by Tim Rowland
Having died fourteen years prior, Doubleday was not in a position to refute the finding, nor was the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce likely to throw cold water on the story. That job was left to Robert Henderson, chief librarian of the New York Public Library (and obvious communist and anti–apple pie activist), who surgically shredded the Doubleday myth, aided and abetted by the collection of historical baseball paraphernalia donated to the library in 1946. Included in the collection was an illustration of boys playing baseball in Boston in 1835.
Henderson asserted that baseball had even been played by Washington’s men at Valley Forge, and the 1946 collection even referred to a baseball-like sport in a book called—one would hope Spalding’s pro-American heirs were sitting down when they read this—“Les Jeux des Jeunes Garsons.[sic]”
Mon Dieu.
But even with all the evidence at hand, it’s a fair bet that more people today “know” that Doubleday invented baseball than “know” that he fired the first shot of the Civil War on behalf of the North—which he actually did.
Along with a small platoon of Federal troops stationed 600 miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line at the port of Charleston, South Carolina, in the winter of 1860 and spring of 1861, Doubleday would literally and figuratively be on an island. These men (10 percent of whom were musicians) were a rowboat of Yankees in a sea of Southern fire-eaters who were raising troops, stockpiling weapons, and agitating for secession. And drinking heavily. As the city residents grew bolder and more menacing, the Federals withdrew under the cover of night to Fort Sumter, a dismal, prisonesque outcrop of brick and stone in the Charleston harbor.
Although soldiers in the Civil War passed the time by playing a form of baseball, the game was not the brainchild of Abner Doubleday. (Courtesy Library of Congress)
Doubleday described it this way: “The fort itself was a deep, dark, damp, gloomy-looking place, enclosed in high walls, where the sunlight rarely penetrated. If we ascended to the parapet, we saw nothing but uncouth State flags, representing palmettos, pelicans, and other strange devices.”
His interests at the time, of course, were focused on cannonballs, not baseballs. He watched with rising bile and disdain as the South Carolinians inventoried the former government property on the shore, trying to master the military arts. Of primary concern was that the Union had sabotaged the cannonballs it left behind on shore by painting them with coal tar. In fact, cannonballs that were exposed to the elements were routinely varnished with tar so that they would not rust. However, Doubleday wrote in 1876, “It was immediately reported that before leaving we had taken great pains to tar the balls to render them useless. The problem which puzzled the military savants of Charleston was to determine in what way cannonballs were ruined by tar.”
So Doubleday reckoned that a sharp Union response to the “spoiled child” of South Carolina would have nipped the whole war thing in the bud. He generally had kind words for his superior officer at the fort, Major Robert Anderson, although he chafed at the leader’s inaction in light of on going South Carolina provocations. Anderson held proslavery views, which dovetailed nicely with the actual slaves that he also held. His wife was from Georgia, and while she stayed loyal to him, his brothers-in-law wound up attacking the fort. This was among the first of many complex and conflicting sentiments affecting the minds of men and women of both sides. Anderson’s pro-slavery stance was further fueled by a liberal interpretation of the Bible. At one point, Doubleday reminded his commander that the Bible did not apportion slavery on the basis of color, and consequently Anderson himself might make as suitable a slave as any other man.
This brought the debate to an apparent end, at least for the time being.
The Charleston press (through the course of the war, no one was noisier and rattled more sabers than newspapermen—and no one ran faster for cover when hostilities began than local editors) singled out Doubleday for amusement, labeling him an “abolitionist.” At the time, there was no greater insult, and indeed, Doubleday wanted to crush both the institution and the uprising.
The Federal government, however, seemed to be doing its best to look the other way. The troops at Sumter petitioned for a warship to come to their relief; instead, the government sent a passenger steamer, The Star of the West, to try to restock the fort’s larder. The steamer and its desperately needed provisions got within sight of the fort. But when the Southerners fired a few shots in her direction, the captain turned her around and went home to New York. It galled Doubleday that such an unsophisticated military force as Charleston was putting forward might win for the Federal’s want of bread. He wrote his wife Mary in late March:
The hostile batteries I think must be trying to frighten us. They keep up a tremendous firing with blank cartridges, balls & shells out to sea, to show us what they can do, I suppose. I have no doubt we could whip all their batteries around us in a fair fight, but then from present appearances we might ultimately have to surrender from hunger.
In the North, people were watching events play out in the South with mixed emotions. Fernando Wood, the strong-arm mayor of gang-riddled New York City sided with the South, largely because his political machine depended on the cash generated by Southern cotton. Wood penned a memo to his council, suggesting that the Union was doomed, so New York City and its environs might as well consider seceding from upstate New York. He proposed the creation of a city-state to be named Tri-Insula, which would have presumably been like Sparta, but with more violence.
The city’s council and playwrights, however, were more sympathetic to the Union’s cause. Doubleday was much amused to received playbills from Fort Sumter stage productions acted out in New York and Boston, where the small band of holdouts was portrayed as heroic bastions of national ideals.
