Richmond
Make It a Southern Game
Baseball took a bit longer to take hold fully in Richmond, Virginia, and in most Southern cities, than in Northern cities. The 1865 season came and went with only a smattering of games in former Confederate states. In 1866, however, baseball flourished. And it was at the end of the 1866 baseball season, a season highlighted by dozens of games in the former Confederate capital, that the Richmond Base Ball Club ignited a baseball scandal. The scandal demonstrated that desires for a “national game,” supported by efforts such as the selection of Arthur Gorman as president of the NABBP, would face competing priorities in the South. The scandal also made clear that racial policies would be a preeminent matter in the growth of a national baseball community.
The Richmond Club started the controversy by rather audaciously breaking baseball’s rules of decorum and refusing an invitation to play a match game against Richmond’s Union Base Ball Club. At about the same time, the leadership of the Richmond Club also indicated that it had no plans to join the National Association of Base Ball Players, nor did they expect that other Southern clubs would submit themselves to such a national organizing body. The simple reason given by the Richmond Club’s secretary for both these rejections: “we are Southerners.”1 The gauntlet had been thrown down.
Thus, while Washingtonians Arthur Gorman and Nicholas Young focused on nationalizing baseball, white baseball leaders in the South worked toward very different ends. Certainly, the environment for baseball activity in states like Virginia and South Carolina differed greatly from that in the North. Confederate soldiers returned home defeated, to a South that had been broken by the fighting. Scarcity of food and shelter reigned as the most immediate of concerns. But still, even in such circumstances, the men of the South quickly began to form social organizations—perhaps hoping to replace camaraderie and community provided by their bygone military units. Southerners as a whole looked for means by which to reestablish everyday life and move beyond the tragedies wrought by the Civil War. Baseball clubs served these purposes.
That men in cities such as Richmond, Virginia, found time for baseball in the 1860s at all still seems surprising. The Richmond Times reported on “Base Ball” in 1866 alongside its coverage of Reconstruction policies, a draining outbreak of cholera, the Freedmen’s Bureau’s ration policies, and the rebuilding of burned sections of the city. In the article “Base Ball,” the Times explained in October 1866, “This exciting game and health-inspiring game that has been much in vogue in the North for many years has become very popular here.”2 Baseball blossomed in Richmond and other Southern cities—Atlanta, Charleston, Chattanooga, Louisville, Nashville, New Orleans, and Savannah especially—both because and in spite of the destruction wrought by the Civil War. Baseball leaders such as Richmond’s Alexander Babcock took a Northern game and made it fit in Southern society. Not surprisingly, questions regarding race and sectionalism played prominently in this formative process.
Richmond’s white baseball leaders had even less to say about race than their counterparts in Philadelphia or Washington, or Chicago, New York City, or Boston. To be precise, most white ballplayers in the South said nothing about race as it pertained to baseball. The leading white Richmond clubs never banned black participation. Similarly, Richmond’s white newspapers almost never commented (negatively or otherwise) on the activities of black baseball clubs. Instead, racial exclusion was an unstated but universal principle of Southern baseball right from the start. Thus, analyzing the mechanics of segregation in Richmond, and thereby the South, is a different task. It involves interpreting circumspect language and symbolic actions more than observing legal developments or even overt conflicts.
The Richmond Times and Richmond Daily Dispatch reported enthusiastically on baseball in 1866 especially. Juxtaposing these baseball reports, both papers also regularly published stories that painted former slaves as lazy, dishonest, and unintelligent. Calls for extreme segregation (“Have we not pointed out the advantages of emigration to Liberia, a country where they can get plenty of yam, plantain and rum?”) persisted.3 On the prospect of baseball serving as a means to reconnect the North and South, virtually no evidence exists to suggest that Richmond men wanted to use the game to forge new bonds with the men who had, only months before, stood across from them on the battlefields of the Civil War. In fact, as the National Association was electing Arthur Gorman as an olive branch of sorts, Southern teams reveled in the “Lost Cause” skirmishes that quickly defined the postwar period. Richmond’s white baseball players made their priorities known by the causes they supported.4 When the city’s ballplayers raised money for charitable causes (a typical endeavor for sportsmen of the nineteenth century), their funds went to support the building of statues honoring Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson or to give fallen Confederates proper burials in Richmond’s bucolic Hollywood Cemetery.5 Even the names of Richmond’s baseball clubs—the Secesh, Dixie, and Robert E. Lee, among others—honored the Confederacy and highlighted Richmond’s stubborn resistance to Reconstruction. In short, although baseball was mostly new to the city, the men of Richmond played baseball, and indeed used baseball, on their own terms.
