Philadelphia
Baseball’s Boomtown
Philadelphia’s baseball community dwarfed those of Washington DC and Richmond. Philadelphia had more ballplayers than its mid-Atlantic neighbors and, by all indications, better ones. The Philadelphia Athletic, Bachelor, Keystone, Olympic, Quaker City, and West Philadelphia Base Ball Clubs were the most prominent of the hundreds of clubs that organized and played in Philadelphia during the 1860s and ’70s. The New York Clipper touted the Philadelphia Athletic Base Ball Club as among the very top baseball organizations in the country, equal to the Atlantic Club of Brooklyn, the Mutuals of New York City, and the Red Stocking Club of Cincinnati.1 In terms of black baseball, the Philadelphia Pythians, led by Octavius Catto, enjoyed considerable success as well. The Pythians hosted visiting clubs and traveled north into New York for games and south to Baltimore and Washington DC. The club won 90 percent of its contests. The Philadelphia Sunday Mercury, a paper that sprinkled racial slurs throughout its pages regularly, and the Philadelphia Press provided regular coverage of the city’s black baseball clubs. Generally speaking, the city’s white baseball community, led by the powerful Athletics, allowed black clubs to use many of the area’s best fields. Relations between white and black clubs were mostly amicable and open, if far from balanced.
Thus, when Philadelphia’s North American commemorated fifty years of baseball in the city in 1907, there was much to celebrate. The city had a unique position in the baseball world. The Philadelphia baseball community had recovered quickly from the Civil War. In fact, Philadelphia teams began engaging in interstate matches again as early as 1863. To celebrate this baseball past, the North American published a lengthy article on Philadelphia baseball written by Al Reach, a former Philadelphia Athletic and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, a sporting-goods tycoon. In the article the former second baseman made sure to mention that the players of his day had been equal or superior to those playing at the beginning of the twentieth century. “Men hit as hard, caught as well and threw as accurately and strongly thirty years ago as they do today,” Reach assured readers.2
3. Philadelphia’s baseball landscape. A. Athletic base ball grounds (1865–1870), B. Athletic base ball grounds (1871–1877), C. Pythian meeting rooms, D. Octavius Catto’s residence, E. Al Reach’s base ball store, F. Keystone base ball grounds, G. Banneker Institute, H. Location of 1871 election riots, I. Orion base ball grounds, J. City hall, K. Liberty Hall, L. Commonwealth base ball grounds, M. W. Philadelphia base ball grounds, shaded area: highest black population. Genealogy of Philadelphia County Subdivisions, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Department of Records, 1966), 72.
Reach also looked back winsomely on the “wonderful elasticity” and “matchless possibilities” of baseball during the Reconstruction era. In noting these characteristics, Reach boasted about baseball’s malleability and recalled how the game had vacillated between different rules and customs in its earliest years. On the seemingly simple issue of balls and strikes alone, for example, Reach had witnessed several significant changes. “First three balls gave a man his base, then we got it up to seven, only to reduce it gradually to four. One season we played four strikes; another year a player was credited with a hit every time he got a base on balls; we abolished the base for a hit with pitched ball then returned to it; we made a rule imposing a strike for a man on every unsuccessful attempt to bunt, and finally reached the foul-strike rule, the most important of all modern baseball legislation.”3 Although Reach’s concept of “elasticity” has some historical merit, Philadelphia baseball, and indeed baseball in New York, Boston, and Chicago as well, did not evidence this elasticity for long when it came to racial matters. Rather, during the Reconstruction era, white clubs rapidly separated themselves from black ones. Philadelphia’s baseball milieu, especially regarding black participation, became increasingly less fluid and elastic.4
The Leading Men
Both the Athletics and the Pythians won the majority of their games and were “champions” in the haphazard, pre–National League sense of the designation.5 But Philadelphia’s baseball community clearly revolved around the Athletics. The New York Clipper regularly gushed over the Athletics’ prowess on the field and the club’s service as an ambassador of the game: “There is no better plan of popularizing our national game than of interchanging visits among the clubs of principal cities in the Union. The Philadelphians were among the first to carry out this excellent method of popularizing baseball. . . . [A]mong the most determined and successful tourists of the fraternity may be included the Athletic Club, of Philadelphia, the acknowledged champion organization of the Keystone State.”6 The Sunday Mercury set its baseball calendar by the activities of the Athletics: “The season of baseball may be said to have fairly commenced in this city. The Athletics took the field yesterday afternoon, and played their inaugural game.”7
Neighborhood by neighborhood, baseball clubs formed throughout Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Press estimated that some three hundred clubs had formed in the city by 1866. Most new clubs prominently identified themselves as residents of a particular city ward. The “Stable Rangers,” for example, claimed the Fifth Ward as their home base. The “Blue Dusters” (Eleventh), “Nothing Like It” (Fourth), “Silver Spring” (Third), “Monitor” (Seventeenth), “Evelyn” (Third), “Mohawk” (Sixth), “Ereon” (Fourth), “Carrol” (Twentieth), “Norma” (Eleventh), and “Buffalo” (Seventh) Base Ball Clubs all saw fit to include their city address as part of their organizational announcements.8 As in Richmond and Washington DC, baseball united the white male population even as it increased neighborhood pride on a club-by-club basis.
The Athletic Base Ball Club had organized on May 31, 1859. The founders were members of a musical society in the city. Colonel Thomas Fitzgerald took the most active role in running the club. Fitzgerald was the prominent editor of a Philadelphia daily—the City Item.9 A political and social leader in Philadelphia, Fitzgerald counted the Radical Republican Charles Sumner as an intimate friend, and he campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in both 1860 and 1864. Although the Republican Party dominated in Philadelphia during Reconstruction, Fitzgerald’s radicalism was unusual for the city. Under the leadership of Fitzgerald, the Athletics moved quickly through the ball games of the era, beginning with townball and then dabbling in cricket, before reorganizing on April 7, 1860, as a baseball club. The club won its first game, versus the Mercantile Club of Philadelphia, 75–26. Consistent success followed. In 1862 the Athletics merged with the United Club to increase its numbers. In 1863, with the Civil War raging on the battlefields of their own state, the Athletics made their first baseball tour.10
Fitzgerald carefully guided the rise of the Athletics and cultivated the club’s reputation. The club shortly came to rival the Atlantics of Brooklyn as baseball’s preeminent club. The Athletics’ leadership recruited players judiciously. Only “gentlemen of the highest respectability” filled the roster. According to the Clipper, many of the Athletics held “positions of honor and trust in mercantile, mechanical, and professional life.”11 The Athletic players enjoyed celebrity status in Philadelphia.
