John Bennett's article The Cannonade of Sandgate in Lone Warrior 130 was a pleasure to read. In discussing the history of wargaming, he mentions The Tin Army of the Potomac, an obscure American book. I decided to check it out and write what amounts to a footnote to his article. I happen to have access to a good library. Change that. I have access to most of the good libraries in the United States. The Ames Public Library is excellent and it offers interlibrary loan service. This means I can fill out a simple half-page form and get a book if it's in a library in the United States. Usually this takes a week, but one recent case took 24 hours. In Ames the service is free. Rumor has it the cost is about twenty dollars, but patrons are not charged. Check your local library for this service. Bottom line: within about ten days I had a copy of The Tin Army of the Potomac in my hands. This copy came from the Brooklyn Public Library, as in Brooklyn, New York. This is indeed a book about wargaming, but it does not offer any rules. H.G. Wells remains the first to publish rules for wargames. The Tin Army of the Potomac is a short book, 38 pages. It looks like each page was hand engraved in steel. There are drawings of model soldiers. They must be solid cast because Britains did not start hollow casting until years later in 1893. Battlefields shown include hills made of stacks of books, buildings made of toy blocks, and rivers made of strips of cloth. Images of these are surrounded by a text that seems to be hand lettered block printing. The book is written for boys. Walter, an eight-year old, has used toy soldiers to refight major battles of the Civil War. Walter has his favorite generals, both Union and Rebel. Walter also invents ideal battles and fights them to their logical conclusion. There is no hint of how the logical conclusion is established, no rules for the game. In the back of the book there is a short "What the hard words mean" section. The goal is quite different from H.G. Wells' anti-war conclusion. The author tells us, "Walter knows war is a cruel and sad thing…" but also sees times "when there is nothing to do but fight." The conclusion reads as follows: "Besides who shall say that there may not come a time when the nation will need the aid of the boys who are now playing at mimic war with toy soldiers…. The more they know of the history of the United States and what has been done for the flag, the more they will love their own country, and the readier they will be to uphold and defend the honor of the great nation for which so many noble lives have been gladly laid down." If Walter was eight in 1888 when the book was published, he would be eighteen in 1898. Clearly Walter comes from a prosperous family. Toy soldiers and books to pile into hills didn't come cheap in those days. Perhaps like many other adventurous young men from prosperous families, he marched off to Cuba with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt to uphold and defend the honor of his country. Perhaps Walter was just a fictional invention. Either way, he was a part of the early history of wargaming. The Tin Army of the Potomac, or A Kindergarten of War by William Howe Downes. Illustrations by J.F. Goodridge. Boston: S.E. Cassino. Copyright 1888 by Samuel S. Cassino. Back to Table of Contents -- Lone Warrior #131 Back to Lone Warrior List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Solo Wargamers Association. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com