Very Different Fields of Play
As the baseball season began in 1866, Richmond still existed as a shattered shell of its former self. The physical damage done to the Confederate capital had, ironically, occurred with only a few fighting days remaining in the Civil War. And Richmond’s own citizens and military protectors had done most of the damage. Richmonders torched their city so that the Union army would find nothing of use when it marched into the capital in April 1865. Cornelius H. Carlton, a young Confederate soldier from Richmond, had witnessed his friends and neighbors destroying their own city, scribbling in his diary as he sat on the opposite banks of the James River: “April 3rd—What a terrible morning—Richmond burning; gunboats burning and their magazines exploding, magazines along the fortifications exploding; Oh what a terrible morning.”6 The fires destroyed a thousand buildings in Richmond’s downtown business district, burning nearly all of Richmond’s major banks and grocers, as well as the offices and equipment of several of Richmond’s newspapers.7 By the time crews had extinguished the blazes, the bridges spanning the James River no longer provided safe passage.
Richmonders did not suffer alone. Atlanta, Charleston, Columbia, and Savannah, among others, each faced significant wartime destruction. Interestingly enough, these heavily damaged cities, along with New Orleans, became the bastions of postwar baseball in the South. This connection between urban destruction and Southern baseball should not be missed. Baseball in the South did not seem to flourish in cities that most closely mirrored Northern urban areas. Rather, baseball’s major cities in the South were, because of the war’s toll and racial demographics, the most different from New York or Boston. Journalists traveled through the South reporting on the devastation. Of Atlanta Sidney Andrews wrote, “The ruin is not so massive and impressive as that of Columbia and Charleston, but as far as it extends it is more complete.”8 Many assessors judged Charleston to have suffered most. An English observer concluded, “Never had a completer ruin fallen upon any city than fell upon Charleston.”9 Nevertheless, baseball quickly rose up from the ashes.
In light of the difficulties experienced by Richmonders and Southerners during Reconstruction, the Richmond Times, on more than one occasion, pondered why and how baseball became so popular. Foremost, the paper concluded that Richmond’s young men needed a forum for socializing and a means to exhibit postwar independence. The men had also acquired, according to the Times, the habit of socializing: “The experiences of four years’ of army life have rendered the young men of the South wonderfully gregarious. To move, live, and have their being in large bodies, seems to be somewhat essential to them. Now that they can no longer claim the fond associations of Company ‘A’ or ‘B,’ they still demonstrate their love for society of each other by establishing organizations for the accomplishments of other objects. The societies of war were no sooner dissolved than associations of a peaceful character were formed.”10 The Times claimed that the “wonderfully gregarious” men of Richmond had formed more baseball clubs, per capita, than any other city in the country.11 It was a dubious claim, but a telling one nonetheless.
Studying Reconstruction baseball in Richmond reveals anew how the struggle to organize a postslavery racial paradigm played out in the South. Although some baseball activity had existed in Richmond and other large Southern cities before the outbreak of the Civil War, Southern baseball really began after Appomattox. White Richmonders in the 1860s and ’70s used baseball as a means of parsing out the new realities that confronted them following their military defeat. Baseball became, at times, a way to fight back, albeit in a gentlemanly fashion. To many Southern whites, there were no unimportant battles or insignificant activities (including baseball) when it came to prohibiting race mixing. The war ended slavery and nullified secession; everything else remained up for debate. These sentiments come through clearly in the newspapers of Richmond and the actions of its citizens. The Richmond Daily Dispatch, for example, understood the Reconstruction struggle to be nothing less than a continual “War of the Races” that whites could not afford to lose. “Laws and bayonets and sordid fanaticism all combined,” the Dispatch resolved, “cannot force the highest of the five races . . . to live in peace with the lowest of that five upon terms of equality.”12
2. Richmond’s burned district. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Yet only one hundred miles to the north in Washington DC—home to Douglass, Gorman, and Young—Reconstruction politicians tried to do exactly what the Daily Dispatch declared impossible. Reconstruction politicians attempted, with varying levels of enthusiasm and effectiveness, to promote racial equality for Richmond and the rest of the South. During the first years of Reconstruction, the Republican Congress passed significant legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and crafted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.13 But outside of Congress, the two sides—those committed to racial separation and those who supported racial integration—understood the parameters of the contest differently. White segregationists, including those who played baseball, had a simple and cohesive policy regarding segregation: whites and blacks should never come together as equals. This maxim was the guiding principle for Richmond baseball. On the other side, proponents of racial progress spent much of their time trying to decide where to focus integration efforts and determining those activities in society where segregation was either permissible or inevitable. This difference in cohesiveness and clarity between the two sides’ understanding of the struggle created a decided advantage for those white Americans, and baseball players, who supported racial segregation.