The members of the Athletic, always popular with our citizens, were warmly greeted yesterday afternoon as they came on the field. Urchins not yet in their teens were delighted as their favorites “tumbled out” to take positions in which they have won honorable celebrity. ~There goes old Birky,” exclaimed one. “Yes, but there’s Al Reach,” sings out a Reachite; “and yonder,” cries out another, “is Smithy.” . . . “But look at McBride, ain’t he pitching,” say half a dozen voices, as Dick lets himself out and sends the ball whizzing with that peculiar twist which we have heard extolled, oft and oft again.12
The 1865 Philadelphia city directory listed only one of the club’s players in its annual “who’s who” of the city: Elias “Hicks” Hayhurst (occupation—gentleman).13 In coming years, however, directories would identify the Athletic players as clerks, entrepreneurs, and telegraphers, and also as working in “liquors” and “shippen.”14 Mostly, the Athletic players focused on baseball as their vocations.
The Athletics began their 1865 season by commemorating the recently assassinated Abraham Lincoln. The club issued a heartfelt resolution on April 17, 1865: “Resolved, that the nation has met with a heart-rending calamity in the death, by an assassin of its kindly, wise, merciful, much-loved Chief, Abraham Lincoln. Resolved, that we deeply sympathize with the family of the deceased. Resolved, that we have entire confidence in the intrepidity and patriotism of Andrew Johnson. Resolved, that we tender our earnest sympathies to Honorable William H. Seward and Family.”15 The resolution revealed a few truths about the men of the Athletic Club. They were Unionists, and most supported the Republican Party. In the years between 1866 and 1892, in fact, a series of Republican politicians would lead the Athletic Club. Hicks Hayhurst, Colonel Thomas Fitzgerald’s successor, was a Republican who served on Philadelphia’s city council in the 1870s.16 Republicanism in Philadelphia, however, did not necessarily indicate support for black rights. Although Athletic Club members through the years would demonstrate many personal acts of kindness toward their black counterparts in Philadelphia, they did not aggressively champion progressive racial causes.
In 1866 the members of the Philadelphia Athletic Club, numbering more than four hundred, reelected Thomas Fitzgerald to his fifth year as president of the club. The Athletics had flourished under his leadership (a fact that Fitzgerald’s own newspaper, the City Item, unabashedly pointed out). The club had won dozens of games, improved their field and clubhouse, and padded their treasury. Gross receipts for the 1865 season topped $5,000. Also in 1866, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed a special motion allowing for the incorporation of the Athletic Base Ball Club.17 Because of its early success, the Athletic Club, unlike most other baseball clubs, had the financial resources to capitalize on the late- and postwar baseball boom. At the club’s annual meeting in 1866, the club treasurer reported the team’s recent financial history: a profit of $317.94 during the 1864 season—a sizable sum given the uncertainty surrounding the war and the presidential election—and $307.18 in profit in 1865. The club patted itself on the back in the 1866 report, noting that its ball field at Columbia and Seventeenth had been thoroughly upgraded and that “no club did so much towards extending the popularity of base ball, or made such rapid progress towards gaining the highest pinnacle of fame, as the Athletics did.”18 On the field the Athletics won thirty-nine of their forty-one contests in 1866, including several wins against prominent clubs from New York City.19
Making Room for Octavius Catto and the Pythians
The successes of the Athletic club, led by Thomas Fitzgerald and later Hicks Hayhurst, begot exclusivity. The Athletic Club supported black baseball to an extent but, not surprisingly, focused primarily on protecting its own reputation and financial resources. Throughout baseball’s northern cities, unwritten rules set limits on the extent to which white baseball leaders could support their black counterparts. No overt declarations of racism came from the Athletic Base Ball Club, but the post–Civil War baseball culture of Philadelphia still featured an uneasy commingling of black and white clubs.
Philadelphia was not Richmond or Savannah, but neither was it a safe haven for African Americans. In 1862 Frederick Douglass had condemned the wartime racial attitudes of white Philadelphians. “There is not perhaps anywhere to be found a city in which prejudice against color is more rampant that in Philadelphia. . . . It has its white schools and its colored schools, its white churches and its colored churches, its white Christianity and its colored Christianity . . . and the line is everywhere tightly drawn between them.”20 Philadelphia had a history of racial violence. Whites in the city had fought to stop blacks from voting in the 1830s. And if anything, the city became more racially restrictive as the Civil War approached. In 1854, for example, the State of Pennsylvania determined that all school districts with more than twenty black students must provide segregated educational facilities.21
As the Pythian Base Ball Club emerged in Philadelphia’s robust baseball community, competing for resources with clubs such as the Athletics, it also joined a myriad of black fraternal organizations trying to navigate through the opportunities and prejudices that post–Civil War Philadelphia held for black men. A long history of black men organizing existed in the city. More than one hundred black benevolent organizations operated in Philadelphia, some established as early as 1823. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, headquartered in Philadelphia, dominated the city’s religious scene.22 Additionally, fraternal societies such as the colored Masons and Odd Fellows were scattered throughout the city. These organizations provided tangible services such as insurance, burial benefits, and credit assistance to the city’s black population. When the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League held its convention in 1866, eleven auxiliary chapters represented Philadelphia alone.23 Thus, black baseball clubs joined a community of organizations available to black men during the Reconstruction era.
