The exchange below occurred on the listserv of the Nineteenth Century Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research. Inspired by sources from Milwaukee, it explores the reasons for the dramatic interest in baseball in the post Civil War era which quickly led to the creation of the modern professional team sport industry.

Dennis Pajot, denpajot@sbcglobal.net:

We know baseball spread quickly after the civil war. Newspapers of the day were aware of this also. This article was taken from the Milwaukee Sentinel of July 25, 1867.

“The Base Ball Mania

Since the cruel war was over, the patriotism of our nation’s young men has commenced to manifest itself in the shape of a general mania–no, not mania, but passion–for the game of base ball, generally denominated our “national game,” with evident propriety, seeing that it is much better and much more generally played in American than in other countries. The popularity of base ball was greatly increased, especially at the West, within the present season. In Wisconsin, where, three years ago, there was scarcely a club playing anything like the “regulation” game, there are now probably not less than a hundred clubs, all in the “full tide of successful operation.” Nearly every country newspaper that we take up contains either an account of a match between the club of Dodge’s Corners and the invincible First Nine of Smithville, or else a notice for the “Irrepressibles,” the “Athletics,” the “Badgers,” or the “Gophers” to turn out for practice on Saturday afternoon. An immense amount of proper healthy physical exercise if thus afforded, and a fearful amount of muscle and dexterity developed.  And at the same time the youths who thus disport themselves can have  the satisfaction of realizing that they are practicing at our great nation’s own patriotic game. “

J. Gordon Hylton, Joseph.Hylton@marquette.edu:

Dennis Pagot’s most recent discovery from July 1867, is quite fascinating, particularly in the way it links wartime to patriotism to post-war enthusiasm for baseball.

It is sometimes suggested that in the aftermath of all-consuming wars (like the Civil War or WWII), there is a need for some sort of moral substitute for war to avoid an intense psychological let-down now that the fighting is over. The “letdown” occurs whether one actually fought in the war or simply experienced it vicariously.

The chronology in this article suggests that the popularity of baseball increased dramatically after the spring of 1865, which would be when the let down would have begun. The same explanation could explain the dramatic increase in the popularity of professional sports after 1945. People subconsciously use baseball to recapture the intensity that was part of everyday life during the war.

Obviously, this is a bit speculative, but questions of this sort ought to be addressed more frequently by sports historians.

John Thorn, jthorn@newworldsports.org:

Excellent post by Dennis and fine response by Gordon. Sport is indeed sublimated warfare . . . or was that politics? Clausewitz had something to say about this.

Priscilla Astifan, pastifan@rochester.rr.com

Very interesting discussion. I know the game greatly spread here in the Rochester area after 1865 but never thought of this connection. It does make a great deal of sense.

Deb Shattuck, Shat5@aol.com:

Excellent discussions on this topic. I have noticed in my research that the earliest women’s baseball teams sprang up after the war too. This date may change as more sources come to light but, for the time being, it appears that, while girls and women may have played the game as individuals prior to the war, it wasn’t until after the war that women’s teams began springing up. I think it is quite possible that the renewal of the women’s rights movement (postponed during the War while women threw themselves into the “Cause”) coupled with the accomplishments of women during the war, expanded women’s understanding of what they were capable of doing. Volume I of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s History of Woman Suffrage, devotes a large section to documenting the work of women soldiers, military planners, nurses, surgeons, abolitionists, etc. during the war. Just as “Rosie the Riveter” and Women Air Service Pilots of World War II helped change attitudes about what women were and were not capable of doing, I suspect the widespread newspaper accounts of women like Anna Dickinson, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix and Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell had a similar influence on women in the 1860s and may have led some to try their hand at the “manly” sport of baseball.

Still looking for the definitive “proof” of the theory.

Richard R. Hershberger, rrhersh@yahoo.com:

The post-war baseball mania did indeed start immediately after the war, with the precise timing depending on where you are. My rule of thumb is to look for “first games” in 1865 in the northeast, 1866 spreading south into the middle states and the old northwest, and by 1867 for pretty much everywhere except the deep back woods. The caveats to this are the various places which had their first games before the war, principally large cities and New York State. The far west is yet another matter entirely.

There is no doubt that this post-war expansion looks a lot like what happened after both world wars. But at the same time, it also looks a lot like a continuation of the pre-war expansion. So which is it? My take on it is that it was both.

The expansion of the New York game was chugging along quite nicely through the 1860 season. It had largely displaced Philadelphia town ball, was well on its way to displacing the Massachusetts game, and was played in larger cities throughout the country. Then this expansion was brought to an abrupt halt by the war. The mere fact that the expansion resumed following the end of the war is unsurprising. What requires more explanation is the speed and universality of this expansion.

This is where post-war psychology comes in. Baseball as a surrogate for war is one hypothesis. Others which spring to mind include post-war geographical displacement, with baseball serving as a reminder of home for those who were already playing the game before the war (which in the case of the world wars would be everybody); or a growing sense of a single national culture, with baseball a part of it. Frankly, any such explanation is too speculative for my blood. I observe that there was a general trend of increased interest in baseball after the two world wars and I am happy to correlate the post-Civil War trend to this, even without having a deeper explanation.

The result is that there were two trends moving in the same direction, combining into explosive growth.

A final observation is that this also was part of the Muscular Christianity trend, which encouraged athletic activities in general. Team sport obviously was a very large niche within this larger trend. By the war, the New York game was already clearly ahead of the rival possibilities of cricket or the various regional forms of baseball, and the New York game weathered the war better than any of the others. So another way of looking at the post-war expansion was of its being an expansion of athletics in general, with team sports a big part of this, and the New York game the only widely viable team sport. In this view, all the heavy lifting was before the war. The later expansion was by default.

John Thorn, jthorn@newworldsports.org:

For Muscular Christianity and the good old-fashioned Western game of bullpen, see Edward Eggleston’s “Hossier Schoolmaster.”