Richmond
The Final Tally
Alexander Babcock, the New York City ballplayer turned Confederate rebel, had led Richmond’s post–Civil War baseball development. Richmond never rivaled Philadelphia or Washington in terms of baseball prowess, but Babcock, as a player and team president, had shaped baseball into a pastime that promoted the values of most white Richmonders. The game became popular, for a time, because it provided a recreational outlet for the men of Richmond. It also gave Richmond men a means by which to express their opposition to federal Reconstruction and, more generally, to the meddling North. Babcock was by any standard a unique baseball organizer. Northern baseball writers respected him due to his status as a former member of the Atlantics of Brooklyn.1 Richmond baseball players in turn admired his “résumé” as a Confederate hero and Conservative Party political leader.
Babcock oversaw the development of Richmond’s strictly segregated baseball community without ever explicitly professing his feelings on race. Babcock and Richmond baseball leaders achieved racial exclusion instead by emphasizing a euphemistic cause—the “memory of the Confederacy”—and by describing baseball activities using Lost Cause verbiage.2 Babcock directed the Richmond Pastime to honor the memory of the failed Confederate States of America as they played and raised funds for nonbaseball activities. Honoring fallen white soldiers, most everyone in Richmond and the South more broadly understood, meant adhering to racial segregation.
Despite the overtures of Northern baseball leaders, Babcock and the vast majority of Southern white baseball players expressed little interest in using baseball to bridge sectional divides. Thus, the reconciliationism of Gorman and the National Association mostly failed. Still, creating a Southern white game did not guarantee baseball a permanent place at the top of Richmond’s recreational hierarchy. Rather, baseball’s popularity ebbed and flowed as Richmond men gravitated toward those pursuits they found most satisfying. Pastimes such as boxing and horse racing predated baseball. In the wake of criticism from Northern baseball leaders and a string of defeats from visiting Northern clubs, Richmond men seemed to lose some of their enthusiasm for baseball. The loss of the Old Fair Grounds also contributed to the decline in baseball activity.
The End of the Pastime
Richmond’s Pastime Base Ball Club appeared in the pages of the Richmond Daily Dispatch for the final time on July 2, 1871. Alexander Babcock had the last word. The Dispatch reprinted a letter from Babcock to the Brotherhood of the Southern Cross, a group dedicated primarily to ensuring proper burials for fallen Confederate soldiers. Babcock’s public letter served as a eulogy for the Pastime Club:
Dear Sir, Some time since the Pastime Base Ball Club of Richmond and the Pastime Club of Baltimore played a series of matches, the proceeds of which were to be devoted to the removal of the remains of our gallant Confederate dead to such southern cemeteries as might be selected for the purpose. In this way $240 was realized, and has been sacredly set apart for that object. Believing now, however, that the effort of the S.C.B. [Brotherhood of the South Cross] in this direction offers a proper and legitimate channel for the appropriation of the fund referred to, I enclose a check for $240. With best wishes, A. G. Babcock, President Richmond Pastime Base Ball Club.3
The chairman of the Brotherhood of the Southern Cross responded to the gift with a grateful return letter.
The Babcock letter highlighted for a final time the Pastime’s almost religious commitment to preserving Confederate memory. The letter’s pious language (play “devoted” to the burial of the “gallant” dead, a task set “sacredly” apart) promoted societal values, not simply the game of baseball itself. Baseball mattered most for the support it could yield to white men’s causes. Babcock passed the club’s hard-earned money along to another white men’s organization. The baseball men had done their part in creating a social setting in Richmond that honored white men and excluded former slaves. Thus, in its end as in its beginning, the Pastime emanated white Southern pride.
By way of comparison, baseball clubs throughout the South served white men in the 1870s in the same manner that the increasingly popular Ladies’ Memorial Associations served Southern women. The organizations provided social outlets to honor the past. They helped reconfigure Southern ideals to fit in the new postwar world.4 And regardless of the exact sentiments spoken, the racial agenda that emerged from these organizations was understood by all. The Babcock-led baseball community in Richmond had remained “unstained” by black participation because it celebrated those organizations and causes easily associated with racially exclusive behavior.
