1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [84]
In some ways, the nine officers formed a microcosm of the Union itself, with men representing almost every region and every political orientation in the country, including one young Virginia lieutenant who later, when his state seceded, ended up switching sides, fighting—and dying—in the Confederate service. They also included a wide range of personalities. The officer corps of the “Old Army,” as the career military would be fondly remembered after the war, was a kind of men’s club, a close-knit, sometimes affectionate, often rambunctious fraternity. You started at West Point before you could shave, and then worked your way through the ranks, flying hither and thither among states and territories at the mysterious whim of the War Department, until you were a grizzled pensioner—unless, of course, a Mexican bullet or a Comanche arrow found you first. Everybody seemed to know everybody else, and a single moment of glory or disgrace—whether on the battlefield or the dueling ground, in the barroom or the brothel—could seal an officer’s reputation, and his fate. In many respects, though, a spirit of tolerant worldliness prevailed. The Old Army was one of antebellum America’s few truly national institutions, and certainly the only one that required the sons of Georgia planters to bunk alongside those of New England schoolteachers, not to mention do daily business (peaceably or not, as circumstances might require) with Mormon emigrants and Sonoran bandits. “I have in my pilgrimage thus far found mankind nearly the same in every region,” Major Anderson once reflected. There was room for many kinds of men around the officers’ mess table—and Sumter’s was no exception.18
Abner Doubleday, the garrison’s blunt-spoken second in command, hailed from Auburn, New York, the antislavery Republican heartland, where his fellow townsfolk included William H. Seward and Harriet Tubman. The bulldoggish captain was used to being regarded as slightly eccentric, both for his radical politics and for his metaphysical turn of mind—neither of these being quite standard issue at West Point. He pored over Spanish poetry, theories of the afterlife, and transcendentalist essays—years earlier, in fact, as a freshly minted lieutenant, he had written Emerson a swoony fan letter, inviting the philosopher, whom he had never met, to come and stay for a visit at the fort where he was stationed off the coast of Maine, “my quarters being large for a bachelor.”19 But Doubleday could also be entertaining company. He had a boyish love of practical jokes and coarse anecdotes that could relieve the often dreary life of an army outpost—it took little prodding for him to regale his messmates with the story of General Kearney, General Sumner, the Irish cook, and the watermelon; or the one about Secretary Floyd’s encounter with the Sioux Indian chief; or of how Lieutenant Tom Jackson—not yet known as Stonewall—got fleeced by a horse trader back at Fort Hamilton.20
The captain’s connection to Cooperstown and the legend that he invented baseball are equally specious, alas. Versions of the game existed long before his birth, and Doubleday himself would mention baseball just once in any of his surviving writings: in 1871, while in command of a fort in Texas, he would ask the War Department for permission to purchase bats and balls for the members of a colored infantry regiment at the post. (This request was apparently denied.)21 In a certain respect, however, it made sense for a later generation of Americans to associate the sport with a famously tenacious Union officer. Baseball was just coming into its own as the Civil War began—the first reference to it as a national pastime dates from 1856—and Americans associated it with some of the same ideas that were percolating through the political culture of the era, ideas that they would also come to associate strongly with the Northern cause. (Indeed, one political cartoon in 1860