The 15th Alabama Infantry, Colonel William C. Oates commanding, had marched twenty-eight miles overnight to reach the battlefield at Gettysburg, then been pushed to the head of Hood's division's column on the afternoon of July 2, 1863. The orders were to attack the extreme Union left, which Confederate reconnaissance had reported as being in the air on the rocky shoulder of a hill called Little Round Top. The 15th Alabama got there first. The slope they had to climb was steep and broken with boulders. The air temperature that afternoon was over ninety degrees. The men were carrying wool jackets, leather cartridge boxes, and Enfield rifle-muskets, and they had been marching since before dawn. Above them, in the rocks, was the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain commanding, anchoring the extreme left flank of the entire Army of the Potomac. The two regiments fought each other across two hundred yards of slope for nearly ninety minutes. Oates ordered five separate charges up the hill. Each was repulsed. When Chamberlain — almost out of ammunition — ordered the 20th Maine to fix bayonets and charge down the hill in a swinging right wheel, the 15th Alabama broke and the Union line held. Oates lost over eighty men in the engagement, including his own younger brother Lieutenant John A. Oates, who was severely wounded in front of the regiment and died days later. For the rest of his long life — he became a U.S. Congressman, Governor of Alabama, and a Spanish-American War general — Oates wrote letters and memoirs arguing that his regiment had actually reached the summit of Little Round Top briefly. Most modern historians do not credit the claim. The fight on the slope below remains one of the most studied small-unit actions in American military history.

This W. Britain figure catches Oates mid-command on the slope: sword raised, revolver in his left hand, body angled into the uphill charge. He wears the field uniform of a Confederate infantry colonel — light gray frock coat with the staff officer's gold-laced sleeve cuffs, the regulation belt with the brass buckle, sky-blue trousers in the Confederate state-jacket pattern, and the dark forage cap with gold trim. The red sash at his waist is the officer's distinction. He is a planter-class Alabama lawyer turned regimental commander, thirty years old at this moment, leading the second or third charge of his life and his regiment's worst day. The figure is the natural counterpart to a Joshua Chamberlain figure — the two colonels separated by two hundred yards and a hundred and sixty years of history. Pair this figure with Scrambling Up the Round Tops for a multi-figure tableau of the Confederate assault, with Defending the Round Tops No.1 for the matched Union scene on the other side of the slope, or with Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, the corps commander whose Day 2 assault Oates's regiment was the southernmost spearpoint of.

Scale: 1/30 (60mm). Matte-painted metal. W. Britain model 31247. From the American Civil War Soldier Study Series. Single foot figure, supplied painted and ready for display.