When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Dreams of a National Pastime

2. Richmond: Make It a Southern Game

21 Chapter2 Richmond Make It a Southern Game Baseball took a bit longer to take hold fully in Richmond, Virginia, and in most Southern cities, than in Northern cities. The 1865 season came and went with only a smattering of games in former Confederate states. In 1866, however, baseball flourished. And it was at the end of the 1866 baseball season, a season highlighted by dozens of games in the former Confederate capital, that the Richmond Base Ball Club ignited a baseball scandal. The scandal demonstrated that desires for a “national game,” supported by efforts such as the selection of Arthur Gorman as president of the nabbp, would face competing priorities in the South. The scandal also made clear that racial policies would be a preeminent matter in the growth of a national baseball community. The Richmond Club started the controversy by rather audaciously breaking baseball’s rules of decorum and refusing an invitation to play a match game against Richmond’s Union Base Ball Club. At about the same time, the leadership of the Richmond Club also indicated that it had no plans to join the National Association of Base Ball Players, nor did they expect that other Southern clubs would submit themselves to such a national organizing body. The simple reason given by the Richmond Club’s secretary for both these rejections: “we are Southerners.”1 The gauntlet had been thrown down. Thus, while Washingtonians Arthur Gorman and Nicholas Young focused on nationalizing baseball, white baseball leaders in the South worked toward very different ends. Certainly, the environment for baseball activity in states like Virginia and South Carolina differed greatly from that in the North. Confederate soldiers returned home defeated, to a South that had been broken by the fighting. Scarcity of food and 22 The war’s over, 1865–67 shelter reigned as the most immediate of concerns. But still, even in such circumstances, the men of the South quickly began to form social organizations—perhaps hoping to replace camaraderie and community provided by their bygone military units. Southerners as a whole looked for means by which to reestablish everyday life and move beyond the tragedies wrought by the Civil War. Baseball clubs served these purposes. That men in cities such as Richmond, Virginia, found time for baseball in the 1860s at all still seems surprising. The Richmond Times reported on “Base Ball” in 1866 alongside its coverage of Reconstruction policies, a draining outbreak of cholera, the Freedmen’s Bureau’s ration policies, and the rebuilding of burned sections of the city. In the article “Base Ball,” the Times explained in October 1866, “This exciting game and health-inspiring game that has been much in vogue in the North for many years has become very popular here.”2 Baseball blossomed in Richmond and other Southern cities—Atlanta, Charleston , Chattanooga, Louisville, Nashville, New Orleans, and Savannah especially—both because and in spite of the destruction wrought by the Civil War. Baseball leaders such as Richmond’s Alexander Babcock took a Northern game and made it fit in Southern society. Not surprisingly , questions regarding race and sectionalism played prominently in this formative process. Richmond’s white baseball leaders had even less to say about race than their counterparts in Philadelphia or Washington, or Chicago, New York City, or Boston. To be precise, most white ballplayers in the South said nothing about race as it pertained to baseball. The leading white Richmond clubs never banned black participation. Similarly, Richmond’s white newspapers almost never commented (negatively or otherwise) on the activities of black baseball clubs. Instead, racial exclusion was an unstated but universal principle of Southern baseball right from the start. Thus, analyzing the mechanics of segregation in Richmond, and thereby the South, is a different task. It involves interpreting circumspect language and symbolic actions more than observing legal developments or even overt conflicts. The Richmond Times and Richmond Daily Dispatch reported enthusiastically on baseball in 1866 especially. Juxtaposing these baseball reports, both papers also regularly published stories that painted former slaves as lazy, dishonest, and unintelligent. Calls for extreme seg- richmond: make it a southern game 23 regation (“Have we not pointed out the advantages of emigration to Liberia, a country where they can get plenty of yam, plantain and rum?”) persisted.3 On the prospect of baseball serving as a means to reconnect the North and South, virtually no evidence exists to suggest that Richmond men...