Henry Knox was a twenty-five-year-old Boston bookseller when Washington gave him command of the Continental Artillery in November 1775 — an appointment that surprised everyone except Knox himself, who had read his way through the entire artillery section of his own bookshop and quietly become the best-read American on the subject. Within weeks he was on the road to Fort Ticonderoga to fetch the cannons that Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold had captured there in May. What Knox organized that winter became the Noble Train of Artillery: sixty tons of guns, mortars, and howitzers loaded onto forty-two ox-drawn sleds and shallow-draft boats and dragged three hundred miles through the snow of the Berkshires to the army outside Boston. The train arrived at Cambridge on January 27, 1776, and went up onto Dorchester Heights on the night of March 4 in a single sleepless operation that overlooked Boston Harbor before dawn. General Howe, finding the Continental guns above him and his fleet under their muzzles, evacuated the city on March 17. Knox commanded the Continental Artillery through the rest of the war and became the first Secretary of War under Washington's presidency.

This Regal Enterprises set is a full artillery crew with their gun, hand-cast in white metal at 54mm and finished in the high-gloss traditional toy soldier style. The centerpiece is a 6-pounder field gun on the standard split-trail block carriage of the period, with the iron-banded wooden wheels and trunnion-capped barrel painted in the period gunmetal blue-grey. The five-figure crew shows the artillery drill in action: the officer at left raises a spyglass to glass the fall of shot, two crewmen flank the gun preparing to load and prime, the No.4 man stands ready with cartridge in hand, and the spongeman on the right works the bore with the sponge-and-rammer staff that cleared powder residue between rounds. Each man wears the regimental dress that became the Continental Artillery's standard from 1775 — dark blue coat with red collar, lapels, and cuffs, buff waistcoat and breeches, white cross-belts, black tricorne edged white. The set fights alongside infantry: pair it with the Regal Minutemen muster set for a Lexington-to-Dorchester display, or with the W. Britain matte Continental Line standing firing for a regimental line with its supporting battery.

Set Number: EA30 / Regal Enterprises — Soldiers of the World, Early American Wars / 54mm scale / white metal / gloss finish / 5-figure crew with 6-pounder field gun / Hand made in New Zealand