The 1st American Regiment was the army that remained when the Continental Line went home. After Yorktown the Continental establishment shrank by the month, and by June 1784 Congress had discharged all but eighty men of Washington's wartime force; what they kept was a single regiment of seven hundred to be raised from the New England and Pennsylvania lines for federal service. Lieutenant Colonel Josiah Harmar took command, headquartered at Fort McIntosh on the Ohio, and the regiment spent the rest of the decade on the western frontier — building Fort Pitt, Fort Harmar, and Fort Washington at present-day Cincinnati, escorting surveyors, and dealing with squatters on lands the Treaty of Fort Stanwix had transferred to the United States. When the Northwest Indian War opened against the Western Confederacy under Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, the 1st American Regiment marched out at the head of Harmar's column in 1790 and St. Clair's in 1791 — the two disastrous campaigns that prompted Washington and Knox to reorganize the army as Wayne's Legion of the United States in 1792. The line of descent ran on from there: the modern 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment — the Old Guard — carries the 1st American Regiment as the senior unit of its lineage.

This W. Britain figure shows a 1st American Regiment private on alert: musket held across the body at the trail position, butt at the right hip, lock plate forward, eyes scanning. The order is the late-Continental regulation worn by the regiment in its early years on the Ohio frontier — dark blue coat with red collar, lapels, cuffs, and turnbacks (the New England facing color carried over from wartime), red waistcoat under the coat, white cross-belts supporting cartridge box and bayonet scabbard, buff breeches and overalls gaitered to the shoe, black tricorne. He stands in company line with the standing firing and standing defending figures, and his direct successor — Anthony Wayne's reorganized federal infantry — appears in the Legion of the United States advancing-loading figures of 1794, only seven years later in the same line of descent.

Model: 16084 / W. Britain 1/30 (60mm) / matte finish / 1 piece set