The Philadelphia Pythian Base Ball Club organized on June 6, 1866. The club joined the black Excelsior Base Ball Club, which began play a few months earlier.24 During the 1860s the Pythians, Excelsior, L’Overture, Active, Gegan, and Liberty Clubs faced off against each other on Philadelphia’s black baseball circuit. Other organizations, such as the Buffalo Base Ball Club, were probably composed of black players as well, but incomplete reporting makes verifying their race difficult.25 Through these half-dozen clubs, black men had proportional representation in Philadelphia’s baseball community. Black residents never made up more than 4 percent of Philadelphia’s total population during the Reconstruction years.26 Though strikingly small, Philadelphia’s percentage of black residents tripled that of its rival northern and midwestern cities. In terms of demographics, black baseball players faced a much different environment in the North than in the South. Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, and New York City (baseball’s most important cities) all shared nearly identical racial complexions. Each city’s black population represented between 1.2 percent and 1.3 percent of the total city population.27 There were, obviously, very few black residents or ballplayers as compared to the overwhelming white majority. Thus, black baseball meant something different in these cities than in Baltimore, Richmond, or New Orleans, where upwards of half the population was black.
The Pythians had first called themselves the “Institute,” due to the fact that most of their players either taught or worked at the Banneker Institute of the City of Philadelphia. Organized in 1854 and named for Benjamin Banneker—an eighteenth-century black mathematician and astronomer—the Banneker Institute brought together black men regularly for literature readings and debates. The organization’s motto touted the transformative benefits of education: “When men are in the pursuit of useful knowledge the noblest attributes of their nature are called into requisition.”28 The organization had close ties to the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), which had been started by Quakers in 1832. The baseball club, however, dropped the uninspired “Institute” moniker before ever playing a game. Because most of the ballplayers were also members of the local Colored Knights of Pythias chapter, the baseball club became known as the Pythians.29
After organizing and playing a handful of games in 1866, the Pythian Base Ball Club began interclub play in earnest during the 1867 season. The club opened with a contest against the L’Overture Club. The Pythians started hot and showed no mercy, running up a score of 62–7 versus their hapless hosts. Octavius Catto (second basemen and team captain) and Joe Cannon led the way, scoring eight runs each. The lopsided score was not uncommon during this era of batter-friendly rules.30 In covering the Pythian-L’Overture game, the Sunday Mercury made no mention of race. The paper did not need to. Although both clubs had only recently joined the city’s baseball fraternity, the L’Overture name, undoubtedly a tribute to François-Dominique Toussaint L’Overture, who led the successful Haitian revolution of 1801, made the complexion of the players obvious. The name also hinted at an aggressively independent spirit among the black ballplayers.
The Pythians moved on quickly to the next challenge. One week after humbling the L’Overture, the Pythians took the field against the “champion” Excelsiors. The Pythians romped to a 39–16 victory in a game, described rather blandly by the Sunday Mercury as “interesting and exciting,” played on the grounds of the Quaker City Base Ball Club.31 A. J. Jones, a seaman by trade, led the Pythian effort with flawless fielding at third base and five runs scored.32 The Mercury again left race out of its reporting.
The Sunday Mercury’s writers assumed that its baseball-savvy readers already knew the race of the Pythian and Excelsior Clubs. The Sunday Mercury had a long record of racist reporting, one that often mixed with baseball news. An 1868 quote on blacks and baseball (“Why would negroes make better baseball players than white men? Because they are better at whitewashing, and in hot weather, they play a stronger game.”) was representative of the paper’s derogatory reporting.33 That the Pythians in a matter of weeks had risen to the top of the pecking order among black baseball clubs in Philadelphia reflected the ambitions of its leadership, particularly Octavius Catto.
Octavius V. Catto helped lead the Pythians both on and off the baseball field. As the captain and a middle infielder, Catto functioned as a modern-day player-manager, setting the batting order and positioning players around the diamond. Catto was particularly well suited for his leadership role. He was educated, passionate, and well known in Philadelphia. Catto had enjoyed as privileged an upbringing as a black man could hope for in the nineteenth-century United States. Born free in 1839, Catto was the son of Reverend William T. Catto, a Presbyterian minister in Charleston, South Carolina. In Philadelphia especially, where the AME Church had begun and thrived during the Reconstruction era, Catto’s credentials as a “preacher’s kid” prepared him for leadership.34
William Catto moved his family from South Carolina to Philadelphia when Octavius was only five years old. Though hardly a bastion of racial equality, Philadelphia held more opportunities for free blacks than did the slave society of Charleston. Schools for blacks existed in Philadelphia. Octavius enrolled at the Institute for Colored Youth. There Catto studied under the guidance of Ebenezer D. Basset, who would later become the minister to Haiti in 1869.35 While a student Catto read the classics of Western literature and learned the fundamentals of mathematics. He also became an accomplished cricket player.
After graduation Catto floundered a bit. Still a teenager, Catto probed the possibilities the United States offered an educated black man. Catto left Philadelphia for nearly six years. Curiously, Catto spent much of his wandering period in slave country, some of it in Richmond. The conditions he encountered below the Mason-Dixon line probably did not shock Catto. In Richmond, like Philadelphia, discrimination commingled with opportunity. The realities of urban slavery in Richmond allowed for some manifestations of black autonomy.36 Though slavery was no small technicality, Catto might well have noticed the depressingly similar conditions of free blacks and slaves in U.S. cities. In both conditions black men could experience some independence, but count on discrimination.
