1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [242]
21. Doubleday’s father grew up in Cooperstown, but there is no evidence that his son ever even visited the town, which would have entailed a 125-mile journey over bad roads from Auburn. Abner was born in Ballston Spa, Saratoga County, and moved to Auburn with his family at the age of one. Throughout the time when he is said to have been in Cooperstown inventing baseball, he was actually at West Point as a cadet. The legend seems to have sprung up more than a decade after his death in 1893. When the millionaire sporting-goods magnate Albert G. Spalding hired researchers to “prove” that baseball had red-blooded American origins, they produced an old man in Colorado who told a vaguely recollected version of the Doubleday-at-Cooperstown myth. Spalding, and the general public, seized upon it immediately: what better origin for the national game? See Barthel, Abner Doubleday, esp. chap. 25; and Joan Smith Bartlett, Abner Doubleday: His Life and Times (n.p., 2009), p. 17.
22. “The National Game. Three ‘Outs’ and One ‘Run.’ Abraham Winning the Ball,” Prints and Photographs Division, LC; New York Herald, Jan. 23, 1857, and Oct. 16, 1859; Crawford Diary, Mar. 1, 1861, SWC Papers.
23. Within months, in fact, Crawford would trade his surgeon’s insignia for the oak leaves of an infantry major, and would go on to be brevetted major general.
24. Richard Wagner, For Honor, Flag, and Family: Civil War Major General Samuel W. Crawford, 1827–1892 (Shippensburg, Pa., 2005); Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 43–44; SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 4, 1861, Dec. 12, 1860; both in SWC Papers. Crawford’s book would not be published for more than a quarter century, but it remains an indispensible account of the Sumter crisis.
25. Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 41–42; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 22; The Drawings and Watercolors of Truman Seymour (Scranton, Pa., 1986), passim; William A. Ellis, Norwich University: Her History, Her Graduates, Her Roll of Honor (Concord, N.H., 1898), pp. 258–60; Twenty-First Annual Reunion of the Association of Graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, June 12th, 1890 (Saginaw, Mich., 1890), pp. 35–37.
26. Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 126. Many years later, Doubleday wrote of Anderson, “Unfortunately, he desired not only to save the Union, but to save slavery along with it. Without this, he considered the contest as hopeless. In this spirit he submitted to everything, and delayed all action in the expectation that Congress would make some new and more binding compromise which would restore peace to the country. He could not read the signs of the times, and see that the conscience of the nation and the progress of civilization had already doomed slavery to destruction” (Reminiscences, p. 90).
27. Ibid., p. 126.
28. Barthel, Abner Doubleday, pp. 66–69.
29. Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 16–17; “A Scene at the Battle of the Bad Axe,” The New Yorker, Mar. 23, 1839; Kerry A. Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America (New York, 2006), pp. 270–71.
30. Barthel, Abner Doubleday, pp. 57, 66–69.
31. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 4, 1861. SWC Papers.
32. Barthel, Abner Doubleday, pp. 68–69; SWC Diary, Mar. 1 and 15, 1861, SWC Papers.
33. SWC Diary, Mar. 6, 1861, SWC Papers.
34. Ibid.
35. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Mar. 19, 23, and 30, 1861; Report of the Sick and Wounded for the Quarter Ending March 31, 1861; all in SWC Papers; AD to Mary Doubleday, Apr. 2, 1861, in Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC.
36. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Apr. 9, 1861; Foster to Capt. Lewis Robertson, Mar. 26, 1861; both in SWC Papers. OR I, vol. 1, p. 241; Michael Burlingame, unedited version of Abraham Lincoln (online at www.knox.edu/documents.pdfs/LincolnStudies), p. 237. Lincoln apparently never saw action in the war, and left the militia some weeks before the Bad Axe massacre.
37. SWC Diary, Apr. 8, 1861, SWC Papers; Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 382–83; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 140; Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War