Chucking the Old Apple: <i>Recent Discoveries of Pre-1840 North American Ball Games</i>

Abstract

North Americans were quite enthusiastic about ball games, including baseball and ball games important to understanding the rise of baseball, before 1840. progress of research in this area of ball game studies has been heartening. Scholars such as David Block, George Thompson, and John Thorn, have uncovered startling finds in the pre-1839 period. Block's book, Baseball Before We Knew It (Nebraska, 2005), provided the clearest and most comprehensive narrative of early baseball and baseball-type sports.1 Thompson's discovery of two newspaper accounts of baseball in New York City in 1823 made New York Times.2 Thorn's unearthing of a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts, ordinance about baseball and other ball games continues to reinforce the point that the history of baseball before Abner Doubleday failed to invent it in Cooperstown is much richer than presumed.3Slave AccountsMore evidence of pre-1839 bat-and-ball games has surfaced. Perhaps the most exciting evidence has been references to slaves playing ball as early as 1797. That year Fayetteville, North Carolina, punished with 15 lashes negroes, that shall make a noise or assemble in a riotous manner in any of the streets on the Sabbath day; or that may be seen playing ball on that day.4 In a diary at the Connecticut Historical Society, a recent Yale graduate, Edward Hooker, wrote some very detailed depictions of life in Columbia, South Carolina, where he went for a job as a tutor in 1805. Our Yankee visitor was both enchanted and repelled by what he saw in this unfamiliar region. On November 9, a Sunday, he jotted: The negroes when not hurried have this day for amusement & great numbers are seen about, some playing ball, some with things for sale & some dressed up going to meeting.5 Hooker, a northern Congregationalist, considered these amusements profane; but for historians, this may be the first recorded evidence of slaves playing ball. When I was doing research for my pre-1820 sports documents encyclopedia, I found sources about slaves' recreational activities maddeningly sparse. Indeed some colonies and states prohibited slaves from congregating in numbers, for fear of uprisings. But here in South Carolina slaves were playing ball in 1805-a period of racial tension-not all that long after the abortive Gabriel Prosser revolt of 1800-1802.Another northern schoolteacher, Emily Burke, reported similar sights during her sojourn in Georgia (perhaps near Savannah) in the 1840s:The slaves had finished the tasks that had been assigned to them in the morning and were now enjoying holiday recreations. Some were trundling the hoop, some were playing ball, some were dancing at the sound of the fiddle, some were grinding their own corn at the mill, while others were just returning from fishing or hunting excursions. In this manner the Sabbath is usually spent on a Southern plantation.6Although ball play was apparently not the only recreation, it was important enough to make her list.Autobiographical ReminiscencesAnother fertile area for finds has been memoirs and reminiscences, especially those published in the latter half of the 19th century, but occasionally even autobiographies from the early 20th century contain pre-1840 ball play recollections. In and of themselves, these memoirs may raise some suspicion that baseball's growing 20th-century prominence prompted writers to retroject memories of early games. However, as more of these recollections surface, their cumulative corroborations add weight to claims about pre-1840 ballgames. fact that these accounts also come from disparate areas and times further bolsters their authenticity. For example, look at Horace Greeley's remembrance, in Recollections of a Busy Life, of ball play in Vermont in the early 1820s:Ball was a common diversion in Vermont while I lived there; yet I never became proficient at it, probably for want of time and practice. To catch a flying ball, propelled by a muscular arm straight at my nose, and coming so swiftly that I could scarcely see it, was a feat requiring a celerity of action, an electric sympathy of eye and brain and hand, which my few and far-between hours snatched from labor, for recreation did not su[double dagger]ce to acquire. …