I went with a 10 foot lance with a small American flag about the size of a lance pennon. I started with the lance 12 feet long but it did not look right. The cap does not fit properly. The upper hand could get reworked.

Major Bill could just set this aside and start a different figure.

I can't help you with the difference, if there is one, between lances and pikes.

"The cap does not fit properly. The upper hand could get reworked."
- Remember the conversation we had a couple of weeks ago about your other figures? I mentioned at that time you need to start with better quality figures. That advise still holds true.

Was the cap molded to the head or did you have to glue it?
If it was molded to the head and looked wrong, I would take a hobbyist backsaw and saw the hat off the head just under the bottom of the hat band. The amount of material (the curf) that the saw took off the figure may drop the hat on the head where it would look right. If the hat was glued on, then when you dry fit the pieces, the height should have been apparent and again I would have files the head down so the fit was achieved with the lower edge of the hat band resting just above the figure's ears.

I can't tell what's wrong with the hand so I can't help much there. I'm guessing this figure is from the same place you got the others. If so, the figures are metal, but don't contain any lead so I imagine the metal might be rather brittle, so they won't bend very easy.

Your painting looks pretty good though.

I think if you got a good quality figure, you'd be very pleased with how well your painting has improved.

 

[major bill]

No this is a 1/32 plastic conversion from an old Airfix U.S Marines kit. The cap is resin.

 

[Cavalier]

I seem to remember reading that lances used by French lancer regiments were 9 feet with an 8.5 inch blade. If correct your model would be very close. I don't know if this was any kind of standard length but I would imagine every countries army would be pretty close. I believe also that effective use of the lance in actual combat required quite a lot training.

John

 

[FedericoFCavada]

I seem to remember reading that lances used by French lancer regiments were 9 feet with an 8.5 inch blade. If correct your model would be very close. I don't know if this was any kind of standard length but I would imagine every countries army would be pretty close. I believe also that effective use of the lance in actual combat required quite a lot training.

John

In our North American military tradition, Revolutionary war soldiers defending Boston were issued spears 13-feet long. In the mid-to-late-1770s Lee recommended "light pikes [sic]," carbines and tomahawks for his Dragoons. These "pikes" [literally lances] were to be 8-feet long. NCOs and officers used spontoons. There were not enough swords. The spontoon or [espontoon] had a shaft about 6-feet, 2-in. long. Overall length was about 6 and a half feet.

"folding" spears or "pikes" were ordered during the American revolution for riflemen, because in hand-to-hand fighting with professional soldiers like Hessians and athletic Britons, trained and skilled in the use of bayonets, they'd come off the worse. These folding spears with a section of metal in the middle approximately 18-inches long where the two portions fit together remained in use by riflemen during the Indian wars along the Wabash and Maumee rivers in what is now Indiana through the 1790s. I do not think they were very long at all... Probably between 7 and 8 feet total, perhaps no longer than a spontoon? Research would be needed, of course.

Bashford Dean, "On American Polearms, Especially those in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," The Journal of the American Military Foundation 1: 4 (1937), 177-185.

Harold L. Peterson, The Book of the Continental Soldier: Being a Complete Account of the Uniforms, Weapons, and Equipment with which He Lived and Fought (Harrisburg: The Stockpole Company, 1968).

Here's George Washington himself in 1775: "Every colonel will appoint thirty men that are bold, active, and resolute, to use the spears in defense of the lines instead of guns; to form in the center of the rear of the regiments and to stand ready to push the enemy off the breastworks."

 

[FedericoFCavada]

When I'm around my library I'll retrieve the 1833 militia manual by the Italo-British officer Francis Macerone and try to figure out how long the "lances" he contrived (these were also folding spears in two pieces, perhaps a bit like the U.S. riflemen spear/pike). Of course, there is no evidence that anyone read or was influenced by his manual... Certainly John Brown's Provisional Army of the United States envisioned arming slaves in servile war with "pikes" but the John Brown pikes are well described as being nearly seven feet long, with a nine or ten inch double-edged blade covered in lacquer or "japanned."

The revolting "Irishry" in 1798 with their white hat bands and green cockades are variously described as having pikes upwards of sixteen and eighteen feet long, which are well and truly "pikes" in the 17th-century sense. "WHo now dare say 'Croppies lie down?!' " Most appeared to have been approximately ten-feet long. It would seem that if such rebel troops broke and ran, there was a very high tendency for them to drop the pike and leave it on the field.

U.S. revolutionary war pike points made by various blacksmiths:

The Newberry Library has digitized a French Revolution-era 1792 manual of pike use with the typical-for-the-time-period-if-also-ponderous-title:
Manuel du citoyen arme de piques, ou instruction raisonneee sur les divers moyens de perfectionner l'usage el la fabrication des Piques. Written "par un Militaire, ami de la liberte." Confusingly, it advocates four different pike lengths, between ten "pied" to fully 16 "pied" long, to be used by the different "ranks" within a formation, i.e. longer pikes in the back, shorter in the front. Those manufactured by the various ateliers nationaux "reproduites a l'occasion de la Revolution" appear to be six-and-a-half feet long, or whatever the French pre-metric measurement was... Still another option shown is a pike with a rifle-type buttstock, presumably for carriage by the person so equipped, and with a "forte pointe de Fer" where a buttplate should go to jam into the soil to fix it in place. This "friend of liberty" included a line drawing of defenses or earthworks with pikemen in the dry moat defending an abatis fixed in place behind various other obstacles, and a further set of pikemen behind the actual parapet, presumably to fend off attackers attempting to jump down from the parapet or wall, or for all I know, to encourage the musket armed soldiers on the firestep to remain at their posts?!

 

[Cavalier]

It has been my impression that pikes, spontoons, and halbreds etc. were infantry weapons, whereas lances were a cavalry thing. Of course I could be all wet!

John