Alexander Babcock, Father of Richmond Baseball
Alexander G. Babcock established the Richmond Base Ball Club in July 1866, bringing organized baseball to the city.14 Edward Cohen, a commodities broker at Richmond’s Merchants and Mercantile Bank, served as the club’s first president. Cohen, a “pioneer of Richmond Jewry,” also served as the president of Richmond’s Kesher Shel Barzel lodge (a national Jewish fraternal order).15 Cohen’s selection to lead the new baseball club demonstrated that whiteness, not religion or ethnicity, was the fundamental criterion of entry to organized baseball in Richmond. J. S. Riley and J. V. Bidgood, bookstore owners, assumed the roles of treasurer and secretary, and Babcock took on a club-director position for Richmond’s first significant baseball club.16
In light of the fact that the club’s initial meetings took place at the Bidgood and Riley Bookstore, and given Richmond’s rising obstinacy to Northern influence, one cannot help but wonder if the club quite literally formed with The Lost Cause close at hand. Edward A. Pollard, the wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, published his massive The Lost Cause in 1866. In a matter-of-fact style, Pollard laid out for his fellow white Richmonders and Southerners a story of gallant Confederate armies competing against the insurmountable resources and thuggish tendencies of the Union army. Pollard had inaugurated the debate over the Civil War’s history, but in the closing pages of the seven-hundred-page work he also gave marching orders to white Southerners: “The war has not swallowed up everything. . . . [T]he war properly decided only what was put to issue: the restoration of the Union and the excision of slavery. . . . [T]he war did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide States Rights. . . . And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim, and still assert in them their rights and views.”17 Pollard wanted Southerners to protect their way of life; the white baseball clubs in Richmond and other Southern cities led this call to arms in the sporting world.
The Richmond Club held its first match on July 12, 1866. It was a scrimmage really, involving only the players of the Richmond Club, but the Dispatch still covered the gathering. The game took place in the western quadrant of the city, on land just across the street from Elba Park and north of the city’s vast Hollywood Cemetery. Proximity to Hollywood mattered. If Washington DC oriented itself around the White House and the U.S. Capitol, Richmond focused on Hollywood Cemetery. The cemetery was a point of pride in the slowly recovering city and an indication of city priorities. One visitor passing through Richmond only days before the Richmond Club’s match noted the juxtaposition of the manicured cemetery and the carnage of the city’s burned district. The “luxuriant growth . . . and above all, the graves of our beloved and glorious Confederate dead, make Hollywood the most charming spot within my knowledge,” the traveler asserted. The business district, on the other hand, was nothing more than “ghastly piles of rubbish, brick and mortar, standing walls, and gaping cellars with yawning chasms.”18 It was altogether fitting that the Richmond Club hosted its inaugural gathering between the shrine to the Confederate dead and the dark reminder of the Union victory.
The Richmond Base Ball Club’s first interclub match came a month later and was an exercise in memorializing a Confederate hero. On August 4, 1866, Babcock and his teammates met the Ashby Club, also of Richmond. The Ashby Club, Richmond’s press noted, played in “honor of the illustrious deceased Southern Cavalier” General Turner Ashby. The game that resulted was a four-and-a-half-hour grind, decided 43–34 in favor of the Ashby Club. The Richmond Times determined the event’s importance by evaluating the crowd assembled: “A goodly number of ladies were present on the above auspicious occasion, and, by their smiles, encouraged their favorite.” On actual baseball matters the Richmond press was a bit lost (the Times reported that one team scored forty-three innings to the other’s thirty-four), but still baseball fever had arrived.19
Alexander Babcock was Richmond’s Nicholas Young, organizing baseball clubs and matches and generally overseeing the infrastructure of a growing game. In a rare mix Babcock had both a baseball pedigree (predating the Civil War) and a stalwart Confederate résumé. Babcock did not hail from Richmond, however, or even from the South. Rather, Babcock had made his antebellum home in New York City. Babcock had played for the reputable Brooklyn Atlantics. When the Civil War came Babcock joined the Union army and served in Company D of New York’s Seventy-First State Militia. In this post and on this side, Babcock lasted only three months.20 For reasons left unexplained, Babcock switched to the Confederacy and served as a captain in Richmond’s Third Battalion for Local Defense in 1863 and 1864. Babcock then transferred from that unit to the Artillery Company of the Forty-Third Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, under the leadership of the daring John Mosby. With Mosby’s men often referred to as “the Guerilla band,” Babcock became the “Big Guerrilla.”21
Babcock served Richmond and the Confederacy well during the war. Thus, it makes sense that he stayed in Richmond after the conflict ended. Babcock’s war record benefited him greatly, in business and society. In 1866 the Richmond Daily Dispatch, for example, vouched for Babcock’s character and urged Richmonders to purchase their ice from a Confederate hero: “Captain A. G. Babcock, well known to everybody who lived hereabouts during the memorable four years, having himself cooled down considerably since that time, proposes to keep the citizens of Richmond cool during the approaching hot term by supplying them with any quantity of pure, clear ice daily.”22 Babcock, like other veterans, retained his military title for life. He remained a “captain,” and thus forever a Southern patriot. That a man with Captain Babcock’s résumé controlled baseball in Richmond certainly mattered in terms of the trajectory of the game.
