Baseball on the Prairie by Kris Rutherford Scott Hanzelka

Author:Kris Rutherford, Scott Hanzelka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

THE CIVIL WAR, RECONSTRUCTION AND BASEBALL: DIVISION AND DIVERSION

Suddenly there was a scattering of fire , [of] which three outfielders caught the brunt; the center field was hit and was captured, left and right field managed to get back to our lines. The attack…was repelled without serious difficulty, but we had lost not only our centerfield, but…the only baseball in Alexandria .

—George A. Putnam, Union soldier

The first baseball game in Texas remains undocumented. George Putnam’s account of his Civil War experience near Alexandria, Louisiana, took place well east of the Texas border, but his passage supports what many believe—that Union soldiers largely introduced modern baseball to the South during the Civil War. While some Rebel soldiers from port cities had learned portions of the game from northern seamen before the war, most of the Confederate exposure to baseball came from watching their enemies play the game in encampments and inside prisoner of war camps. Diaries of Union prisoners at Camp Ford near Tyler speak of baseball being played in the camp, with the soldiers forming a ball from a piece of cork wound in blanket thread and covered in leather. The Rebel guards must have been intrigued at the competitive spirit the contests brought out in their prisoners’ otherwise bleak lives. Even though crude forms of the game had been played in the South for some time, the Rebels marveled at the northern game’s refined rules and skilled positioning of players.

Some of the same guards from Camp Ford may have participated in Texas’s first recorded baseball game on April 21, 1867. The Houston Stonewalls celebrated the anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico by defeating the Galveston Robert E. Lee’s 35–2 on the San Jacinto battlefield. Regardless of when or how the game arrived in the state, however, it is clear that soon after the Civil War, the same “base ball” fever sweeping the nation arrived in Texas.

The northern tier of Texas counties voted against secession leading up to the war, but when hostilities began, most men broke ranks with the popular vote and joined the Confederate cause. Charles William Batsell, a twenty-two-year-old Grayson County resident whose father owned just one of the county’s two hundred slaves, enlisted in the Sixteenth Texas Cavalry under Fitzhugh’s command. After mustering at Clarksville, his company soon stationed at Little Rock, Arkansas, and saw its first combat at the Battle of Cotton Plant along the White River. When Rebel commanders ordered the cavalry dismounted, Batsell joined “Walker’s Greyhounds,” an infantry division nicknamed for its ability to march long distances on short notice. Batsell and his unit crisscrossed southern Arkansas and Louisiana for nearly three years, taking part in the Vicksburg and Red River Campaigns and the Camden Expedition. With Union troops scattered throughout both Arkansas and Louisiana and combat sporadic, it is likely that Batsell witnessed baseball being played during raids like those described by George Putnam. Whether or not Southerners attempted to mimic the game in their own camps remains unknown.

Will Batsell held little interest in the rural lifestyle.

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