After turning over the remains of its coffers to the Brotherhood of the Southern Cross in 1871, the Pastime never again appeared in Richmond’s papers or the New York Clipper or Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times. Babcock stayed in Richmond, though, as did Alexander Tomlinson and most other members of the club.5 The historian at this juncture is again left to draw inferences from incomplete records regarding what happened. One might reasonably conclude that the chaos of 1870, often referred to as the “Year of Tragedy,” halted recreational activity altogether in the city. In 1870 Richmond’s statehouse collapsed, killing dozens, and the city flooded. Then the panic of 1873, which crippled the railroad industry, nearly shut down Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works. Unemployment rose. Richmond banks collapsed by the dozen. The Freedman’s Saving and Trust Company, commonly referred to as the Freedman’s Bank, failed in 1874.6
The end of direct congressional Reconstruction in Virginia also brought new controversy and instability to Richmond. Frederick Douglass, for one, deemed Virginia unready for autonomy: “Virginia is today as thoroughly rebel and as completely unreconstructed as at any former period.”7 Nevertheless, Virginia’s new government took over. Racial tensions were heightened by the influx of black migrants to Richmond. The 1870 census revealed an increasingly black city: of the fifty-one thousand people living in Richmond, twenty-three thousand were identified as black.8
Fledgling Baseball, Shooting, and Riding
Baseball had never completely supplanted some of the more traditional Southern sports in Richmond or in other formerly Confederate cities. Shooting and riding contests in particular remained ensconced in Southern life. Thus, it was not surprising that after the Pastime Base Ball Club folded, Alexander Babcock joined the Richmond Shooting Club. This organization, unlike Richmond’s baseball clubs, needed no explanation as a thoroughly Southern endeavor. No one needed to assert that only white men could participate. There was no Northern-based organizing structure to address or avoid. Richmond men deemed this lack of a national structure as a positive characteristic.
Examples of what could go wrong with bisectional cooperation abounded, at least in the eyes of many white Southerners. In 1871, for example, a Richmond temperance organization experienced a telling reversal of Northern reconciliationism. This was the constant fear—Northerners would speak in reconciliationist terms and then use any cooperative organization to change the racial norms of the South. “The resolution adopted by the National Division of the Sons of Temperance,” the Richmond Daily Dispatch reported “. . . by which the doors of the order throughout the country were thrown open to all persons ‘without distinction of race, color, or condition,’ has caused not a little excitement among the Sons of Richmond.” Promises had been made that the cause of temperance would not be compromised by discussions of racial politics. These promises had been prerequisites for Southern chapters rejoining the national organization. “The Grand Lodge of Virginia would never had resumed its organis [sic] relations with the National body since the war but for the positive assurances . . . that the question of color should not be introduced into the Order.”9 When the situation changed, it took the Richmond temperance men less than one week to withdraw from the national organization.
