Kirsch - Baseball in Blue and Gray : the National Pastime during the Civil War

Baseball in Blue and Gray

The National Pastime during the Civil War

GEORGE B. KIRSCH

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2003 @ by Princeton

University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

Fifth printing, and first paperback printing, 2007

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13043-9

Paperback ISBN-10: 0-691-13043-4

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Kirsch, George B.

Baseball in blue and gray : the national pastime during the Civil War / George B. Kirsch.

p.cm.

Includes bibliogaphical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-05733-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. BaseballUnited StatesHistory19th century. I. Title.

GV863.A1 K56 2003

796.357'0973'09034dc21 2002069289

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Goudy text with Zapf Dingbats

Printed on acid-free paper.

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

5 7 9 10 8 6

For Adam Lavitt Kirsch

Contents

Preface

T his book serves a double purpose. First, it presents a narrative and analysis of the growth and transformation of baseball in the United States during the Civil War. Second, it examines the relationship between the sport and American nationalism during that tumultuous time. Historians of early baseball (myself included) have paid only brief attention to the development of the game during the years between 1861 and 1865, viewing that period as merely a minor interlude between the rise of the modern version of the sport in the New York City region during the late 1850s and the remarkable spread of baseball across the country during the late 1860s. But a closer look at baseballs progress during the war years reveals several developments that proved to be critical for the games postwar success. These include the spread of the New York City variety of the sport to Philadelphia and Boston, the advent of revised rules governing pitching, and especially the growth of commercialism, fostered by championship competition and other special events.

Baseballs long association with American nationalism predated the Civil War, and the war intensified that connection. In the late 1850s many of the first clubs adopted names with patriotic associations, such as Young America, Eagle, Empire, National, or Continental, while on a few occasions ladies presented the Stars and Stripes to the players in a ritual that signified female endorsement of the sport as a wholesome amusement. The war itself provided the greatest trial of American nationalism since the founding of the United States in the Revolution. As northern and southern soldiers slaughtered each other to decide the fate of the country, sporting civilians and military men engaged in a far more innocent contest to determine which version of early baseball, or even the English game of cricket, would be recognized as the national pastime for the republic. The struggle to keep the country united and the search for a sport that would bind Americans together converged during these years. As Union armies overcame the Confederate secession, the New York City version of baseball became the most popular bat and ball game in the United States, widely recognized as the national pastime. Both outcomes were expressions of American nationalism.

The Civil Wars influence on baseball is literally the stuff of legend. And, like most legends, there is both more and less to it than at first meets the eye. The ordeal of the Union and the triumph of baseball have been linked in the American imagination first and foremost through the Doubleday-Cooperstown creation myth, which casts a Union general as the inventor of the game, and also through tales of soldiers playing ball in army camps as they awaited deadly encounters with the enemy, or in prison camps as they awaited release. Several sport historians have stressed the importance of those soldiers matches for the instruction of novices and the promotion of the new sport in all regions after 1865. But while the emergence of the little republic of baseball did not entirely result from the struggle to preserve the American republic, their histories are interwoven.

The chapters that follow recount the story of baseball on the battle and home fronts during the Civil War, but here it is necessary to evaluate the creation myth that ties the origins of baseball directly to a Civil War hero. On December 30, 1907, Abraham G. Mills, the fourth president of professional baseballs National League, issued the final report of the special commission that had been charged with deciding the true origins of Americas national pastime. Specifically, that august panel had investigated the question of whether baseball derived from the English schoolyard game of rounders, or whether it was a purely native product. Henry Chadwick, a prominent sportswriter for fifty years who was known in many quarters as the father of baseball, argued for the rounders theory. He had played the game as a boy in England, before he emigrated with his parents to the United States, and after a half century of watching and promoting the rise of baseball, he was convinced that rounders and the young American sport were closely related because they shared essential principles. As he explained to the commission, which consisted of former ball players and officials, as well as two U.S. senators, both were played by two opposing sides of contestants, on a special field of play, in which a ball was pitched or tossed to an opposing batsman, who endeavored to strike the ball out onto the field, far enough to admit his safely running the round of bases, so as to enable him to score a run to count in the gamethe side scoring the most runs winning the game. Although Chadwick conceded that the two sports differed in methods and details of play, he claimed that they were quite close in fundamental structure.

Albert G. Spalding, an American-born baseball star and sporting goods magnate, countered Chadwicks view, declaring that baseball was of purely American origin and no other game or country has any right to claim its parentage. He recognized that rounders and baseball shared certain features, but he stressed the many differences in rules: for example, by the late 1880s the two sports had diverged in the size and shape of the fields (square versus diamond); the number of players on a side (eleven versus nine), innings in a match (two versus nine), and outs in an inning (eleven versus three); and the size and shape of the bats (smaller and flat in rounders) and the balls (smaller in rounders). Spalding argued that rounders was closer to cricket than to baseball, that it was never played in the United States, and that any similarity between rounders and the American national pastime was simply a coincidence. A patriot at heart, he could not believe that in 1840 our national prejudices would permit us to look with favor, much less adopt any sport or game of an English flavor. Instead, he was convinced that baseball descended from the colonial game of old cat in which a player batted a ball and ran to one or more bases. According to him, old cat evolved into the townball matches that were popular on village holidays in many early nineteenth century American communities, and modern baseball was simply a modification of townball.