According to city council records and tax bills, Babcock struggled to make a profit as an ice dealer, even with his reputation and connections. Of course, after the war, most men, black and white, took on whatever work they could find. Unemployment plagued the city.23 Baseball players as a rule were the fortunate minority who had great-enough financial resources to pursue recreation. By cross-referencing Richmond’s annual city directory with baseball box scores, one learns that Richmond ballplayers held a wide variety of jobs, including banker, constable, salesman, carpenter, ice dealer, mechanic, laborer, shoe repairman, magistrate, policeman, news agent, hotel clerk, printer, tobacconist, stonecutter, “plate turner,” iron puddler, gas inspector, “liquorsman,” and bookkeeper.24
In a second act of blatant disloyalty (the first, of course, being his switch from the Union army to the Confederates), A. G. Babcock abandoned the Richmond Base Ball Club before the team finished its first full season. Babcock decided to start over in order to build up an even more competitive baseball club. He founded the Pastime Base Ball Club in late-September 1866 and assumed this club’s presidency from the start. The Pastime recruited the city’s best white players. Less than one week after organizing, the Pastime took the field for their first match, winning 135–33.25
Despite the difficulties of postwar Reconstruction, the summer of 1866 gave rise to hundreds of white men joining Alexander Babcock, the Richmond Base Ball Club, and the Pastime Club on the city’s ball fields. Throughout the South as a whole, baseball participation increased rapidly during the 1866 season. The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer reported on more than fifty games during the late 1866 and early 1867 season. The Savannah Daily News and Herald boosted that the play of its clubs “could scarcely have been better” and that the Savannah boys would soon take “a ball or two” from their more experienced Northern counterparts.26 Fans also began to turn out. The elite clubs of Savannah and Charleston in particular competed before thousands of paying spectators within a couple of short seasons after the Confederacy’s death.27
The Richmond Times lavished its city’s white baseball community with generous press coverage. Baseball had become, the paper surmised, the “modern requisite for a ‘two horse town.’” Further classifying the activity, one editor described baseball as the city’s newest sickness: “Cholera having disappeared [it had not subsided completely], and the chills, in a measure, abated, the baseball fever is the last mania with which our people have been afflicted.”28 During the 1866 season the Richmond Times and Richmond Daily Dispatch published more than 150 articles concerning baseball. Although tallying an exact count of the Richmond clubs is difficult due to the capricious nature of teams commencing and folding, one can conservatively conclude that at least thirty baseball clubs played in the city during the 1866 season. Still, no Richmond club played more than ten games during the 1866 season. Despite its late start, the Richmond Pastime compiled the city’s best record, at 8–2.29
The Bonds of Baseball, the South, and Whiteness
Whereas Henry Chadwick, whose Virginia-raised wife might have offered him a dose of reality, preached that baseball would “be national in every sense of the word,” Southern baseball players embraced the language and practices of sectionalism.30 They commemorated the rebellion. Some examples of this Southern tendency were overt. In August 1866, for instance, the Richmond Daily Dispatch sternly warned a new club that had taken on the designation of “Keystone Club” to find a more fitting, more Virginian name. Other vestiges of sectionalism took a more nuanced approach. When it came to uniforms, the baseball men of the South did not forget what they had been wearing for the past four years. In the face of restriction by the U.S. Army against wearing one’s Confederate uniform, the Richmond Pastime wore garb regularly described as including “Confederate grey pantaloons.” This statement via wardrobe became common in Southern baseball. In Atlanta a “Grey Jacket Base Ball Club” formed also in 1866. Beyond dress the commemoration of Confederate leaders became a part of white Southern baseball. In Richmond the Ashby Club made clear that its play was meant to honor Turner Ashby, the “gallant Confederate raider, whose deeds of valor in time gone by so often struck terror to the hearts of the federal invaders.”31 Dozens of teams throughout the South played in honor of leading generals, especially Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
Although uniforms, tributes, and descriptions might, on the surface, seem inconsequential, the semantics and visuals of the Southern game exposed the priorities of its white players. Racial exclusion came by inference and via a resolute commitment to maintaining Southern distinctiveness even while taking up a Northern game. Thus, Leon Litwack’s thesis, that “the racial distinctions that characterized the immediate post-emancipation years were almost always understood rather than stated,” rings true when considering the baseball realm of Richmond and the South.32
A more formal manifestation of Southern separatism also percolated in 1866. Richmond baseballers led the discussion about forming an organizing body, composed solely of Southern clubs, to challenge the National Association. The Richmond Times received dozens of letters during the 1860s from clubs spread across Virginia and the South, asking for rule clarifications and inquiring about the prospect of Southern clubs coming together at a convention. The Times printed one such letter in its October 3, 1866, edition: “As your paper seems to be the general champion of the baseball fraternity in Richmond all of our baseball players here [Alexandria, Virginia] are beginning to patronize it, and every evening we look with eager eyes over your local column for information in regard to matches that have been and are to be played, besides trying to get information about the ‘Southern Baseball Convention’ that we hear will meet before long.”33 In the end the proposed Southern convention never occurred. But the idea of not only rejecting the National Association but also joining with like-minded Southern teams appealed to many Richmonders, Virginians, and Southerners. Of the dozens of clubs in Virginia, only one—the Union Club of Richmond, not an accepted member of the city’s baseball community (as will be demonstrated)—saw fit to send a representative to the North-led National Association of Base Ball Players convention in 1866.34
Richmond clubs did meet for a Virginia state baseball convention in 1866. Edward Cohen presided, and Alexander Babcock represented the interests of Richmond baseball at the gathering held in Richmond’s city hall. The men decided at the meeting that another meeting should be called; this one would be a formal state convention set for 1867. Virginia men would organize and control their own baseball interests. This represented the only palatable option. Cohen clarified his priorities for organizing: “The chief objects of such a Convention are, to further the cause of base ball by giving it that influence and position to which its bearing upon the health and morality of any community so just entitles it, and to meet the objections and inconveniences which Clubs in this state must have to attending the National Convention.”35
Black Baseball?
