BASEBALL

[MITO MINISTER]

America’s Pastime, Behind Bars

By GEORGE KIRSCH

Civil War prisons were terrible places: captured solders suffered and
died by the thousands from malnutrition, disease and exposure to the
elements. But in several Northern and Southern prisons, a few
fortunate inmates were able to enjoy, for a moment, a lighter side of
life: baseball.

The Civil War was the caldron of America’s pastime, the period in
which several prototype forms of the game – the New York game,
townball – were melded into what we more or less know as the sport
today. Such melding took place in camps, where officers on both sides
permitted and even encouraged baseball playing. But it also took place
in prisons, mostly notably those in Salisbury, N.C., and Johnson’s
Island, near Sandusky, Ohio.

During the first two years of combat, weather permitting, the
Salisbury camp was the site of daily baseball games by captured
Northern soldiers. Adolphus Magnum, a Confederate chaplain who visited
the prison in 1862, wrote that a few inmates “ran like schoolboys to
the play ground and were soon joining in high glee in a game of ball.”
Charles Carroll Gray, a physician held at Salisbury from May 17 to
July 28, 1862, recorded in his diary that the Fourth of July was
“celebrated with music, reading of the Declaration of Independence,
and sack and foot races in the afternoon, and also a baseball game.”

Some of the prisoners who were assigned to Salisbury had previously
played baseball in other Southern prisons. William J. Crossley, a
sergeant in Company C, Second Rhode Island Infantry Volunteers, was
captured on July 21, 1861, at the Battle of Bull Run. He was
transported to camps at Richmond, Va., and Tuscaloosa, Ala., before
winding up at Salisbury on March 13, 1862. In his memoir he described
a baseball game at Salisbury that spring between sides of men
initially incarcerated in New Orleans and Tuscaloosa. He recalled that
the “great game of baseball” generated “as much enjoyment to the Rebs
as the Yanks, for they came in hundreds to see the sport.” He added:
“I have seen more smiles today on their oblong faces than before I
came to Rebeldom, for they have been the most doleful looking set of
men I ever saw, and the Confederate gray uniform really adds to their
mournful appearance.” The game ended in a draw (11 runs each), but
“the factory fellows were skunked” – i.e., shut out – “three times and
we [from the Tuscaloosa prison] but twice.”

Another commentator regretted “that we have no official report of the
match games played in Salisbury between the New Orleans and Tuscaloosa
boys, resulting in the triumph of the latter.” He explained that the
“cells of the Parish Prison were unfavorable to the development of the
skill of the `New Orleans Nine.’” Crossley was released that summer as
part of a general exchange of prisoners, rejoined his old regiment in
October, and fought again in campaigns at Fredericksburg, Gettysburg,
Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.

Josephus Clarkson, a ship chandler’s apprentice from Boston held at
Salisbury, recalled that the prisoners preferred to follow the New
York rules rather than the townball regulations, since the latter game
allowed fielders to “plug,” or hit, base runners with the ball to
record an out. He remembered that a pitcher from Texas was removed
from the game after “badly laming” several prisoners. His side had to
politely inform their captors “that we would no longer play with a man
who could not continue to observe the rules.” Clarkson also wrote that
“the game of baseball had been played much in the South,” but many of
the guards “had never seen the sport devised by” Alexander Cartwright,
a member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball club of New York who is often
credited with devising the modern rules of baseball.

Through most of 1862 Salisbury prison was not filled to capacity, and
the adequate supply of food, frequent prisoner exchanges and
opportunities for recreation made life reasonably tolerable for many
of the inmates. But conditions deteriorated severely in late 1862, and
grew even worse until a new prisoner exchange agreement was negotiated
in February 1865. Overcrowding, the intense cold winter weather, a
breakdown in prisoner control and shortages of food, medicine and fuel
made life miserable for the men. Approximately a quarter of
Salisbury’s 15,000 prisoners died, many during its last few months.
There is no documentary evidence of ball playing during that period,
and given the horrific conditions and poor health of the inmates, it
is unlikely that they participated in any athletic exercises from 1863
to 1865.

