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Images of Baseball and the Civil War Photo Gallery
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Baseball and the Civil War

Thanks to one of our loyal readers, John Quinlan, for sending me this beautiful lithograph from the American Battlefield Trust web site (a version of which I use as the back-drop for my Baseball History Comes Alive web page). It depicts Union prisoners held at Camp Salisbury, North Carolina playing a game that we can recognize as an early form of baseball.

According to many baseball historians, casual baseball games in army camps and prisons helped spread the game’s popularity throughout the country during the Civil War era, helping to transform the game “from a regional pastime in America’s northeast into a national obsession that endures to this day.” During frequent periods of downtime soldiers already familiar with the finer points of the game introduced their comrades to the sport.

Here’s some interesting information excerpted from the American Battlefield Trust web site about the Civil War and baseball:

• Even before the war, Americans used terms and imagery from baseball to explain and describe events in other arenas of life. One 1860 political cartoon [shown in the gallery], depicts that year’s four presidential candidates as baseball players, with Lincoln emerging victorious.
• According to a well-known myth, Union General Abner Doubleday invented baseball during an 1839 visit to Cooperstown, New York. In fact, baseball evolved from various eighteenth and early-nineteenth bat-and-ball games, including the British game of “rounders.” The Doubleday myth originated in the early twentieth century through the work of the Mills Commission, which was set up by Major League Baseball leaders to discover (or invent) a purely American origin for baseball.
• During the first year of the Civil War, Frank Bancroft enlisted as a musician in a New Hampshire regiment. During his time in the army, Bancroft was wounded in action. After the war, he made a name for himself as one of the most successful managers in baseball. In 1884 he managed the Providence Grays to victory over the New York Metropolitans in a three-game series that was the first championship series known as the “World Series.”
• In the decades after the Civil War, baseball was sometimes portrayed as a force for national unity, bring together North and South in mutual love for the game. One illustration from a 1913 volume of “Puck” [shown in the gallery] shows two Civil War veterans preparing to attend a double-header.

There’s no doubt that the origin of our game precedes the Civil War. Thanks again to John Quinlan for sending this interesting information.

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Gary Livacari 

Photo Credits: All from Google search

Information: Excerpts edited from the American Battlefield Trust web site

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