While Richmond’s newspapermen served the white baseball community by publishing letters and fostering organization, these same papers never mentioned black baseball in the city. Never—at least not until 1875. In light of this dearth of information about black baseball, one might question whether black Richmonders played baseball at all. Perhaps it was not segregation at work, but rather that black men in Richmond, many of them former slaves, simply ignored the new game. This scenario, though possible, is highly unlikely. Consider the sources first. Until the Richmond Planet began circulation in 1879, Richmond did not have a black newspaper. This left the Richmond Daily Dispatch and Richmond Times, both well known for their racist reporting, to cover black games.
Further supporting a hypothesis that black baseball clubs organized in Richmond during Reconstruction are the numerous examples of such activity in other Southern cities. Perusing newspapers from 1865 to 1875, one learns of the activities of black baseball clubs in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chattanooga, Galveston, Little Rock, Memphis, Mobile, Montgomery, New Orleans, and St. Louis, among others. Black baseball in Georgia was popular enough within five years of the war’s end that a Macon club organized a “colored championship” for the state in 1870. Teams from Atlanta, Griffin, and Milledgeville, among others, traveled to Macon for the competition. During the same week in Georgia, another “sable” tournament took place in Brunswick.36 A complete lack of baseball activity would have rendered the black population of Richmond, some twenty thousand strong, radically different from its counterparts in cities from Boston to New Orleans.37 Thus, although confirmation of black baseball activity in Richmond did not surface until 1875, analyzing the extenuating circumstances suggests that segregation simply forced black baseball clubs so far to the periphery of the baseball community that records are hard to come by.
There is an irony to consider when analyzing the development of Richmond baseball in 1866 and the mechanics of segregation set in motion at this time that should not be missed. That irony—that the firm segregation of the game began in earnest the same year as the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment—makes obvious the limitations of Reconstruction policies in post–Civil War America. The Civil Rights Bill had almost no connection or application to baseball. Indeed, while the bill, passed over the opposition of Gorman’s friend President Johnson, guaranteed black Americans the right to “purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property,” black baseball clubs in Richmond could barely set foot on the city’s primary baseball grounds.38
Above all else Richmond baseball in 1866 brought together like-minded and like-hued players and spectators. Whiteness trumped religious and class barriers, varying levels of baseball proficiency, and neighborhood identities on the baseball field. Players usually joined clubs based upon a shared work association or neighborhood, but then enjoyed inclusion in the broader baseball community. The Westham Club represented Richmond’s Sydney neighborhood. The Old Dominion and Stonewall Jr. Clubs drew their members from the Church Hill area of the city.39 Each of these clubs joined the broader community and had no difficulty finding match opponents.
The most significant example of this race-based unity can be seen in the acceptance of Manchester’s baseball clubs. Manchester had long existed as a stepchild to Richmond. The city sat on the opposite side of the James River from Richmond. Despite fueling Richmond’s economy with its many business and manufacturing establishments, and despite the social connections between the two adjacent towns, Richmond would not officially absorb Manchester until early in the twentieth century. Residents of Manchester often chafed at the haughtiness of the Richmonders:
The way in which Richmond and Manchester behave toward each other is quite singular. The former reminds me of a girl who, poorly raised, by a stroke of good fortune becomes the petted wife of some rich and stupid old bachelor. Thus suddenly improved in condition, she makes the most of it. She decks herself in all the extremes of fashionable folly, assumes lofty, flaunting airs, and hastens to forget the humility of her origins. Richmond is rich. . . . Richmond is large . . . Richmond is proud. . . . Richmond pities Manchester. . . . [T]here is a touch of arrogance and conscious superiority in the behavior of Richmond people toward us which it is my misfortune to despise.40
Despite this dynamic, respect and generosity usually characterized the relationships between the white ballplayers of Richmond and Manchester.