Thus, traditional Southern recreations had their appeal.10 Going far back into the roots of the American South, Southern men, described as “hot-blooded and trigger-happy” by historian John Hope Franklin, had taken guns, marksmanship, and hunting seriously. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the white men of Richmond had armed themselves and organized—establishing militia groups such as the Dragoons, the Light Infantry Blues, and the Rifle Ranges.11 Shooting competitions in Richmond, like baseball contests, suffered from the economic depression of the 1870s but still went on. In one bizarre competition in 1876, for example, a pigeon shortage cost Babcock outright victory. After shooting seven birds in eight attempts, Babcock had to set down his rifle without a chance to break a first-place tie when the competition organizers ran out of birds to release. When not testing his marksmanship, Babcock also tried his hand at horse racing, but without much success.12
Billiards also became immensely popular in Richmond in the 1870s. The Southern press reported eagerly on championship billiard matches, bestowing the title of “champion of Virginia” as haphazardly as it had in baseball.13 Roller-skating and shuffleboard also gained new participants. Racial segregation was the norm in each of these activities. Putting bricks and mortar to this segregation, Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCAs) opened throughout the city, with separate facilities and organizations serving white and black men.14 With segregation even more firmly entrenched, Richmond’s white press gave more favorable coverage to black recreational organizations. Rather than ignoring black societies that arose, as had been its tradition, the Daily Dispatch began providing in the 1870s a regular record of “colored societies” in the city.15
A mild pushback against baseball surfaced in several Southern cities after 1870. One Louisville paper joked about baseball and the benefits of early death: “To the parent whose son dies in infancy, there most be something peculiarly soothing in the thought that no matter what may be the fate of the child in the next world, it can never become a member of a base ball club in this.”16 Similarly, the Atlanta Daily Sun mused, “What a blessing it would be if base ball were played only by the Japanese.”17
Even without the Pastime Club, Richmond baseball did not disappear altogether. On July 4, 1871, Richmond clubs gathered to celebrate America’s independence while still mourning the South’s failed attempt at a similar goal. Richmonders flocked to the Old Fair Grounds for a baseball game meant to raise funds “for the removal of the remains of the Confederate dead from Gettysburg to Hollywood [Cemetery].”18 Baseball teams representing Richmond and Petersburg competed for a quixotically conceived “championship of Virginia.”19 Clubs, including the Swan, Virginia, Old Dominion, Atlantic, and Athletic, formed and played during the first half of the 1870s in Richmond. Most of these teams, however, played just a handful of public games before disbanding or easing into inactivity. Richmond’s Daily Dispatch gave the clubs and baseball in the city only sporadic coverage.
As Reconstruction waned New Orleans surpassed Richmond as the center of Southern baseball, but in a less hierarchical manner than had been evident in the years immediately following the Civil War. The ballplayers of Atlanta, Macon, Montgomery, and other Southern cities did not write to their counterparts in New Orleans looking for leadership, as they had to Richmond earlier. The baseball clubs of New Orleans simply played more often and better than those of most other Southern cities. Led by the Lone Star Club, the city’s oldest baseball organization, New Orleanians hosted tournaments and watched hundreds of ballgames annually. In 1872 nineteen clubs entered a chase for the city and state championship.20 New Orleans, not surprisingly, was among the first Southern cities to support professional baseball.21
Babcock and the Conservative Party
Many of Richmond’s baseball players transitioned from baseball to more direct involvement in politics. Virginia’s Conservative Party mirrored the aggressive sectionalism that had surfaced in Richmond’s baseball community. The party had formed in 1867 as a Southern-based faction of the Democratic Party. The Conservatives opposed the Republican Party, especially the “mushrooming” radical faction of the GOP that supported equal rights for former slaves.22 Although the stakes were considerably higher and the politics more direct, the activities of the Conservative Party in Richmond still fit within the patterns established by Richmond baseball clubs emphasizing sectional and racial separation.
As Richmond ballplayers spent less time shagging flies and more time wrangling votes, Alexander Babcock still provided leadership. Babcock emerged as a full-fledged member of Richmond’s conservative political movement. Babcock provided public commentary on the 1872 presidential election. In 1875 Babcock was elected treasury pro tem of the city’s Conservative Committee and chosen as a delegate to the Senatorial Convention. The Richmond Daily Dispatch urged residents of the former Confederate capital to patronize Babcock’s ice business; Babcock’s service deserved support.23 The Old Dominion (Base Ball) Club joined Babcock in the political fight. Names that had previously surfaced in only box scores—James M. Tyler (Arlington Base Ball Club) and Daniel Wren (Mechanic Base Ball Club)—began to appear in print attached to conservative political causes.24
That baseball for the Old Dominion Club fit with prosegregation, anti-Reconstruction politics was evident as the club played and politicked on a nearly equal basis during the 1874 and 1875 seasons.25
Black Baseball and Violence
Black men continued to play baseball in the South as Reconstruction wound down. In 1875 in Louisiana a dozen black clubs formed a “Colored Base Ball Association.”26 Black clubs played and organized throughout the South, from Galveston to Little Rock to Richmond.27 Although these clubs did not ever acquiesce to the inequalities of segregation, they focused mostly on building the best black clubs they could. Integrating baseball did not concern most black ballplayers on a day-by-day basis. There were too many other obstacles to face.