While baseball declined significantly in Southern camps after 1862, it
remained a popular diversion for prisoners and guards in Northern
facilities, especially at Johnson’s Island. The baseball historian
John R. Husman has shown that it is very likely that a few of the
Confederate prisoners had previously been members of the first
baseball clubs in New Orleans. This group included Lt. Charles H.
Pierce, captain of the Southern Base Ball Club at Johnson’s Island,
who was a native of Ohio and grew up in Cincinnati. He later moved to
New Orleans and enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861. After the
end of the war he joined that city’s Southern club and also became an
umpire.

Conditions at Johnson’s Island were generally better than at most
other camps, in part because it was restricted to officers, and also
because its average population was only about 2,500 men. Yet even
there life became harsher by the summer of 1864, with food in such
short supply that some inmates resorted to eating rats. But despite
their hunger and bleak prospects, they organized a championship match
for Aug. 27, 1864, between the camp’s two rival clubs, the Southern
and the Confederate. Husman views that game as Ohio’s first formal
interclub contest. (Cincinnati, Sandusky and a few other towns in Ohio
had organized baseball clubs in the late 1850s, but they restricted
their competition to recreational and intraclub play.)

The most detailed report of that grand contest appeared in 1874 in
Col. Daniel R. Hundley’s diary. A native of Alabama and a graduate of
Harvard Law School, Hundley married a daughter of a Virginia man who
owned real estate in Chicago’s suburbs. Hundley purchased a house on
Lake Michigan north of Chicago, but spent his winters in Alabama. A
supporter of Stephen Douglas in the 1860 presidential campaign, after
Lincoln’s election he moved to his home state and joined the 31st
Alabama Infantry. After he was captured by Union troops in June 1864,
he was transported to Johnson’s Island, just as the excitement was
building before the contest between the Southern and Confederate
nines. The former were officers below the rank of captain who wore
white shirts, while the latter held higher ranks and wore red shirts.
Hundley wrote:

During the progress of the game nearly all the prisoners looked on
with eager interest, and bets were made freely among those who had the
necessary cash, and who were given to such practices, and very soon
the crowd was pretty nearly equally divided between the partisans of
the white shirts and those of the red shirts, and a real rebel yell
went up from the one side or the other at every success of the chosen
colors The Yankees themselves outside the prison yard seemed to be not
indifferent spectators of the game, but crowded the house-tops, and
looked on that match with as much interest almost as did the rebels
themselves.”

Another prisoner, William Peel of the 11th Mississippi Infantry
Regiment, recalled that several hundred dollars was wagered on the
game by players and outsiders, which was won by the Southern club, 19
to 11. Lt. Michael McNamara, who wrote another account of this game,
estimated the crowd of spectators at about 3,000, including inmates,
officers and citizens of Sandusky. He recalled: “So apprehensive were
the prison officials that the game was gotten up for the purpose of
covering an attempt to break out, that they had the slides of the port
holes” of a patrol vessel “drawn back and the guns prepared for
action.”

Although a local newspaper published a detailed and highly favorable
account of the game, some radical Northern journals were highly
critical of the decision by Johnson Island’s commanding officer to
allow it to proceed. According to McNamara, “their malicious efforts
were successful, the commander was removed, and the amusement of the
unhappy prisoners, for the time being, cut off.”

Generations of historians have endorsed Albert G. Spalding’s view that
baseball games played in Union and Confederate prison camps
contributed significantly to the spread of the game after the war.
Many of the guards and spectators who watched the contests became
enthralled with baseball, and after the war brought it back to their
respective hometowns. But prisons were hardly the only place where men
whiled away their time with a friendly game of baseball. Informal
matches played by soldiers on makeshift grounds in army camps and
contests between the first nines of the premier clubs of Northern
cities kept the pastime alive during wartime and provided the
foundation for the baseball boom that followed the return of peace.

And of course, the occasional baseball game does not overshadow the
real horror of life in Civil War prison camps. But if nothing else,
the fact that men deprived of their freedom and most of their physical
comforts nevertheless found time for the sport demonstrates how deep a
chord baseball had struck in 19th-century American culture, and
foreshadowed how quickly it would spread after the war ended.

George B. Kirsch is a professor of history at Manhattan College and
the author of “Baseball and Cricket: The Creation of American Team
Sports, 1838-72” and “Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime
During the Civil War.” His latest book is “Six Guys From Hackensack:
Coming of Age in the Real New Jersey.”

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