When the Alert Base Ball Club of Manchester formed in August 1866 (first as the Dixie Club), the Richmond Times described its members as “working men” and confirmed that the club was composed of “good material, and bids to become a first-class [club].”41 Class could have been a divider here. The Manchester club’s captain, James B. Fitzgerald, worked as a carpenter. Mostly bachelors and laborers, the Manchester players’ schedules limited club activities to Saturday evenings. Practices and games occurred weekly during that period of brief respite. Still, the club enjoyed all the baseball pageantry common for the period. Within its first few months of existence, the Alert Club invited “ladies” to attend, unfurled a club flag, and coupled action on the field with addresses from distinguished citizens.42
Although almost always labeled as a team from Manchester, the Alerts were accepted. The Alert arranged games. Within weeks of organizing, the Alerts hosted the also new Pastime Club at Marks Park. The Pastime walloped the Alerts, 126–17, and the Times postulated (incorrectly) that the tally represented “the largest score made in the United States this season.”43 The men of Manchester, accustomed to decades of being slighted by Richmonders, took the field regularly against the best clubs Richmond had to offer. Whiteness bridged class divides and, in this case, the James River. The Southern game brought Fitzgerald the Irish carpenter and Cohen the Jewish stockbroker together.
The Exception to Whiteness
The singular exception to unity by whiteness in Richmond baseball involved a baseball club made up of Freedmen’s Bureau agents. While the white baseball community in Richmond found a place in its midst for Jews, unskilled laborers, and residents of Manchester—all groups that experienced social discrimination in the city at times—those white men charged with protecting the rights of black men became social outcasts among Richmond’s white baseball players. The Union Base Ball Club of Richmond discovered this reality as the busy 1866 season wound down.
Controversy surrounded the Union Base Ball Club during its two-year existence. Richmond newspaper reporters tried to pin down exactly what the Union Club members did when they were not playing baseball. The Richmond Times concluded somewhat hopefully that the Union ballplayers seemed to work as clerks, not as soldiers. “In relation to the status of the ‘Union Club,’” the newspaper reported, “we are authorized to state that its members are not composed of army officers. Most of them are attached to Government departments in the capacity of clerks, etc.”44 The clerk occupation, of course, was a common one among baseball men. The Daily Dispatch also researched the Union Club, concluding that the “Union Club is entirely composed of Federal officers.” When considering the prospect of a match between the Union and Richmond Clubs, the Dispatch worried about the game being used “to make political capital.” The paper also understood the reluctance of the Richmond Club to travel to the Union Grounds, which were “situated very near a Federal camp.”45
That the Union Club received a less than a cordial welcoming to the Richmond baseball community probably did not come as a surprise to the club members themselves. The relationship between formerly Confederate Richmonders and the occupying federal force was a strained one. The issue of altering the city’s racial norms worried many whites. The young diarist Carlton noted the presence of federal troops after the war and had no doubts about their motivations for descending upon Richmond: “We are now under military rule. Officers of the ‘Freedmen’s Bureau’ are posted throughout this southern country to carry out the emancipation and ‘protect’ the negro.”46 Despite these tensions, or maybe in an attempt to minimize them, the federal soldiers organized a baseball team and tried to join in the city’s competition.
The bonds of whiteness and the tradition of baseball hospitality were strong, but even they could not save the Union Base Ball Club from rejection in Richmond’s Confederate-memorializing baseball community. After organizing, the Union Club conducted a few practices and then began looking for competition. This effort to become a part of Richmond’s baseball community set off a controversy in Richmond and in broader baseball circles. It began innocuously. The Union Club wrote the Richmond Club in October 1866, requesting a match. The Union Club’s J. F. Dooley, adhering to baseball protocol, penned the formal challenge: “Sir,—Having been authorized, I hereby challenge the Richmond Club to a match game of base-ball, single game, to be played at any time between the 5th and 20th of October, and according to the rules of the National Association. Please advise me of the action of the club as early as possible. Should the club think proper to decline the challenge, you will oblige me by stating plainly the reasons therefore.”47 The letter clearly tested the waters. One might argue, in fact, that the letter meant to pick a fight. In comparing Dooley’s letter to the challenge letters that other baseball clubs sent back and forth regularly (many of which were published in newspapers), Dooley’s request for an explanation of a refusal stands out as unusual. The Union Club probably anticipated a rejection and wanted documentation regarding their treatment by other Richmond clubs. Whether the reference to the National Association resulted from ignorance regarding Richmond’s Southern-based baseball community or was meant to provoke a reaction is difficult to discern. Regardless, the letter did not sit well with the Richmond Club.