As the ten-year anniversary of the Civil War’s end neared, black players faced an onslaught of negative press. Racial separation was further entrenched in the baseball world by linking black baseball activity to violence and instability. Surveying Southern newspapers during the 1870s makes evident this slandering pattern. The mechanics of segregation in this case reverberated against the idea that baseball was an especially gentlemanly game and that proper ball games needed white female fans.
To be sure, baseball (black and white) had its share of violence during this period. In 1870 in New Orleans, for example, an umpire grew tired of taunts from a catcher questioning his calls. When the offending catcher was knocked to the ground during a play, the umpire picked up a bat and clubbed the catcher in the head, killing him.28 Other, mostly random, acts of violence happened throughout the nineteenth century. But given the general roughness of the games and instability of the times, one must conclude reports on fights and violence at black baseball games received an inordinate amount of attention from the white press. The ratio of reporting on uneventful ballgames involving black ballplayers versus sensationalized accounts of “near riots” connected to black baseball became increasingly skewed. Baseball-centric newspapers led the charge. Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, for example, wrote of “dark and swarthy” ballplayers from Williamsburg hosting a black club from Philadelphia in 1870. Rather than baseball, however, “wrangling, disputing, bullying, charging, denying, cursing, and countering” dominated the event. “A general riot took place,” the sporting press reported.29 Similarly, the New York Clipper reported on a match between the Excelsior Club of Philadelphia and the Uniques of Brooklyn, both black clubs, where something could have gone wrong. “The prospect seemed pretty fair at one time for a riot,” the Clipper reported, connecting black baseball to violence despite the fact that no actual confrontation occurred.30
Relatively isolated incidents of black baseball violence did occur in both the North and the South, but they were wildly exaggerated by the press. The Charleston-Savannah baseball conflict of 1869 seemed to spark a press vigilance movement in reporting on the perceived unruliness of black baseball. The steady stream of stories involving black ballplayers fighting and black fans storming fields certainly served the cause of whites who wanted baseball to remain racially segregated. Reading just a sampling of this type of stories gives one a feel for the effect they had on ballplaying communities. A partial sampling: In 1869 a black baseball club riding a steamer across the Potomac River “commenced fighting . . . and in a short time the row became general.”31 In 1870 in Cleveland, a “murderous affray” took place on the field of the “Colored Base Ball Club of Van Wert.” Two black men argued, called each other names, and fought. One hit the other with a “terrible blow on the head” with a baseball bat.32 In 1871 in Atlanta, a white woman crossed through a baseball field at dark, only to be attacked by black man who demanded, “Give me a kiss.”33
An 1874 game in Memphis, involving two black teams, turned into a shoot-out. Violence, so it seemed according to many white newspapers, threatened to break out anytime black clubs met. “During a game of [black baseball] in the suburbs of Memphis on Wednesday evening, a negro man, who was in the way of Peter Meath, the catcher, was ordered out of the way, to which he responded with an oath, and drawing a pistol fired at Meath, who ran to his coat, and getting a pistol returned the fire. Some half dozen shots were fired in the melee that ensued, the negro firing at other members of the club. Finally he was shot in the back and then beaten terribly.”34 Similarly, two clubs in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1876, fought over field rights. In a strikingly common act of baseball violence, one player struck the other on the head with a baseball bat, “killing him instantly.”35 The men involved in the fight were not just ordinary players: “They were the leaders of the two clubs, and quarreled about their right to a certain field.” In Madison, Florida, a few years later, an even more salacious account emerged. An argument arose during a game between two black clubs; it escalated quickly due to the fact that the players had come armed. By the time police responded, “one man was shot and another cut, both perhaps fatally.” The police arrested sixteen ballplayers.36
The imagery presented in these and other similar accounts undoubtedly frightened many white baseball players and fans. The stories fed prejudices. The difference between the baseball environment presented through stories of violence involving black players versus those of the gentlemanly, controlled, and respectable setting often conveyed regarding white baseball contests could not have been more striking. For example, one might read of the player-crowd interaction at a game involving two black clubs in Chattanooga, Tennessee: “The Olympics [who had lost] . . . grew angry and malicious and tried to embroil the Atlanta crowd in a fight.”37 This image, on some level, would then be compared to highly glossed accounts of white baseball’s unique respectability. A not atypical story: “It is to be hoped that all will endeavor to encourage the attendance of their lady-friends, who by their presence will give a refining influence to our national game. In Boston, Hartford, Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati, the ladies always turn out in full force and it adds greatly to the interest of both players and spectators.”38 Thus, to the nineteenth-century baseball fan who read enough accounts of, say, black catchers going to the bench to get their pistols and then shooting and beating an adversary, the gulf of respectability (and even safety) between white and black baseball became obvious. Segregation seemed like the only reasonable policy.
