Since Colonel Gardner lived outside the fort [Fort Moultrie, S. Carolina], the highest-ranking line officer living in the officers’ quarters was Captain Abner Doubleday, promoted to that rank in 1855.
Early in the twentieth century, long after Doubleday’s death, a committee anxious to promote the sport of baseball examined its origins and claimed that he had invented it in 1839 – which was and is absurd. The game’s roots went back to eighteenth-century England – and, depending on how one defined it, perhaps long before. But the committee preferred to think it was dealing with “the great American pastime.” Their main justification came from a Denver mining engineer who recalled that Doubleday, seeing some local boys playing a game, suggested some rules for them.
Oddly, this myth – never claimed by Doubleday himself – remains the most famous thing about him.
Source:
Detzer, David. “Salad Days.” Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War. New York: Harcourt, 2002. 38, 39. Print.
Original Source Listed:
See, for example, David Morgon Ramsey, “The ‘Old Sumpter Hero’: A Biography of Major-General Abner Doubleday,” Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1980, pp. 11-21.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...