Henry Bridgewater's Black Stockings of St. Louis, 1881-1889

Abstract

Henry Bridgewater's Black Stockings team of St. Louis provides another foundational story in history of colored baseball.1 remarkable thing about this story is not so much its retrieval from baseball's past as its buried treasure, its titillating fragments and artifacts. It argues that something special occurred in 1880s, something that needs to be unearthed and reexamined-if not examined for first time. Henry Bridgewater's colored nine, Black Stockings of St. Louis, provide a parallel vision of larger forces of modernization reshaping American life, alternately resisting and adapting to these forces. Mass-circulation newspapers and sporting journals represent some of novel constraints and opportunities with which this colored club had to contend. While story of Black Stockings may be tracked from start to finish in print media, its meaning remains to be fully explored by historians. And as this essay makes clear, colored baseball teams rarely present a single story, or a single meaning.2Scant attention has been devoted to Black Stockings. While primary references to Bridgewater's club have been incorporated into baseball histories-most recently in works by Harold Seymour, Robert Peterson, Jerry Malloy, and Michael E. Lomax-no significant scholarship, to my knowledge, has been devoted to subject.3 I present this work, then, as a bare-bones historical outline. Historians fascinated with postbellum Gilded Age, period of economic ascendancy in United States following Civil War, may give priority to other colored nines if subject were to enter their accounts. For present purposes, I think it makes sense to concentrate on this buried treasure and leave other cultural artifacts of 19th-century colored baseball to be exhumed later.4Pre-1883 sports columns tended to limit their coverage of Black Stockings. Bridgewater changed all that. He fits among most famous unknown baseball men of period-unknown, that is, to modern investigators-a man whose presence, at time, was immediately recognizable. Bridgewater was not only a baseball man; black sporting community considered him an expert billiardist and a principal exponent of western sporting fraternity.5 Traveling throughout United States and Upper Canada in 1883, Bridgewater's professional nine anticipated Cuban Giants, both in national prestige and as a viable economic entity.1882: The Colored Lads Play Surprisingly WellBetween 1881 and 1882, St. Louis newspapers offered sparse coverage of city's colored clubs, but when they did, Lindells, Aetnas, Waverlys, Hartfords, West Ends, Blue Stockings, Yellow Stockings, and Black Stockings figured prominently.6 papers promoted weekend games and provided score results that appeared on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, or Mondays. On June 17, 1881, for example, Evening Chronicle reported that Black and Yellow Stockings would play at Red Stocking Park.7 Local papers failed, however, to carry game's score.Why poor coverage? One answer was column space. Critics complained that editors gave baseball too much column space. And press doted on white professional club, Brown Stockings, which it viewed as a lucrative, civic-minded enterprise. On other hand, Black Stockings colored nine hardly qualified as city's iconic sports symbol. In 1880s, professional baseball intensified its demands, weeding out those ill-suited by age, class, ethnicity, race, and gender.8 Labor historian Robert E. Burk explains, [T]he established lines of ethnic and racial acceptance and prohibition changed little. owners' recalcitrance illustrated other half of player value equation-the need for player force to present an appealing visual product to a 'respectable' white spectatorship.9 For Burk, white ownership's preoccupation with controlling ballplayer's image and enhancing spectators' response to product- namely a high-skill, labor-intensive entertainment industry-defined the ethnocultural composition of player force. …