Baseball experienced a rebirth in Richmond, and in the South generally, in 1875. The worst of the financial crises had passed, and a second generation of white ballplayers took to the baseball fields. Alexander Tomlinson, a former member of the Richmond Pastime, led the revival in Richmond. During the early 1870s when men such as Alexander Babcock concentrated more on politics than baseball, a team from Petersburg, the Old Dominion Club, had emerged to claim the championship of Virginia.39 Thus, as the first order of business, Tomlinson fired off a challenge to the Old Dominion Club and the rest of Petersburg’s baseball community at the start of the 1875 season. Tomlinson asserted that his recently assembled “nine” would face any nine men from Petersburg for “a Ball and the Championship of the State of Virginia.”40
Richmond’s baseball men still perceived themselves to be the finest in the state. Tomlinson’s challenge also made evident, again, Richmond’s rejection of national baseball standards. Although Richmond could not expect to place a team in the NAPBBP circuit, Tomlinson might have at least acknowledged the more hierarchical nature of baseball competition. He might have admitted that the practice of new teams mandating themselves challengers for a particular championship had long since ceased. He did not. The men of Richmond would continue to play the game and compete for championships on their own terms. Richmond challenged the men of Petersburg to a championship match. The Richmond nine traveled to Petersburg and won. And thus with one hastily arranged game, Richmond regained the unofficial top spot in Virginia baseball.41
In 1875 Richmond’s newspapers once again gave baseball regular coverage. At least twenty-five publicized contests took place during the 1875 season. Although some overlap occurred, new players and clubs dominated the city’s baseball scene. Henry Boschen became one of the new baseball leaders in the city.42 Through Boschen Richmond baseball gained a Doubleday-esque creation (or at least rebirth) story of its own. According to tradition, Boschen’s Richmond doctor recommended that he get more exercise. Following these directions, Boschen went to a vacant lot with a bat and a ball. There he hit the ball and retrieved it, hit the ball and retrieved it, until he grew fatigued. Tired of chasing his own hits, Boschen organized his own baseball team, the Pacific Base Ball Club. For his actions, Boschen would become known, somewhat mythically, as the “father of organized baseball” in Richmond.43
Boschen, like Babcock before him, was a leader in Richmond’s business community. He owned a shoe factory, and many of his workers soon doubled as ballplayers. Boschen did not pay his workers to play ball, but he was known to offer a talented baseball player a job in his factory.44 The white ballplayers of the 1870s were similar to those who played in Richmond during the 1860s. They came from a variety of backgrounds and held many different jobs. They were factory hands in Manchester and on Belle Isle, saloon owners, hotel clerks, printers, newspapermen, and cigar sellers, among other things. They were mostly political conservatives. Several Richmond ballplayers (including Alexander Tomlinson, James M. Tyler, and Daniel Wren) worked for the city’s police force.45 This commingling, of the police department and baseball, served as another warning for blacks to stay away. The black residents of Southern Reconstruction states complained regularly about the unfairness and, at times, brutality of the white police forces.46