In 1859, at the age of twenty, Catto returned to Philadelphia and to the Institute for Colored Youth. There he taught literature, math, and classical languages. It was a noble cause, teaching the next generation of black men, many of whom left Philadelphia to further black education in other cities.37 The Civil War then interrupted Catto’s teaching and cricket-playing days. Catto enlisted in the Union army’s Philadelphia colored militia. He also rallied other black men to the cause. A pamphlet circulating in Philadelphia in 1863, signed by Catto, made clear the young teacher’s militancy: “This is our golden moment. The government of the United States calls for every Able-Bodied Colored Man to enter the Army for three years of service. . . . Men of Color! All Races of Men—the Englishman, the Irishman, the Frenchman, the German, the American have been called to assert their claim to freedom and a manly character, by appeal to the sword. . . . Men of color to Arms! Now or Never!”38 Catto had a respectable military career. He rose to the position of major and inspector of the all-black Fifth Brigade. Catto, however, had little chance of becoming a hero. He experienced neither the danger nor the excitement of the battlefield. He did not join the thousands of black soldiers who fought and died in support of the Union cause. Instead, Catto and most of his regiment of black Philadelphians remained encamped in the city’s suburbs. There they waited anxiously for the call to action that never came.39
Philadelphia’s colored regiments received no bounties for their service, as white regiments did. The black men earned just ten dollars per month and daily rations. Additionally, the mere presence of black men in uniform sparked insecurities among the white population, even in Philadelphia—a mecca of prewar abolitionism. This white paranoia caused humiliating slights for Catto and his men. “The Negro regiment drilled and camped outside of the city was forced to sneak in civilian’s clothes to the train that was to carry them to the battle-field, lest they should be mobbed for fighting for their country,” the New National Era reported.40 Still, Catto made the best of the situation. Located in the Philadelphia suburbs, Catto acquired the military skill of passing free time. He became a baseball player.41
In an 1865 speech to the Union League Association, a prosuffrage organization of which Catto founded a Philadelphia chapter, Catto voiced his vision for the future: “It is the duty of every man, to the extent of his interest and means to provide for the immediate improvement of the four or five million of ignorant and previously dependent laborers, who will be thrown upon society by the reorganization of the Union. It is for the good of the nation that every element of its people, mingled as they are, shall have a true and intelligent conception of the allegiance due to the established powers.”42 A devout Christian, Catto coupled his baseball activity with service as the corresponding secretary of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League—a group determined to desegregate the streetcars in Philadelphia. Catto also belonged to the Colored Knights of Pythias, Republican Party, Fourth Ward Black Political Club, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia Library Company, and Union League. Catto tried to chip away at the racial barriers of academia. He joined the all-white Academy of Music, only to be singled out when he tried to attend a lecture.43
In addition to his credentials and activism, Octavius Catto’s personal charisma gained him leadership opportunities. Catto was, to put it simply, well liked. News of his engagement, for example, brought heartfelt congratulations from well-wishers across the country. “It filled my heart,” Bill H. Wormley wrote from South Carolina, “with joy unspeakable when I saw that some fair young lady had won the gallant heart of our most noble Catto.”44 Catto’s wealth distinguished him from the majority of the city’s black population. In a city where much of the black population fought off (or succumbed to) poverty on a daily basis, Catto achieved relative financial security. The Banneker Institute provided a relatively healthy and stable salary.45
Catto and the Pythians toed the line between pushing for equality and making the best of a bigoted environment. The Pythians tried to claim the city as their own. As the club’s reputation grew, hosting visitors became an important part of the Pythians’ mission. Philadelphia’s press took notice of the club’s rising fortunes. By July 1867 the Sunday Mercury trumpeted the Pythians’ winning record: “As almost every reader of the Mercury knows, the Pythian Club, of this city, stands at the head of all colored organization here-abouts.”46 Members of the Alert Base Ball Club of Washington DC invited themselves to visit Philadelphia. Leaders from the two clubs set the Pythian-Alert match for July 6, 1867. Catto oversaw preparations himself, securing use of the city’s best fields for the game and arranging suitable overnight accommodations for the visitors. A week before the match Catto boasted of his accomplishments to the Alert Club: “We have secured the grounds of the Athletic Base Ball Club and all conveniences (the best in the city) have been put at our disposal.”47 Catto also arranged for Hicks Hayhurst, a member of the Athletics, to serve as umpire for the match.
A look at the club’s finances reveals that the Pythians had the financial wherewithal to rent a plot of land for a ball field, had such an opportunity presented itself. The club spent several hundred dollars in 1867 providing food and entertainment for visiting clubs. The prominent white clubs of the city—the Athletic and Olympic Clubs—leased grounds from the city (the Water Department in particular) at favorable rates. The Pythians, however, never received such an opportunity. The “champion” Pythians relied on fitting their schedule around the games of the city’s white ball clubs. This scenario foreshadowed the problems teams in the Negro Leagues faced in the twentieth century, when black ball clubs usually played in Major League stadiums, often as victims of predatory rental rates, when white tenants took their road trips.48
There were enough fields to go around, but not all were open to black clubs. Within a four-mile radius of the Pythian meeting rooms, at least five ball fields existed to which the Pythians never gained access. Most prominently, the Keystone Base Ball Field, at Eleventh and Wharton, was located less than a half mile away from the Pythian headquarters; the Pythians rarely used it. The problem with the Keystone Field was that it was located on the south side of Bainbridge Avenue. The street served as an informal line of racial demarcation between Philadelphia’s Irish and black populations. The Pythians played many of their games in Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River.49
The Alerts’ visit to Philadelphia demonstrated that the Pythian Base Ball Club functioned as a conduit for African American connectedness. Indeed, the Pythians’ entire organizational structure pointed to a broader role in the black community than simply fielding a baseball club. The Pythians used baseball as a means to bring together successful young black men. While the Pythian Club’s “service” (baseball) was unique, the Pythians actually mirrored the organizational structures of the other black fraternal organizations in the city. Strong leadership, a clearly defined hierarchy, and meticulous record keeping allowed the Pythians to function efficiently. The Pythians’ voluminous store of records (letters, receipts, box scores, and the like) makes it obvious that the club took baseball seriously and guarded its reputation closely. Record keeping ensured accountability. When, for example, treasurer Thomas Charnock bought a baseball, the club recorded the price ($1.20) and noted the date Mr. Charnock received his reimbursement. There would be no financial scandals. The club secretary also took special care to represent the club well and to build relationships with other organizations. Letters took on a formal, diplomatic tone: “The action of the Club requires me to perform the pleasant duty of tendering you this letter of acceptance with the suggestion that, if it should be consistent with your inclinations and arrangements, the game be played on Saturday, the 6th of July. Hoping that the suggestion may meet your approbation, I am very respectfully your obedient servant.”50 Most fraternal clubs of the period took similarly formal and diligent approaches to governing their affairs.