Meanwhile, the Rebel noose continued to tighten. It was Doubleday’s view that the loudest rabble-rousers in Charleston—not all that much loved, even through the balance of the South, he hinted—figured that Washington did not have the stomach for a fight. By striking against the fort, the fire-eaters believed, the Federal government would see that the South was serious and would agree to Southern independence rather than take up arms.
The fly in this tactical ointment was the inauguration of the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln. (Doubleday, unlike his fellow officers in the command, was a fan of the new president.) Whatever his various and sundry beliefs regarding slavery and other urgent matters of the day, Lincoln was resolute in his idea that the Union must be preserved at all costs. It was an uncompromising stance, Doubleday believed, that the leaders in Charleston had not entirely bargained upon. But the election of the hated Lincoln steeled their own resolve to secede, so by then—even though there were still efforts at peace—too many wheels had been set in motion to facilitate cooler heads.
By the time South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, Anderson had decided secretly to regroup behind the protective walls of Fort Sumter. The Southerners scrambled to occupy the abandoned Federal outposts in and around the Charleston harbor in the days after Christmas, and by January 2,
Fort Sumter was all the United States government had left. As it turned out, however, the press clippings advertising the structure as a “fort” had been greatly exaggerated. What walls there were, were crumbling under a never-ending assault of windblown sand. It lacked flanking defenses and, in a couple of spots, parts of the walls had been torn down in anticipation of a rebuilding effort that the engineers had somehow never gotten around to.
But Doubleday was ever the optimist: “Perhaps in one sense it added to our security, for there was no glory to be acquired in capturing a fort which was wide open and defenseless.”
The fort, and the Federals’ feverish work to shore it up, became something of a tourist attraction for the residents of Charleston, who, wearing their secession cockades, would frequently come calling, although they never offered up any violence.
They hardly needed to, so inept were the nation’s efforts to look afte
r its own interests. A group of 150 masons were sent to Sumter to fortify the fort’s walls, but no one bothered to check their loyalties prior to their dispatch. As (bad) luck would have it, most favored the South and were not terribly interested in the garrison’s predicament.
Worse, even on the eve of the Civil War, the Buchanan Administration (Southern sympathizers abounded in the nation’s capital) had continued to blithely send thousands of U.S. muskets to the government of South Carolina, while sending only forty to Fort Sumter. This handful of weapons had no sooner arrived than the Secretary of War telegraphed in the middle of the night, asking for them back.
To add insult, while the fort was being lackadaisically patched and weapons were being denied, the Administration sent an inspector to the fort to ensure than everyone there was doing his job properly, even with no materials and provisions to do it. It was about more than Doubleday could stand.
Nor could he stand silent in the face of growing Northern sentiment to simply say “goodbye and good riddance” to the South. Doubleday heatedly wrote that this was an insult to Northerners who had invested capital in the South, and that it was unconscionable for the United States to write off its magnificent Southern harbors, as well as the mouth of the Mississippi and the Chesapeake Bay. All this, Doubleday said, was “a proposition to commit national suicide.”
And while Northerner opinion-drivers were agitating against conflict, their Southern counterparts were agitating for it—or at least for secession, whether it led to war or not. Part of their sales pitch was directed toward poor white dirt farmers in the South, who were promised that with secession and the reopening of the African slave trade would come an abundance of cheap negroes. Thirty dollars a head, tops. Southern leaders, Doubleday said, “Tried to make the poor whites believe that … every laboring man would soon be a rich slave owner and cotton planter. To the timid there would be no coercion (to fight). To the ambitious, they spoke of military glory and the formation of a vast slave empire, to include Mexico, Central America and the West Indies.”
Doubleday tartly noted after the war that cheap slaves never became a reality—the reopening of the international slave trade would have been bad business for the Commonwealth of Virginia, which had an active slave-breeding trade that would have been crippled by a saturation of the market.
Meanwhile, some of the rich plantation owners who had beaten the drum for independence suddenly went silent, it occurring to them that someone would have to pay for the establishment of this “vast slave empire,” and that it just might be them. Some anti-secessionists were emphatic. South Carolina judge J. L. Petigru, who was brought to tears by the thought of a divided Union, remarked that he would not be supporting secession because the state was “too small for a republic and too large for a lunatic asylum.” But these and other concerns were drowned by the fire-eaters.
Having surrounded the U.S. garrison and for the most part cut off its supply lines in January, the Rebels could have taken Fort Sumter any time they wanted. The reason they waited made sense: Might as well fix up the fort on the United States’ dime and capture it once the improvements had been made.
By April, the South was ready for its initial attack. Brig. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard—they did things this way in the South—sent word to the fort announcing his plans to attack.
Doubleday was underwhelmed:
About 4 A.m. on the 12th, I was awakened by some one groping about my room in the dark and calling out my name. It proved to be Anderson, who came to announce to me that he had just received a dispatch from Beauregard, dated 3.20 A.m., to the effect that he should open fire upon us in an hour [D]etermined not to return the fire until after breakfast, I remained in bed.