Boschen’s Pacific Club had a successful inaugural season in 1875. One of the club’s first games came on the Fourth of July, a traditional baseball day in the city. The Pacific Club took on the Atlantics, also of Richmond, for the benefit of the St. Joseph’s orphanage.47 Supporting an orphanage did not ring quite as symbolically loud as playing to pay for proper burials of fallen Confederate soldiers, but the cause was still one related to losing the Civil War. The Pacific Club won most of its games and gained a reputation, along with Tomlinson’s club, as one of the city’s finest. The Washington Nationals took notice and invited the Pacific Club to Washington for a game. The Nationals by this time had fallen from their lofty perch of the 1860s. Still, the club held some lingering influence and cachet in the baseball world. The Pacifics traveled to Washington in August 1875, hoping to demonstrate that Richmonders were finally ready to compete with clubs from beyond their own state. The Pacifics lost, 22–5. The divide between the baseball men of Richmond and those in Washington DC still remained wide.48
In all about twenty white clubs played in Richmond during the 1875 seasons. The list included some familiar names (the Richmond, Old Dominion, Arlington, and Olympic Clubs), as well as a dozen or so new ones. Richmond College fielded a team. Other clubs included the Mount Vernon, Virginia, Swan, Atlantic, Athletic, Eagle, Mutual, Figaro, Eureka, and Excelsior. At first glance the Richmond game had a less sectional tone. The names had softened. Perhaps, however, because political representation had been restored and white men had seized control of the city’s government, names such as the Confederate Club and Robert E. Lee Club were no longer as necessary. The Lost Cause connections, however, remained. Boschen would eventually lose control of his ball club to a group of prominent Confederate veterans. Renamed the Virginias, the club joined the Virginia Base Ball Association and raised money for a Jefferson Davis Memorial and the “Lee Camp” soldiers home.49
A Northern Humbling
The Red Stocking Club of Boston visited Richmond in 1875 and in doing so illuminated, with some finality, the failure of white baseball’s attempt at sectional reconciliation. The Boston club had recently toured Europe with the Athletics of Philadelphia and had won the three prior National Association championships. In 1875 the Red Stockings would win seventy-one of their seventy-nine games.50 Demonstrating just how wide the gap had become between the best clubs of the North and the best clubs of the South, the Red Sox chose not to challenge any Richmond club to a game. “It is possible that a picked nine of this city will be induced to play the Red Stockings a game, through they can scarcely do so with hope of success,” one Richmond paper concluded.51 Thus, instead of engaging one of Richmond’s clubs, the Red Stockings brought the Washingtons, of Washington DC, with them to Richmond. The clubs met at the Richmond Old Fair Grounds on April 29, 1875. It would be the only professional match played in a former Confederate state during the 1875 season.52
The Red Stockings–Washington tilt went off as planned. The significance of the event—a Boston club and a Washington DC club meeting for a match in Richmond—had little to do with the score. Boston won. Rather, the game more significantly demonstrated the failure of baseball’s reconciliation campaign. White baseball leaders had rejected black clubs and black ballplayers in order to win favor from Southern white ballplayers. And for nearly a decade, Northern white baseball leaders had tried to induce their Southern counterparts to play baseball, to join the National Associations, and to keep overt sectionalism out of the game. Only on the first emphasis did the effort bear some fruit.
