pictures of the "Danish Exchange" uniforms held at the Royal Danish Arsenal Museum

thomas aagaard

Captain
Joined
Nov 19, 2013
Location
Denmark
The Royal Danish Arsenal Museum have a collection of US uniforms.
What makes this collection special, is that all items are from an exchange made in 1858.
So its all prewar items that representative of what the ordinary soldier in the small army was issued...

Thought some of you might be interested.

About the items:
Text from the museum:
Expired Image Removed

I spoke shortly with one of the employees and he told me that the "raincoat" had basically fallen apart when you took it out of storage. The rubber hadn't survived the ageing.

He also told me that they had a big debate about if they should add weapons or not.
Not including them is show the exchange as it was. But adding weapons would make the "picture" of what a US soldier looked like more complete.
(the "no weapons" won)

Iam sure you will easily notice the embarrassing mistakes in the way the items is shown...

About the pictures
I only had about 15minutes to take the pictures with a borrowed camera, and with no experience taking pictures of museum items... so they could be better.

The pictures are the original ones. With photoshop or similar it should be possible to make them better by modifying the light balance and similar.
The last 9 pictures are of items (or info about them) from the two Sleswig wars. (1849-51 and 1864)

here is one example (cut down in size for the forum)
Expired Image Removed

The rest can be found here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sc/2yi5k4i1ouzmfzt/TwDgCwHhiW

Feel free to download a copy, fix the lightning and share with others... just make sure to tell where the items are at.
 
Welcome to CivilWarTalk ! Yes, many of us are very interested in your photographs. I was not aware of a uniform exchange program between the USA and the Kingdom of Denmark during the 1850s. Thanks for sharing this information. I look forward to your future posts on the forums.
 
Hello there and welcome to CWT from New Zealand.

I too didn't know about the uniform exchange between the United States and the Danish - thank you for posting the photos, and I wonder where the Danish uniforms went?
 
They do like blue.
The Royal Danish Guard Uniforms have always been impressive.
garden4.jpg
 
Thanks for the welcome.

About the CSS Stonewall. take a look at:
http://www.milhist.dk/vaaben/vands/starkodder/starkodder.htm (its in english)
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_ironclad_Kōtetsu

About the danish items:
(quoting a user on another acw forum) "According to the QM Museum in Ft. Lee, its mostly gone (lost, unaccounted for, etc...)."

Colors:
until the 3 year war in 1848-51 (actually a civilwar within the Kingdom of Denmark, with the German confederation getting involved on the side of the rebels) the danish army used Red coats and skyblue trousses with white leather.
during the war this changed to dark blue coats with black leather. But the change took time, so in the middle of the war, you might see the soldiers in one company wearing both types of uniforms.

The guardcompnay of the Royal Life guards, use the blue version as the day to day guard uniform. And the red version is used for gala events. (the rest of the regiment off cause use the standard uniform)
To be fair I should add that the guards is a infantry regiment and have more done their part fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan... so They ere not just paradeground soldiers...
 
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Thomas:

A big welcome from Texas!
Thank you...your pictures are going to get around, a lot of material culture/history minded folk will appreciate them!:wavespin:

Kevin Dally
 
I did notice the red coats , Uniform regulations are complex everywhere.

My thanks to Denmark for fighting terrorism. The Danes have always been a tough,respected and honorable military force.
shamseddin20110102023049717.jpg

Danish forces in Afghanistan.
 
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