Decisions on whether to accept a match challenge, such as the one issued by the Alerts, came from the Pythian leadership. The Pythians annually elected a president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer, as well as a governing board. This hierarchy was also nearly universal in the fraternal world. During the 1867 season, the Pythians’ first as a fully functioning club, the club chose James Purnell as president, Raymond J. Burr as vice president, Jacob C. White as secretary, and Thomas Charnock as treasurer. Jefferson Cavens, Henry B. Bascom, and Joel Selsey made up the governing board, and Octavius V. Catto served as the field captain.51
The officers of the Pythians—like Babcock, Fitzgerald, Gorman, and Young—were more socialites and social activists than baseball players. Men who had no business catching or throwing a ball in front of an audience joined up for social reasons and served the Pythian Club where their talents fit. The club’s first president, James Purnell, for example, never took the ball field for the Pythians. His name, in fact, did not appear on any playing roster, despite the fact that the club fielded four “nines,” in 1867 and 1868.52 Instead, Purnell focused on administrative tasks. The Pythians and black baseball fit into Purnell’s broader portfolio of activism. Even as he acted as the Pythian Base Ball Club president in 1867, Purnell also founded the Liberty Hall Association, an organization meant to encourage a “spirit of self-improvement” among “colored” Philadelphians.53 Of the board members, only Jefferson Cavens played well and regularly. Cavens manned first base for the club’s first nine and was among its leading batters and run scorers.54
Membership in the Pythian Club required sacrifice and commitment. The Pythians demanded service from their men, primarily through participation in one or more of the club’s various committees. These committees met regularly and produced a plethora of thoroughly mundane reports. Committees formed to secure playing grounds and meeting rooms, to perform financial audits, as well as to take care of tasks such as selecting uniforms. The challenge from the Alert Club sprang the Pythians’ Committee on Reception into action. After weeks of feverish preparation, the committee had doled out $78.26 to fund a lavish reception for the Alert Club. The Pythians also paid for the Alerts’ boarding expenses—a measure not uncommon in the years immediately following the Civil War.55 From a purely fiscal standpoint, it was an outlandish sum. By way of context, the Pythians paid the Banneker Institute $6.25 a month to rent a room, $5.50 for a dozen bats and a ball, and about $50.00 to outfit the entire club in uniforms.56 But the reception expenditure demonstrated the Pythians’ ascendant social priorities. For the Alert Club reception, the Pythian Committee on Reception dutifully filed a detailed expense report demonstrating exactly where the money had gone:
Provided board for them [Alert] at Mrs. Sebastian’s. Escorted them from and to the Depot. Escorted them from and to the Base Ball Grounds. Provided entertainment on Friday and Saturday evenings. Provided silk badges with the name of the Club thereon.
The Bill:
Ice cream, Raspberries and Plain Cream—11.75
Six pair spring chickens—6.75
1 Al a mode—6.00
30 lbs ham and 5 beef tongues—10.40
Dish Hire—4.38
Knives and Forks—2.70
1 box segars—3.00
1 Gal claret Wine
4 doz rasped rolls—4.20
Groceries—2.21
Oranges and Ice—1.00
Cheese pickles and Butter—1.65
Bar Fare—6.17
Mrs. Furmans services and rent of 2 rooms—9.25
Ribbon for badges—2.80
Printing—3.50
Total—$78.2657
The Pythians apparently counted the evening worth the cost in order to form bonds between Philadelphia and Washington DC’s “best” black men. The Pythians demonstrated convincingly to their visitors that in Philadelphia, a black man could play on the city’s best field (albeit with the white club’s permission) and enjoy a luxurious banquet. The Pythians’ hosting prowess paralleled the customs of elite white baseball clubs, many of which similarly placed great emphasis on the duty of social hosting.58
Unfortunately, the Alert-Pythian contest did not live up to the extravagant preparations. The clubs battled back and forth in a spirited contest for four innings before a summer thunderstorm sent the players and spectators scurrying for cover. With the game starting and stopping several times, the Pythians recorded the game as a 23–21 victory, while the Mercury and Clipper settled on a score of 21–18 in favor of the Alert Base Ball Club. The discrepancy arose due to the rain stoppages. After four complete innings the score stood 21–18 for the Alert. The Pythians led off the fifth inning with a flurry of hits and runs, but before the Alert could even get three outs rain stopped the game. Thus, the score reverted back to what it had been at the end of the fourth inning, giving the Alert Base Ball Club a disputed victory. Umpire Hayhurst had no choice but to cancel the game’s remaining innings.59
Despite the abbreviated action on the field, the endeavor of bringing together the men of the Alert and Pythian Clubs had been significant for Philadelphia. The Sunday Mercury exhibited a hesitant enthusiasm for the event that mirrored the sentiments of many white Philadelphians. The paper in its reporting affectionately termed the Pythians “our fellows” and covered the game with the same attention prominent Athletic or Olympic contests received. But there was awkwardness in the Mercury’s fawning. After calling the Pythians “our fellows” in passing, for example, the editors of the paper felt it necessary to clarify for the readers that “by that we mean the Pythians.” Such support could not, during the early years of Reconstruction in Philadelphia, be assumed.60 The treatment of black men—whether as a members of baseball clubs or not—remained in flux.
Paternalism and Deference
The Pythian-Alert game would not have taken place at all had the Athletics refused the Pythians permission to use their field. Because the Pythians did not lease or own their own grounds, plans for matches such as the one with the Alerts could be undone at the last minute due to a scheduling change by the owners of the grounds. By all indications, the Pythians maintained excellent relations with the Athletic Base Ball Club. Indeed, they had to. The Pythians used the Athletic ballpark regularly, and Fitzgerald and Hayhurst served as umpires in Pythian contests on more than one occasion. Hayhurst’s support in particular was crucial. At one time or another the president of the Athletics, president of the Pennsylvania Association of Base Ball Players, and member of Philadelphia’s city council, Hayhurst had the respect of the city’s baseball and political leaders alike. His relationship with the Pythians, and the limits of that relationship as demonstrated in the next chapter, went a long way toward determining the Pythians’ place in Philadelphia baseball.61 Beyond Hayhurst the Athletic players in general appreciated the efforts of their black counterparts. For the Alert game the best Athletics—Dick McBride, John Radcliff, John Sensenderfer, and Weston Fisler—all made it out to the field.