The task of replying to the Union Club’s challenge fell to J. V. Bidgood, the bookseller and secretary of the Richmond Base Ball Club. Bidgood wasted little effort on diplomacy in his response to the Union Club’s challenge. There would be no game. “Sir,—Your communication of the 21st instant is before me. I am instructed to state that the Richmond Base-Ball Club does not desire and will not play the Union Club a single game. We are not, nor do we expect to be, members of the National Base-Ball Convention. Our reason: we are Southerners. Hoping this may be satisfactory.”48 “We are Southerners” was reason enough for Richmond’s premier (at least for the time being) baseball club to reject a potential match. Reunion and reconciliation, ideals of great concern to Chadwick and other national baseball leaders, did not sway the Richmond ballplayers.
News spread quickly of the Richmond Club’s decidedly direct act of sectional agitation. The New York Clipper, baseball’s most prominent voice, pounced first, suggesting that the slight would resonate far beyond Richmond. Baseball’s future in the city, according to the Clipper’s Richmond correspondent, rested on defeating sectionalism. The Clipper correspondent had determined that “real” baseball had yet to come to Richmond precisely because Northern-based clubs had not visited the city: “We have had no matches of importance as yet, but soon expect to see some sport of this kind, if sectional prejudices will permit.”49 The Richmond Club did not act alone in refusing to play the Union Club. The Clipper reported that Richmond’s Old Dominion Club had drawn a challenge from the Union Club as well, which it refused “for reasons which are apparent to all.”50
Adding further context to the Union–Richmond Club controversy, during the 1866 season a particularly salacious racial scandal captured the city’s attention. Miscegenation, with the federal government’s tacit approval, had become the city’s new panic.51 In July 1866 Peter Cary, a member of Company G, Second Battalion, of the United States Army, stationed in Richmond, married Henrietta Johnson, a mulatto former slave. The Richmond Times gravely reported the perceived transgression as “the first case of miscegenation which has disgraced Richmond.”52 The fact that an occupying soldier would have the gall to marry a former slave solidified the worst suspicions of some Richmond residents, namely, that the federal government had designs on forcing radical racial integration.
The reaction of the national baseball press to the Union Club’s rejection hinted at organized baseball’s concern over reconciling with white Southerners. The Clipper demanded unity in baseball, but it did so amid a fog of geographic and cultural misunderstanding. And the Clipper failed to comprehend or chose to ignore the rather obvious fact that white Richmond wanted to remain separate and distinct, both in baseball and in most other activities. Thus, when the New York Clipper appealed to the Richmond Club for increased bisectional hospitality, most Richmond ballplayers paid no attention. Richmond ballplayers had no interest in the North-led baseball nation. Still, Chadwick and his fellow baseball leaders in New York pressed for reunion: “Until this example was set by the ‘Richmond club,’ nothing of a sectional character has emanated from a single club in the country; those North, as far as they have had opportunity to do so, manifesting a feeling quite the reverse. We trust to see the Richmond Club reverse their action by challenging the Union Club, if they are Southern gentlemen, and not of that class who bring discredit on the name of Southerners.”53 The Richmond Club, apparently unmoved by this argument, offered no response.
Only as frustration mounted over the Richmond Club’s obstinacy did the Clipper and Northern baseball leaders begin to address the true issues at stake. Three weeks after reporting on the controversy, with the Richmond Club demonstrating no remorse for its stand, the New York Clipper issued a thinly veiled threat that exposed the undercurrent driving the conflict. The paper suggested that if playing the Union Club offended the Richmond Club so greatly, a different opponent could be rustled up. “A more suitable match,” the Clipper seethed, “might be arranged by pitting one of our colored nines against the flower of the Richmond and Old Dominion Clubs, providing the ‘boys in black’ interpose no obstacles. What say the parties?”54 With this verbal jab the Clipper cast off its typical gentlemanly tone and made clear the negotiating chips on the table. The Clipper understood the Richmond baseball community’s commitment to racial segregation. The proposed mixed-race game was a mostly empty threat, but the threat played on Southern white ballplayers’ greatest fears.
The Richmond Club’s rejection of the Union Club made clear that baseball was a venue in the struggle over racial segregation. The Philadelphia Inquirer, a paper that only occasionally concerned itself with baseball, joined in the criticism of the Richmond Club. Unfortunately for the Inquirer, the paper mixed up some of the particulars. The Philadelphia paper somehow came to the conclusion that the Union Club actually made its home in Washington DC, not in Richmond. The Philadelphia Inquirer attempted to stir the pot further with its own report, connecting the politics of Reconstruction with the budding game of baseball in Richmond:
Baseball and Reconstruction—Some things outside of theatre are as good as any comedy played inside. Among these “some things” we note this, which has recently transpired at Richmond, Virginia, and it’s all about baseball. It seems there is a club in existence in Washington DC composed of government employees. This club, in its child-like innocence, challenged the “Richmond” club to play a match game, never dreaming but that the “glove” would be taken from the ground by the “cavalier.” Judge, then, ye baseball men of the Atlantic and Athletic clubs, of the surprise which seized the challengers when they received the following laconic and highly chivalric billet down from the challenged party. Read it, and then, answer whether you are ready to place yourselves in a position to receive the same snubbing at the hands of “gentlemen” and “southerners.”55
The Inquirer followed this harangue with a copy of the “We are southerners” letter. Interestingly enough, while the Philadelphia Inquirer made the mistake of calling the Union Club a DC team, it accidentally exposed another aspect of Richmond’s simmering sectionalism. It mattered little that the Union Club resided in Richmond. Residence in the South did not make one a Southerner.
