Honor and Slavery by Kenneth S. Greenberg

Author:Kenneth S. Greenberg [Greenberg, Kenneth S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691214092
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIVE

BASEBALL, HUNTING, AND GAMBLING

SOUTHERN MEN OF HONOR did not play baseball during the antebellum period. They enjoyed a variety of other sports and diversions, including hunting, racing horses, and betting on various card, dice, and other games. But they showed little interest in baseball. Despite the wishful thinking of some early publicists, antebellum baseball was not the “National Game.” Only after the Civil War, only after slavery had ended and men of honor had lost their central place in Southern culture, did baseball begin to take root in the South. To understand why Southern gentlemen preferred the hunt and other games to baseball is to understand much about the complex connections among games, slavery, and honor among masters of the Old South. Southern men revealed themselves in the games that gave them pleasure.

I

Baseball mythology has hitherto combined with Civil War mythology to make it difficult to analyze the sectional origins of the game. In order to study the history of antebellum baseball, it is necessary to appreciate the power of the myths that have come to surround it. Even before the war, early nationalist sports writers, eager to discover a single sport loved by all Americans, ignored the Northern regional roots of baseball. In 1857, the pioneer sports publicist William T. Porter referred to “the National Ball Play of our country” in the pages of his journal Spirit of the Times.1 After the Civil War, the image of baseball as the national sport attained a nearly sacred status in the culture. It was an important symbol that demonstrated that the United States had always been a single nation. Charles A. Peverelly, in his popular survey of American sports, described baseball as “The National Game ... peculiarly suited to the American temperament and disposition.”2 America had just been split by a bloody civil war, but Peverelly’s portrait of the universal appeal of baseball created an image of unity. In phrases that echoed the words of contemporary sporting journals, Peverelly contended that the game offered “excitement and vim” with “no delay” for two and a half hours. Americans, he believed, needed constant stimulation in order to sustain their interest because “they are too mercurial and impulsive a race not to get drowsy and dissatisfied with anything which permits their natural ardor to droop even for a brief space of time.” Moreover, baseball was not costly in terms of equipment or time. Unlike foreign, “aristocratic” games, anybody in America could play. “The great mass,” Peverelly contended, “who are in a subordinate capacity, can participate in this health-giving and noble pastime.”3

The image of baseball as the national game achieved powerful reaffirmation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the guidance of the promoter and sporting-goods entrepreneur Albert G. Spalding and the president of the National League, Abraham G. Mills. Their central contribution was to achieve official sanction for the idea that “America’s National Game” was invented by Abner Doubleday and had not evolved from the English ball game of “rounders.” The campaign began in 1889.

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