[legendsport]

from "The Illustrated History of Base Ball" by Henry Chadwick, Howard House Publishing, New York, NY 1907.

From its humble beginnings in rounders or cricket (depending on the theory to which theory you adhere), base ball after the internecine struggle between North and South remained a game with no clear set of rules and no sort of governing body yet was growing into one of the most popular pastimes in both the United States and the Confederacy.

That the game was more popular in the North than the South was no great secret, nor much of a surprise; that there were variations called the "Massachusetts Game" and "New York Game" speak volumes about the popularity of the game in those two areas of the recently sundered nation. But in the Confederacy, in places like Georgia, Virginia and Mississippi, those states in which Union soldiers had either spent long periods on campaign, or in prison camps, the game was beginning to flourish in the years 1864 to 1869 - those years immediately following the cessation of hostilities. This is no great wonder for the commonality of history and language ensured that Northern and Southern soldiers bore much in common; therefore that base ball should prove popular in both nations was a logical result of days upon days spent together in the boring drudgery of prison camps.

One man who played a leading role in bringing the game to his native Alabama was Daniel R. Hundley, a Colonel of Infantry who was captured by the Union Army of U.S. Grant at the Battle of Port Gibson (Mississippi) in the spring of 1863 and swapped back to the Confederates a month later. Hundley had attended Harvard University as a young man, where he was exposed to the Massachusetts game and lived in Chicago in the pre-war years, where he not only married, but also saw the game in its Illinois format. In his brief period of captivity, Hundley participated in several matches between Union soldiers and their Confederate captives. He brought the game back to Alabama after first spending time integrating the state of Missouri into the Confederacy following the peace treaty of December 1863. Though a prominent figure in base ball in the Confederacy in the 1870s, Hundley was far from the only one.

The R.E. Lee and Pelican Base Ball Clubs of New Orleans, which both rose in the immediate aftermath of the War of Southern Independence were the precursors for the huge following the game currently enjoys in Louisiana. In Georgia, the 50th Georgia Infantry under Colonel William Manning were exposed to the game while with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during the Pennsylvania campaign. A group of Manning's men, notably Lieutenant Avery Hastings, became greatly enamored of the game and brought it back to Georgia with them. There were similar cases in each of the Confederate States, including both Texas and the recently acquired Indian Territory (now the state of Sequoyah).

And so, while the game was moving inexorably towards professionalism in the club circuits being established in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston, it was also growing - albeit slightly more slowly - along the same lines in places like Richmond, Atlanta, Montgomery and New Orleans. In the 1870s everything would begin to accelerate.