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A bner Doubleday led an eventful life and achieved considerable fame as a career officer in the United States Army and Union general in the American Civil War. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who fought in the American Revolutionary War, and his father, a veteran of the War of 1812, he entered West Point in 1838 and graduated four years later, twenty-fourth in a class of fifty-six cadets. Doubleday fought in the Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848, took part in campaigns against the Seminoles in Florida from 1856 to 1858, and was promoted to captain for his efforts. As the Civil War approached, Doubleday found himself second in command of the garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, where in response to the Confederate attack on April 12, 1861, he ordered the first Union cannon fire of the great conflict. He then distinguished himself on a succession of battlefields, including Bull Run, Antietam (where he was wounded), and Fredericksburg. In perhaps his finest hour, Doubleday, by then a major general, played a pivotal role in the early fighting at Gettysburg, taking command of the entire battlefield when General John F. Reynolds fell to Confederate fire. Some military analysts after the war accused him of indecision as a commander (unfairly, many historians now insist), but Doubleday nonetheless enjoyed an admirable postbellum career, serving mostly in San Francisco and Texas, until his retirement in 1873. Thousands saw him lie in state in New York City after his death in 1893, and a seven-foot obelisk monument still marks his grave at Arlington National Cemetery.1 But Doubleday’s major claim to fame—though he never actually claimed it himself—rests not with his military service but with his association with baseball. i n t r o d u c t i o n Abner Doubleday and Baseball’s Idol of Origins 2 t h e fa r m e r s ’ g a m e It began, innocently enough, with a long-running, spirited debate on the origins of the game between two pioneers of professional baseball—Albert Spalding, a former star pitcher and the leading sporting goods entrepreneur and sports publisher in America, and Henry Chadwick, a popular and highly respected British-born baseball writer. Since the late 1880s, in the most widely read sports publications of the day, including Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide, Chadwick had maintained that baseball evolved from the English stick and ball games that he had played as a child, most notably rounders, whereas Spalding insisted that the game was entirely an American product. The debate became more heated as the stakes rose after the turn of the twentieth century. With big league professional baseball not yet a big-time commercial success, and at a time of rampant nationalist fervor and anti-British chauvinism, Spalding realized that a purely American origin and a heroic American inventor could work wonders to promote both the game and his business interests. With considerable fanfare he convened, in 1905, a “special commission ,” chaired by former National League president Abraham G. Mills and including two senators and several prominent businessmen, “to settle the matter definitely and . . . for all time.”2 With little pretense of objectivity, the commission began its work. Its secretary, James E. Sullivan of New York, president of the Amateur Athletic Union, placed ads in newspapers and sporting publications around the country inviting “oldtimers of the game” to send him “any proof, data, or information” that they might have on the origins of baseball. For two years, Sullivan collected and filed the responses—several dozen in all—most of which credited the famous Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York City for inventing the game in the mid 1840s. That, however, was the extent of the commission’s research. The five members other than Mills and Sullivan appeared to have done nothing at all except lend their names to stationery letterhead. Its rather dubious methods notwithstanding, the commission submitted its final report to the public in March 1908. Based solely on the reply of one individual, an elderly Denver resident named Abner Graves, and a follow-up exchange with Spalding, the commission concluded that none other than Abner Doubleday invented baseball while playing with his schoolmates in a cow pasture in the village of Cooperstown, New York, in the summer of 1839.3 And so the legend began. Few figures have ascended into American folklore so effortlessly as Abner Doubleday. Fewer still have...

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