The New York Clipper’s coverage of the Red Stockings–versus–Washingtons game revealed the Northerner’s frustration over the continuing obstinacy of the Southerners to acquiesce to reconciliation. The Richmond crowd did not cheer politely for all the ballplayers, as was the baseball custom. Instead, “[Southern] prejudices were shown in their exhibition of favoritism for Washington, or what they considered as the ‘Southern nine’ against the Northern or Massachusetts players.” The game was, the Clipper reported, “about as partisan a gathering as any country village could present.”53
Perhaps finally recognizing the futility of the reconciliation effort, the Clipper let loose and openly belittled baseball in the South. Richmond was a “country village,” not a true baseball city. The fans lacked civility. The “better class,” the Clipper complained, was outnumbered. “The minority of the better class present, of course resented this rural style of things; but the shouts of the majority ruled supreme.” Also, Richmond’s field was subpar, “rough,” and “below the standard exhibited on our local field.” The game should have thrilled Southerners, by the Clipper estimation. “The play was so infinitely superior to anything ever seen in Richmond, that the spectators were delighted.”54 The Clipper concluded its report on Richmond by warning clubs from the North to “keep away” from Richmond. The Clipper signed off by again expressing amazement that sectionalism and politics had a place in the baseball community. “We thought that in the baseball arena sectional ill-will was something all would refrain from.”55 In a way both sides had stayed consistent. Northern leaders had always wanted Southern clubs to conform to fit into a national community of baseball players. Southern players had always wanted to remain separate.
Black Baseball in Richmond
Finally, in July 1876, a brief notice in the Richmond Daily Dispatch confirmed the existence of a group of men who had been pushed to the far periphery of Richmond’s baseball community—black baseball players. In a remarkably nondescript announcement, the Daily Dispatch reported on July 22, 1876, that a game of baseball between two black clubs had taken place one day earlier. “Colored Base-Ball Clubs—A match game was played between the Lone Star and Reindeer Clubs yesterday, resulting in a victory for the former by a score of 46 to 5.”56 There was no further comment. Instead, the Richmond Daily Dispatch simply announced the game as an everyday occurrence. Indeed, it probably was. The revolutionary nature of the black baseball game in Richmond, in 1876, was not that black men took to a ball field, but rather that Richmond’s white press finally chose to acknowledge the event.
Black baseball had almost certainly existed in Richmond long before July 1876. The fact that the Richmond Daily Dispatch detailed a match between two black clubs strongly suggests that black baseball had been a part of the city’s recreational landscape for some time. The paper did not report on the formation of a black club. Nor did it record two “nines” taking part in an informal game. Rather, two black clubs, at the very least, existed in the city and were ready for action. In September the Dispatch reported on a second game involving black clubs, this time the Reindeer and the Lookout Base Ball Clubs.57
In assessing Richmond baseball after the Civil War, absence of certain phenomena is important. No grand demonstration existed against black baseball. Instead, complete avoidance relegated black baseball clubs even further to the periphery of the baseball community than if they had been castigated as inferior or unworthy on a daily basis in the press. This avoidance was typical of racism in Richmond. The process is informative in understanding the mechanics of segregation. Countless examples of brutal unacknowledgment, avoidance, and nonrecognition often preempted confrontation, making black baseball players’ fight for a position in Richmond an invisible one until 1876.
The End Game
Richmond’s baseball history is characterized by continuity rather than change. The white segregationists did not merely emerge victorious at the end of the Reconstruction era, as had been the case in Philadelphia and Washington. Rather, segregation defined Richmond’s baseball community from the moment it arose. Racial exclusion always reigned as supremely important among Richmond’s white baseball players. Southern baseball had always reveled in the memory of the Confederacy. As a manifestation of this, Richmond’s white clubs had chosen names that made their allegiances clear—the Secesh, Confederate, and Robert E. Lee Clubs, and so on. Baseball at its height in Richmond (in 1866 especially) had also been a vicarious fight against Northern influence in Richmond. Beneath squabbles of sectional allegiances, most prominently those involving the men of the Union Club, was the question of how white and black men would interact in Richmond. White exclusion won out, in a rout.
The reconciliatory gestures made by white Northern baseball leaders—including drawing the color line in baseball associations—were not enough to convince Richmond’s white ballplayers to join a national consortium. Broadly speaking, Southern baseball clubs had played their proverbial hand well. Although individual clubs and particular regions acted differently, collectively white Southern baseball players leveraged the perceived prospect of joining with the North and making possible the long-desired dream of a truly “national game” into a policy of thorough exclusion of black baseball players from the game’s highest levels. Then, most Southern baseball clubs still rejected the National Associations and, to a certain extent, the “national game.” The South roundly won baseball’s peace.