In October 1859 the abolitionist John Brown seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, hoping to spark and arm a slave uprising. The nearest reliable troops were a detachment of U.S. Marines, hurried out from the Washington Navy Yard and placed under an Army officer borrowed for the occasion — Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, with Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart at his side. At dawn on 18 October, Marines under Lieutenant Israel Greene battered into the engine house, and Greene cut Brown down with his dress sword before he could fire. It was the Corps' most consequential action of the decade, eighteen months before the guns opened on a divided country.

W. Britain poses the Marine at attention with his M1855 .58 caliber rifled musket grounded at his side, socket bayonet fixed. He wears the blue frock coat with red piping, brass scale epaulettes, white crossbelts, and the French-style shako with its red wool pom-pom — European military fashion adapted to the antebellum Corps, and a direct ancestor of the modern dress blues. He anchors the dress lineage: behind him the 1833 NCO and the 1839 Fatigue Marine, and a century forward the four-pocket tunic of the post-WWII Dress Blues that grew from this very coat.

W. Britain model 13050. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), solid metal hand-painted in a matte finish. Single foot figure on a sculpted groundwork base. Boxed.