Although in a less tangible manner than the ballpark struggle, the white press also played a significant role in determining the Pythians’ place in the baseball spectrum. At times the Pythian Club had its accomplishments belittled by paternalist reporting. Philadelphia’s white press treated the Pythians and other black clubs with nearly equal parts paternalism, condescension, and genuine affection. The Mercury, for example, frequently emphasized the mentorship of white players to their black counterparts, a relationship that virtually no corroborating evidence exists to support. “The experts [Athletics] were present and by their advice kept the Pythians down to their work,” the Sunday Mercury reported of the Alert-Pythian match, as if the Pythians might have lost interest without the Athletics’ guidance.62 Because the Athletics never consented to a match against the Pythians or even took the practice field with their black counterparts, the contention that the white ballplayers were the experts and the black ballplayers the novices was simply assumed rather than verified.
Not all white press reports on black baseball were negative. Press paternalism often looked, well, paternal. Exhibiting a vacillating opinion on racial equality, Philadelphia’s newspapers often countered racist reporting by celebrating the accomplishments of black clubs. The Sunday Mercury, which once bemoaned the “ignorance, squalor, degradation, and brutal instincts of the African,” also jealously protected the interests of local black clubs from out-of- town criticism and called for financial support for black clubs’ tours.63
In 1867 the Mercury took up the causes of both the Excelsior and the Pythian Clubs. After the Excelsior nine visited New York City for a match, the New York papers criticized their behavior. “The New York Papers, as usual,” the Mercury reported, “are in a muddle concerning the Excelsior (colored) Club, of this city, which last week, defeated a colored club belonging to that city. They apply the title of Champions to the Excelsiors, and then abuse and ridicule them, after the fashion of New York.”64 The Mercury pointed out indignantly that the Pythians, not the Excelsior, were the colored champions of Philadelphia. The paper had no doubt that the Pythian Club would represent its native city well, both on and off the field: “Should [the Pythians] ever conclude to visit New York, an opportunity will be afforded Philadelphia defamers to see a well behaved set of gentlemen.”65
The key to the strange balance of integration and segregation in Philadelphia’s baseball community seemed to rest on the “proper” behavior of the black clubs. The Pythians had to exhibit proper deference to their white counterparts in order to maintain harmonious relationships. Proper requests were to be followed with proper gratitude. Thus, glowing thank-you letters went out almost immediately after a game played at the Athletic facility or umpired by a member of the Athletics. Following the Alert contest, for example, the Pythians sent a letter meant to “impress the earnestness with which we all unite in thanking the members of your Organization.” The letter concluded with a dose of Victorian flattery: “Permit me, My Dear Sir, to express on behalf of the Pythians an ardent desire that the Athletics may ever in the future, as they have always in the past sustain the well earned title of Champions of our national game.”66 Hicks Hayhurst received a similarly gushing note of appreciation for his service as umpire. These regular acts of deference were the price of using the best field in the city.
In short, race “rules” governing baseball fit the description of Philadelphia’s “social intercourse,” put forth by W. E. B. DuBois some thirty years later. The patterns of interaction between white and blacks had been established in the immediate postslavery years. As DuBois explained, unwritten rules governed relationships such as the one between the Pythians and Athletics. “If [a black man] meets a life long white friend on the street, he is in a dilemma,” DuBois explained. “If he does not greet the friend he is put down as boorish and impolite; if he does greet the friend he is liable to be flatly snubbed. . . . White friends may call on him, but he is scarcely expected to call on them, save strictly for business matters.”67 The black-white relationship as evidenced through the relationship between the Pythian and Athletic Base Ball Clubs was neither hostile nor completely one-sided. Genuine affection and camaraderie existed, but proper order had to be respected. This order included a built-in level of dependency on the part of the Pythians due to the fact that white ball clubs controlled the baseball fields and white men dominated the city’s press.
A Battle for Control of the Athletics
The racial climate of Philadelphia’s baseball community changed dramatically in 1866 due to a leadership struggle within the Athletic Club. Because of the Athletics’ prominence, the president of the club wielded significant influence in the broader baseball world. Thomas Fitzgerald, a founding member of the Athletics, had enjoyed this influential position from 1860 until 1866. Then, rather suddenly, the Athletics forced Colonel Fitzgerald to resign from his position as club president in 1866. Hicks Hayhurst, an Athletic Club board member and officer, eventually took over. Although the details surrounding the divorce are murky, one thing is certain: the move had little to do with the club’s performance on the baseball field. The Athletics had risen steadily to the top of baseball’s hierarchy, and Fitzgerald’s credentials as a baseball man were above reproach. The New York Clipper had publicly lauded Fitzgerald and the City Item in 1865 as key figures in Philadelphia’s shift from cricket to baseball and in making Philadelphia a leading baseball city. “The breaking out of the rebellion, however, drew off much of the material forming the principal cricket clubs, and then baseball began to come in to vogue, the influence of the Athletic Club and the efforts of Col. Fitzgerald of the City Item, Col. Moore and others being greatly beneficial in bringing the national game of ball of America prominently before the community as a recreation worthy of the heartiest encouragement.”68 In addition to his duties with the Athletics, Fitzgerald served as president of the National Association of Base Ball Players in 1863. In serving in this capacity, Fitzgerald called to order and facilitated the National Association’s pivotal discussion on adopting the modern “fly game.” When the famous Brooklyn Atlantics and New York Mutuals played games, Fitzgerald was often asked to umpire.69
Buffeting his service as a baseball leader, Thomas Fitzgerald had connections throughout Philadelphia society. He published and edited the City Item. Fitzgerald served on the executive board of the Philadelphia public schools. He was also a popular playwright, whose productions regularly packed Philadelphia’s theaters. Fitzgerald’s Light at Last proved so popular at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre, in fact, that the Broadway theaters soon came calling. As an artist Fitzgerald espoused populism over elitist exclusion; he argued that arts were for the masses and that music should be included in the curriculum of Philadelphia’s public high schools.70 And in addition to publishing the City Item from 1846 well into the 1870s, Fitzgerald served as foreman of Philadelphia’s grand jury and as the “superintendent of bonded warehouses” for Philadelphia’s port authority.71 Thus, Fitzgerald before, during, and after his ouster from the Athletics was well known and respected in Philadelphia—exactly the type of man that the burgeoning gentlemen’s sport targeted for inclusion.
