On Christmas day during the Civil War in 1862, a few New York regiments stationed in Hilton Head, South Carolina played a baseball game and gave birth to a baseball mystery.
One of the players that day was a soldier named Abraham Mills. According to Gunther Barth, University of California-Berkley history professor, Abraham Mills would later write that there were 40,000 in attendance for at that game. (City People: The rise of modern city culture in 19th century America, page 162, by Gunther Barth, 1980, Oxford University Press).
The problem with the number stems from its source. In the early 1900s, Mills would go on to head the “Mills Commission” which declared that Abner Doubleday was the inventor of baseball and that Cooperstown was its birthplace.
People openly wonder now if Mills made-up the number of people in attendance on that Christmas day game much the same way as he anointed Doubleday the founder of the game itself.
Several recent articles about this game have cited this 40,000 attendance figure and promoted it much the way Mills promoted Doubleday as baseball’s founder.
However, the official war records of the New York 165th, one of the regiments involved with the Christmas day game, are at odds with the Mill’s claim of 40,000 as shown by this entry:
Christmas Day: The men had quite a time playing a game of ball with other troops here. Sgt. A.G. Mills and George E. Cogswell of Co. B played in this game, which was witnessed by 10,000 soldiers.
See this article for further information.
Looking back, it’s fascinating that Mills proclaimed to know how many were in attendance for the game, but neither Mills nor anyone else seems to have knowledge of the game’s final score. I guess Mills and everyone else were too busy trying to figure out the attendance figure and forgot to watch the game. But, heck, I guess that 40,000 sounds better than 10,000 to those who wanted to increase the stature of the game.
When all is said and done, baseball’s mystique is unique because its history is often shrouded in mystery.
In my upcoming novel, Saving Babe Ruth, Abner Doubleday plays a role in telling a modern story of baseball, though he doesn’t play the role you might expect.
Sign up for my mailing list in the right hand column of my home page so you don’t miss a post in anticipation of the book’s release.
(Note: The photograph above is believed to be one of the only ones in existence to have captured a military baseball game during the Civil War. It features soldiers of Company G, 48th New York State Volunteers playing a game at Fort Pulaski, Georgia. Courtesy of Fort Pulaski Military Park.)