Abner Doubleday

Abner Doubleday (June 26, 1819 – January 26, 1893), was a career U.S. Army officer and Union general in the American Civil War. He fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter, the opening battle of the war. Some believe he should be credited with the invention of baseball, although he himself made no such claim.

Early years

Doubleday was born in Ballston Spa, New York. His grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War and his father served four years in the U.S. Congress. Abner practiced as a civil engineer for two years before entering the U.S. Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1842 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 3rd U.S. Artillery.

Military career

Doubleday served in the Mexican-American War and Seminole Wars. At the start of the Civil War, he was a captain in the garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, under Major Robert Anderson. He aimed the cannon that fired the first return shot in answer to the Confederate bombardment on April 12, 1861, starting the war.

Doubleday served in the Shenandoah Valley from June to August, 1861. He was appointed brigadier general of volunteers on February 3, 1862, and led the 2nd Brigade, 1st Division, III Corps, at the Second Battle of Bull Run. He took command of the division on August 30 when its commander was wounded. He again led the division at South Mountain, Antietam (where he was wounded by a shell exploding nearby), and Fredericksburg (where his division mostly sat idle).

Doubleday was promoted to major general of volunteers on November 9, 1862, commanded 3rd Division, I Corps, at Chancellorsville, and took over corps command for a day when General John F. Reynolds was killed in opening of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863. Army commander George G. Meade replaced Doubleday with John Newton, a more junior major general from another corps, after the first day of battle, one in which the I Corps was overwhelmed by a Confederate assault. Meade had a long history of disdain for Doubleday's combat effectiveness, dating back to South Mountain. Doubleday was humiliated by this snub and held a lasting grudge against Meade. He was wounded in the neck on the second day of the battle and assumed mostly administrative duties in the defenses of Washington, D.C., including the attack by Jubal A. Early in the Valley Campaigns of 1864.

Later life

After the Civil War, Doubleday retired from the Army in 1873 and moved to San Francisco, where he obtained a charter for the cable car railway that still runs there. By 1878, he was living in Mendham, New Jersey, from where, that year, he became a prominent member of the Theosophical Society. When two of the founders of that society, Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, moved to India at the end of that year, he was constituted as the President of the American body.

Doubleday died in Mendham, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

Legacy

Although Doubleday was a competent, if colorless, combat general with experience in many important Civil War battles, the lore of baseball credits Doubleday with inventing the game, supposedly in Elihu Phinney's cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.

The Mills Commission, chaired by Abraham G. Mills, the fourth president of the National League, was appointed in 1905 to determine the origin of baseball. The committee's final report, on December 30, 1907, stated, in part, that "the first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839." It concluded by saying, "in the years to come, in the view of the hundreds of thousands of people who are devoted to baseball, and the millions who will be, Abner Doubleday's fame will rest evenly, if not quite as much, upon the fact that he was its inventor ... as upon his brilliant and distinguished career as an officer in the Federal Army."Kirsch, pp. xiii.

However, there is considerable evidence to dispute this claim. Baseball historian George B. Kirsch has described the results of the Mills commission as a "myth." He wrote, "Robert Henderson, Harold Seymour, and other scholars have since debunked the Doubleday-Cooperstown myth, which nonetheless remains powerful in the American imagination because of the efforts of Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown." At his death, Doubleday left many letters and papers, none of which describe baseball, or give any suggestion that he considered himself a prominent person in the evolution of the game. Chairman Mills himself, who had been a Civil War colleague of Doubleday and a member of the honor guard for Doubleday's body as it lay in state in New York City, never recalled hearing Doubleday describe his role as the inventor. Doubleday was a cadet at West Point in the year of the alleged invention and his family had moved away from Cooperstown the prior year. Furthermore, the primary testimony to the commission that connected baseball to Doubleday was that of Abner Graves, whose credibility is questionable; a few years later, he shot his wife to death, apparently because of mental illness, and he was committed to an institution for the criminally insane for the rest of his life.Kirsch, pp. xiii-xiv.

Doubleday published two important works on the Civil War: Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie (1876), and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (1882), the latter being a volume of the series Campaigns of the Civil War.

Doubleday's indecision as a commander earned him the uncomplimentary nickname "Forty-Eight Hours".

References

Eicher, John H., & Eicher, David J., Civil War High Commands, Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3.
Kirsch, George B., Baseball in Blue and Gray : The National Pastime during the Civil War, Princeton University Press, 2003, ISBN 0691057338.
Tagg, Larry, The Generals of Gettysburg, Savas Publishing, 1998, ISBN 1-882810-30-9.

Notes

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External links

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