Fitzgerald’s forced resignation came on the heels of the Athletics’ membership reelecting Fitzgerald to the club’s presidency in 1865 and 1866, without even a single dissenting vote. Shortly after his 1866 reelection, however, an incident or series of incidents, the exact nature of which is difficult to reconstruct, occurred that led to calls for Fitzgerald’s ouster. As a part of the equation that led to Fitzgerald’s dismissal, some members of the Athletics seemed to oppose the machine-politician manner in which Fitzgerald used his influence as the publisher of the City Item and as the president of the Athletics. Fitzgerald certainly knew how to trade favors; most men of his stature did.
In the months following Fitzgerald’s ouster, details about the rift gradually seeped out through the press. Politics oozed beneath the surface of the conflict. Fitzgerald used the City Item to suggest that pettiness on the part of jealous club leaders caused the ouster. The Sunday Mercury, already a rival of the Republican-leaning City Item, became the mouthpiece of the Athletics. The Sunday Mercury’s Democratic allegiance had taken an acrimonious tone even during the Civil War, calling Lincoln “the elongated baboon at Washington. . . . The lank, lean, filthy-mouthed, slab-sided, six foot thing that disgraces the seat once honored by Washington.”72 The Athletics, through the Mercury, argued that Fitzgerald’s behavior (left unspecified) forced the gentlemanly club no choice but to formally expel him, which was done shortly after Fitzgerald had resigned from the club’s presidency.
The war of words that erupted in the Philadelphia newspapers reflected poorly on both parties. Fitzgerald fired the first shot on May 5, 1866, by printing the Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times announcement on the Athletics’ situation: “Col. Fitzgerald, publisher of the City Item, Philadelphia, and for a long time the efficient president of the Athletic Club, of that city, has, we regret to learn, resigned the latter position, to which he was lately re-elected without a dissenting voice.”73 Fitzgerald reprinted the same article in his next issue as well, making it clear that he had supporters in the baseball world. Fitzgerald then went on the offensive when he filed a complaint with the NABBP, reporting that the Athletics paid their players, a charge that may have been true and still held some moral weight in 1866. Next he charged the Athletics with degrading baseball’s reputation by fielding a team with members who had been arrested for drunkenness.74
The Sunday Mercury shed any vestige of impartiality in response. Referring to Fitzgerald as “Fitzitem” or “Dead Beat” (often shortened to D. B.), the Mercury accused Fitzgerald of a history of “blackmailism and dead-beatism.”75 The Sunday Mercury offered the following as an account of why Fitzgerald had been relieved of his duties.
When he [Fitzgerald] visited New York in the spring, and sent a demand to Burton’s Theatre, in that city, for twelve free tickets and a private box, the bearer of the refusal was told by the angry editor that when Mr. Burton came to Philadelphia he would give him fits. Mr. B. has visited Philadelphia, and he finds that “Fits means blackguardism.” . . . [W]e have full and interesting particulars concerning the modus operandi, by which these things are “did” . . . together with the number of free carriage rides that the great D. B. indulged in and which the Board of Control are respectfully asked to verify. . . . The Athletic Club—composed of gentlemen—was ever the subject of attack while this fellow was their President. They were frequently made acquainted with his manner of doing things, and were made to blush more than once by knowledge of his contemptible meanness, as practiced upon those whom they recognized as friends.76
These charges, while filled with moral indignation, could not have been the entire story. If indeed Fitzgerald liked to be treated as a dignitary, requesting free tickets and taking complimentary carriage rides, he fit the norm among baseball’s and society’s leading gentlemen.
Only in the final line of the Mercury’s list of charges is there a hint at what might have been at the root of the fight—Fitzgerald’s “meanness” toward the “friends” of the Athletic Club. The Athletic Club certainly had many friends and admirers. The club prided itself on being instrumental to the nationalization of baseball. The Athletics traveled throughout the Northeast especially, to both cities and rural hamlets, “with the view of extending the popularity of their favorite game.”77 Regarding Fitzgerald’s alleged “meanness,” the colonel’s City Item certainly provided a ready vehicle. In the weeks before the Athletic-Fitzgerald rift became public, the City Item published a number of editorials that Southerners, whites committed to racial segregation, and political conservatives would have considered offensive (or, to put it more simply, “mean”). In February 1866 Fitzgerald denounced conservative Copperheads as traitors. In March he urged Philadelphians to support the Freedmen’s Bureau in their quest to protect former slaves. In April, just weeks before splitting with the Athletics, Fitzgerald predicted the collapse of the Democratic Party. And a week later Fitzgerald argued for the passing of the Civil Rights Bill of 1866.78
Many members of the Philadelphia baseball community—a community led by the Athletics—professed either subtle or overt kinship with the South. The Athletic-championing Sunday Mercury expressed such fondness consistently. That the Mercury, which had called Lincoln a baboon and derided ideas of racial equality, lavishly supported the Athletics suggests that the majority of Athletic Club members had similarly conservative views on matters of race and Reconstruction. Fitzgerald, in contrast, had no sympathy for those who sympathized with the South during the war or agreed with its values following the fight. Fitzgerald had a long record as a partisan political organizer and as a proponent for black equality. During the war he spoke at dozens of “grand rallies for the Union.” Fitzgerald also denounced those organizations that expressed sympathy for the wartime South in his City Item, demeaning the Philadelphia Keystone Club, for example, as a “pro-slavery, rebel-pitying, Union-moaning, Government hating, broken-hearted, mutual admiration society of the false Democrats of Philadelphia.”79 In light of Fitzgerald’s personal ledger of baseball and societal credentials and the Athletics’ consistent success on the field and financially, it is plausible to assume that the Athletics ousted Colonel Fitzgerald at least in part for his radical views on race relations. It was Fitzgerald’s views on race in particular that distinguished him from his ball-playing brethren in Philadelphia more than any other issue.