The Richmond Club’s decision to protect its white Southern values by avoiding contact with Northerners did not decide the issue for all white clubs in the city, let alone in the South. Rather, the refusal to play was only one approach to making a point. The Richmond Daily Dispatch, for one, argued that Richmond clubs should use baseball to fight back and to demonstrate Southern superiority. A Dispatch editorial postulated: “We never before heard of the existence of the ‘Union Club’ (so called). . . . But we think the Richmond boys should have accepted the challenge.” Then, throughout a rambling five-hundred-word editorial that followed, the paper pondered the political nature of the controversy and searched for the downside that might result from a Richmond–Union Club meeting. “We are not yet aware whether [the Union Club] is a political organization or not. . . . The only objection that we could possibly admit to such a course [the two clubs playing] may be found in the fact that the Union Club requested the Richmond to state their reasons for refusing to play; from which it may naturally be supposed that the ‘loyal’ Club desired to make political capital.”56 The editorial demonstrated a sense of distrust and near paranoia that pervaded Southern society even as postwar reunion was being advocated by many Northern ballplayers.
The Dispatch urged the Richmond Club to take the challenge in order to “exhibit another instance of southern prowess over northern boastfulness by beating the ‘Union Club’ badly,” but also to be careful. Thus, while the Dispatch’s plan of action was the exact opposite of what the Richmond Club did, the goal—Southern distinctiveness—was the same. On a practical level, playing against Northern clubs (even those based in Richmond) provided an opportunity to improve the state of the game in the city. But despite the very public flap that had erupted over its harsh stand, the Richmond Club held fast in its refusal to play the Union Club. The two clubs never met.
While the Richmond Club took a principled stand that won it many fans in Richmond, other white baseball clubs proceeded differently. Not long after the Richmond Club’s rejection, the Spotswood and Ashby Clubs accepted the Union Club’s challenges. The fact that differences of opinion arose within Richmond’s white baseball community, regarding the level of animosity appropriate over a baseball game, is revealing. The implementation of segregation was rarely neat and rarely pushed forward by unanimous consent. Thus, in Richmond’s baseball community, two clubs refused to meet the Union Club on the field. Two other clubs decided that the baseball field was an altogether fitting place to meet such an adversary.
As for the ever-obstinate Richmond Base Ball Club, its gallant stand (at least in the eyes of many white Richmonders) did not save it from decline. In the very same issue of the Richmond Daily Dispatch that summarized the Richmond–Union Club controversy, the paper announced that Alexander Babcock had formed his new baseball team.57 It took only a matter of weeks for Babcock’s all-star Pastime Base Ball Club to quickly surpass the Richmond Club for city supremacy. Although one might postulate on the relationship between the Richmond Club’s rejection of intersectional baseball and Babcock’s departure from the club, Babcock did not explain how the two events overlapped.
The Union Club, for its part, did not give up hope of finding matches in Richmond during the fall of 1866. The Union Club met and defeated the Spotswood Club (70–21), the Ashby Club (51–26), and the Olympic Club (39–36) in quick succession.58 Then Alexander Babcock’s newly formed nine agreed to a match game with the Union men. The championship of Richmond was at stake.59 The Pastime-Union match stretched across several days in early-October 1866. Although newspaper accounts did not clarify the reason, either rain or darkness forestalled the ballplayers from playing the final innings, with the score standing at a lopsided 51–14 in favor of the Pastime. The game resumed on October 8, 1866, and no great miracle occurred for the Unionists. The final tally favored the Pastime club 135–33. It was, the Times noted, a “glorious victory for the Pastime.” The Union Club would not take the city’s championship.60 The Union Club quickly issued a challenge for a rematch, but to no avail. Playing and defeating the Union Club once seemed enough for the Pastime men; they issued no response to the Union Club’s November request for a game.61
Thus, white Richmond’s efforts to make and keep a Southern version of baseball had won out, at least temporarily, on the field. Overall, through a variety of messages and conduits, Richmond baseball leaders had made clear that very different objectives existed for ballplayers in the South. Reunion was not a priority; preserving racial separation was paramount.