Doubleday credits the “venerable” Edmund Ruffin (who, wrote Winston Groom, despised the Yankees with “a hatred that was almost obscene”) with firing the first Southern, and thereby the first, shot of the Civil War. Like Doubleday, Ruffin is better remembered for other things, such as his contributions to agronomy. He introduced scientific soil testing and revitalized Virginia’s agricultural economy by sharing a new way to rotate tobacco crops for optimum yield. On hearing of Lee’s surrender, Ruffin sat down at his writing desk and declared (multiple times) his “unmitigated hatred” for the Yankees before wrapping himself in a Confederate flag and putting a bullet through his head. In a sense, he might so be remembered as firing the last shot of the Civil War.
Ruffin’s cannon shot hit the fort wall in “unpleasant proximity” to Doubleday’s right ear. Soon, the fort was being pounded by nineteen batteries, filling the fort with smoke, dust, and debris. Doubleday contemplated the action for a while before going down to the mess for breakfast.
His biggest complaint of the morning, oddly, wasn’t about the cannon shot, but about the poor quality of the pork he was forced to eat at his morning meal. Breakfast over, he marched his detachment of men to the casemates to return fire.
In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feelings of self-reproach, for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking … The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery.
Doubleday’s shot bounced off the roof housing the opposing battery.
The defense of Fort Sumter was of course pointless, and in truth so was the attack. In all, the whole show had the atmosphere of liquor-fueled, chest-thumping bonfires that college students put on the night before the Big Game. Still, the exercise had its moments. The big guns atop the fort were not employed, as Major Anderson was reluctant to use any weaponry that might inflict casualties on a people that he was still apparently having trouble considering as the enemy. This unused arsenal included “modified guns that might have reached the city of Charleston itself. It seemed to me there was manifest desire to do as little damage as possible,” Doubleday wrote. But this didn’t stop a wild-eyed Irishman from sneaking up the walls and setting off a few charges on his own.
Doubleday’s own men eventually abandoned their casemate, only to be baffled several minutes later when they heard its big gun fire. Returning to the little room that held the weapon, they found several of the aforementioned Baltimore masons doubled over in convulsions of laughter. Not only had they figured out (from watching Doubleday’s men) how to fire the gun, the beginners had hit their target dead center.
Much of the fort’s inner sanctum was built of wood, and when this was set afire by Rebel artillery Sumter was officially doomed. When flames threatened the magazine, the men shut the heavy copper doors to the powder room and hoped for the best. A cannonball soon dented the lock, and after that neither the flames nor the Federals had access to powder and shot.
The cheering mob back in Charleston was calling for Doubleday’s head, the belief being that he was the only “Black Republican” in the fort at the time. However, his general good standing among the town leaders allowed him to save his skin—despite one further act of mischief on his part.
A large hotel on shore was seeing double duty as a troop barracks, so Doubleday used this as license to send a forty-two-pound ball crashing through the length of the structure, sending troops and civilians alike scampering for the exits. An aggrieved officer later asked Doubleday why he did it, and—not in the mood for a drawn-out explanation—Doubleday stated that the innkeeper had given him a rotten room three years earlier, and he saw this as his one and only chance to get even. At hearing this explanation of lost honor restored, the Southern officer’s face brightened and he fully sanctioned Doubleday’s action.
The secessionists’ bombardment of the fort did plenty of structural damage, but caused only one serious injury. There were no casualties immediately reported on the Southern side (“Thank God for that,” the Union’s Anderson reportedly said), making the fight remarkably bloodless—which of course was in contrast to what was to come over the next four years.
The Federals had no option but to surrender the fort
after a day of performing admirably in its defense. They were allowed safe passage and the right to salute their flag one last time with gunfire. The salute turned out to be bloodier than the battle. A smoking ember inside the gun caused an explosion when it was packed with powder, killing a soldier by the name of Daniel Hough, who became the first of 360,000 Northerners to die in the war. But the cartoonish sideshow didn’t stop there. Sparks drizzled out the muzzle of the cannon, setting off a stack of cartridges and blowing several men into the air. They were seriously hurt, but recovered.
The sixty soldiers who defended the fort were treated to two celebrations, one from the Southerners, who threw an aquatic party with all manner of watercrafts to commemorate their victory. The second celebration occurred when the men returned to New York, where they received a hero’s welcome, despite the circumstances. “It was impossible for us to venture into the main streets without being ridden on the shoulders of men and torn to pieces by handshaking,” Doubleday wrote.
Doubleday would go on to greater achievements, performing well in Gettysburg and the battles leading up to it. Gettysburg might be called Doubleday’s finest hour, as his corps of 9,500 men ferociously held off a Confederate force of 16,000 early in the fight. Double received no credit for this either, due mainly to another corps commander who used Doubleday as a scapegoat for his own failures. Maj. Gen. George Meade, never a fan of Doubleday, willingly believed the lie and passed over Doubleday for a deserved promotion. Doubleday left for Washington in a snit.