Fitzgerald had no problem defending himself. Considered by Charles Sumner to be one of the finest orators and debaters in the nation, Fitzgerald poked fun and jabbed at his former team. He had the City Item at his disposal. Fitzgerald dashed off several letters to the Sunday Mercury, calling for the A’s to recognize their mistakes. To the Athletic Club, he wrote: “Repent of your folly, and return to the arms of the one who has ever considered you in the light of a loving parent, and who weeps as he signs himself, Fitzitem.”80 In the midst of this verbal back-and-forth, multiple fractures become evident. It was a case of Fitzgerald versus the Athletic Club, the City Item versus the Sunday Mercury, and a social radical versus an increasingly conservative white baseball community.
The Thomas Fitzgerald–Athletic Club power struggle most likely centered on Fitzgerald’s commitment to aggressive race reform and the Athletic Club’s concern over not alienating the city’s pro-South citizens. Fitzgerald’s City Item prided itself on challenging inequality. The paper promoted universal suffrage: “There is one certain remedy for this danger [Union sympathizers losing political power], and that is found in universal suffrage—a measure which has become essential to the preservation of the rights of loyal white and black men.”81 Whereas the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869 would decide the issue, Philadelphia in 1866 was still fiercely divided on the topic. More broadly, Fitzgerald’s motto for the City Item, that the paper be “constantly aggressive in all that relates to the equality of Man before the Law and ever striving to break down barriers of Prejudice and Caste,” undoubtedly unnerved much of Philadelphia’s conservative population.82
After the Civil War ended the City Item had also defended blacks on the all-important labor question. “We are continually informed that the negro will not work unless he is obliged to,” Fitzgerald mused. “Does it ever occur to these captious critics that in this respect a Sambo shows himself to be ‘a man and a brother,’ that in this respect, if in no other, he resembles the white man?”83 The Athletics’ mouthpiece, the Sunday Mercury, in contrast, pushed for the colonization of the United States’ black population as late as 1874. “It might not be right or kind, or even possible to compel the whole black population of this country to emigrate; but if they would go willingly, it would be a blessed thing for them, as well as for the whites.”84 Politically, the Sunday Mercury, like most papers, did not straddle the partisan fence. The paper championed Pennsylvania Democrats for unmasking “the Federal and State miscegenationists.” The paper also had had no patience for the Radicals, calling Thaddeus Stevens, for example, the “son of Lucifer and brother of Beelzebub.”85 Fitzgerald’s friend Charles Sumner elicited similar reactions.
In early-September 1866 the Athletics released an official resolution explaining why Fitzgerald had been expelled from the club. The explanation came after a summer of squabbling back and forth between the two parties. The resolution still left much unexplained. The Athletic Club, though, expressed its distaste for the volleys that Fitzgerald had launched, via the City Item, at the Athletic Club after his removal as president. But regarding Fitzgerald’s original sins, the Athletic Club rather opaquely resolved that it had been Fitzgerald’s ignorance of “the decencies of social intercourse, the privacy of business relations and the sanctity of domestic life” that led the club to split ways with its founder.86
As 1866 drew to a close the Sunday Mercury continued to pound away at Fitzgerald. In additional to slandering Fitzgerald and the City Item generally, the Mercury posited specifically that Fitzgerald lost out on his leadership position because of his associations. To be a Sumner or Lincoln man in Philadelphia raised eyebrows. Additionally, Fitzgerald’s ties to John W. Forney (nicknamed “the dead duck” by Andrew Johnson after publicly criticizing the president) drew particular contempt. Losing any sense of decorum, the Mercury lashed out at Fitzgerald, labeling him “the most obsequious ‘dorg’ that ever licked the great Dead Duck’s boots.”87 Forney, for his part, had served in a variety of civil service and appointed posts in the Lincoln administration. He was, to many, a respected power broker. As secretary of the Senate, Forney would go on to lead the charge for Johnson’s impeachment. The Sunday Mercury, undoubtedly voicing the opinions of many Athletics and Philadelphians, felt association with a man such as Forney made Fitzgerald unfit for his esteemed position with the A’s.
The struggle to oust Thomas Fitzgerald from the Athletic Club embodied elements of the broader Reconstruction-era struggle in Philadelphia. Fitzgerald’s stance on race relations was his most controversial view and his most potent liability in the racially conservative baseball community. It probably cost him. The level of fervency behind one’s support for racial progress could not surpass certain unstated ceilings without drawing a considerable backlash. It might have been acceptable for Fitzgerald to editorialize that blacks should have some civil rights in the South, for example. But to tout universal suffrage in the years immediately following the Civil War, for Philadelphia as well as the South, crossed an important divide. In what turned out to be a win for those white baseball leaders opposed to black participation, Fitzgerald likely lost his position of authority in baseball because of his commitment to racial equality.
Historians have appreciated Thomas Fitzgerald for his role in growing the game of baseball and for his efforts to foster integrated baseball play (to be discussed subsequently).88 He has been cited as the leader of the ascendant Athletic Base Ball Club during the Civil War era. Some histories even suggest that Fitzgerald might have been part of the Olympic Town Ball Club (Philadelphia’s oldest baseball club) and helped facilitate the Athletics’ trip through Europe in 1874.89 What has been overlooked, though, is how Fitzgerald’s removal as president of the Athletic Base Ball Club in 1866 fit into a broader pattern of events. The Civil War ended. Baseball boomed. Many baseball leaders like Henry Chadwick sought to nationalize the game. Southern baseball clubs, however, as evidenced by the “we are Southerners” letter, resisted these efforts. Arthur Gorman won the presidency of the National Association of Base Ball Players precisely because it was thought that his conservative credentials would heal sectional divides that plagued baseball’s growth. And then Thomas Fitzgerald—a successful baseball organizer, a civic leader, a baseball-friendly voice in the press—was removed. That a radical like Fitzgerald was ousted from one of baseball’s most prominent leadership posts in 1866 cannot be counted a coincidence. The white leadership of the game sought a conservative path; Fitzgerald did not fit. Thus, Colonel Fitzgerald, who might have been Branch Rickey some eighty years before the actual trailblazer, found himself knocked out of white baseball’s upper echelon.