Abner Doubleday

Abner Doubleday (June 26, 1819 – January 26, 1893) was a career officer in the United States Army and a Union major general during the American Civil War, best remembered for firing the first cannon shot in defense of Fort Sumter at the outbreak of the conflict and for commanding the I Corps of the Army of the Potomac during the opening day of the Battle of Gettysburg. He is also widely, though erroneously, credited as the inventor of baseball, a claim advanced decades after his death and since thoroughly discredited by historians, but one that nevertheless shaped the location of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

Early Life and Education

Doubleday was born in Ballston Spa, New York, the son of Ulysses Freeman Doubleday, a newspaper publisher and War of 1812 veteran who later served two terms in the United States House of Representatives. The family soon moved to Auburn, New York, where Abner spent much of his youth. As a boy he briefly attended school in Cooperstown, New York—a fact later exploited, inaccurately, by proponents of the baseball legend.

After preparatory studies that included time at Georgetown College in Washington, D.C., Doubleday entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1838. He graduated in 1842, ranked twenty-fourth in a class that included future Civil War generals James Longstreet, John Pope, and John Newton. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 3rd U.S. Artillery.

Military Career Before the Civil War

Doubleday served with the artillery during the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), taking part in operations along the Rio Grande and in northern Mexico. In the 1850s he rotated through garrison and frontier postings and saw active service in Florida during the campaigns against the Seminole people. By early 1861 he had risen to the rank of captain and was assigned to the garrison of Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, one of the most sensitive postings in the United States Army as sectional tensions reached a crisis.

Fort Sumter, 1861

On December 26, 1860, Doubleday's commander, Major Robert Anderson, secretly moved his small garrison from the vulnerable Fort Moultrie to the more defensible Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. When Confederate forces opened fire on the fort on April 12, 1861, beginning the American Civil War, Doubleday, as second-in-command, aimed the cannon that fired the first shot from Fort Sumter in reply. He later recounted these events in his memoir Reminiscences of the Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–'61 (1876), which remains a valuable firsthand account of the episode. Following the fort's surrender, he was promoted to major and helped organize the defense of Washington, D.C.

Civil War Commands

Doubleday rose rapidly in the expanding Union Army. He was appointed brigadier general of volunteers in February 1862 and given command of a brigade, and later a division, in the I Corps of the Army of the Potomac. During the Second Bull Run campaign in August 1862, he assumed command of a division and was commended for the steadiness of his troops, who covered the Union retreat after the battle. At the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, when corps commander Joseph Hooker was wounded, Doubleday took temporary command of I Corps. He was promoted to major general of volunteers in November 1862 and subsequently led a division at the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.

At Gettysburg, on July 1, 1863, Doubleday again inherited command of I Corps when Major General John F. Reynolds was killed early in the fighting. Doubleday organized the corps' defense on the ridges north and west of the town, holding off Confederate advances for most of the day before withdrawing his badly depleted command to Cemetery Hill. Although his handling of the battle was later judged competent—even creditable, given the overwhelming odds—Army commander George G. Meade replaced him that evening with John Newton, who was junior in rank to Doubleday. The slight embittered Doubleday, who afterward testified before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War in criticism of Meade's generalship.

In August 1863 Doubleday was assigned to command the Department of Washington, overseeing the capital's defenses, and later performed administrative and court-martial duties. In 1865 he received brevet promotions in the Regular Army, culminating in the brevet rank of major general. After the Confederate surrender he served briefly in Texas during the early stages of Reconstruction before being mustered out of volunteer service in 1866.

Postwar Years

Doubleday continued in the Regular Army as a lieutenant colonel and, from 1867, as colonel of the 35th U.S. Infantry. He served at posts in California, including the San Francisco area, and on the Texas frontier along the Rio Grande. In 1871 he obtained a patent for a cable-car propulsion system, an innovation connected with San Francisco's street railways, though he derived little financial benefit from it. He retired from active service in 1873 with the rank of colonel and the honorary rank of brevet major general.

After retirement Doubleday settled for a time in San Francisco, where he developed an interest in spiritualism and theosophy and served as president of the Theosophical Society's local branch in the late 1870s. He also turned to writing, publishing his Fort Sumter memoirs in 1876 and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (1882), a volume in a contemporary series of Civil War campaign histories. In 1893 he died of heart disease at Mendham, New Jersey, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He had married Mary Hewitt in 1852.

The Baseball Myth

Doubleday's most famous association—invention of the game of baseball—rests entirely on evidence historians regard as fabricated. In 1905, Albert G. Spalding, the sporting-goods magnate and former pitcher, appointed a commission to determine the origin of baseball, seeking to establish the game as a uniquely American creation rather than an offshoot of English rounders. The commission relied heavily on the recollections of Abner Graves, an elderly Denver mining engineer who claimed that, as a boy in Cooperstown, he had watched Doubleday devise the game in 1839, sketching the first diamond and establishing teams of nine players.

In 1907 the commission, chaired by former National League president Abraham G. Mills, formally concluded that Doubleday had invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. The finding was almost immediately challenged, and modern scholarship rejects it conclusively:

• In 1839 Doubleday was a cadet at West Point, not in Cooperstown, and there is no record that he visited the town that year.
• Nothing in Doubleday's extensive writings, correspondence, or contemporary accounts ever mentions baseball; his obituary and family papers are silent on the subject.
• Graves was in his nineties when he recounted events said to have occurred more than sixty years earlier, and his testimony contained demonstrable errors.
• The evolution of baseball is well documented from earlier bat-and-ball games, including English rounders, with references to "base-ball" appearing in 18th-century English and American sources. The game's codification belongs to the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York, which adopted written rules in 1845 associated with Alexander Cartwright, Daniel "Doc" Adams, and other club members.

Nevertheless, the myth had profound practical consequences. Cooperstown was enshrined as baseball's "birthplace," and in 1939, on the supposed centennial of Doubleday's invention, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum opened there, alongside Doubleday Field. The Hall of Fame has long acknowledged that the Doubleday story is false, yet Cooperstown's status—and Doubleday's popular reputation as baseball's founder—endures in American popular culture.

Assessment and Legacy

Historians assess Doubleday as a dependable, courageous, and unpretentious commander who served capably in nearly every major campaign of the Army of the Potomac, though he lacked the political instincts and self-promotion of contemporaries such as Hooker and Daniel Sickles. His performance at Gettysburg, long overshadowed by Meade's decision to replace him, has been substantially rehabilitated by modern scholars, who note that his corps fought outnumbered against superior Confederate forces and bought the time necessary for the Union army to concentrate.

Doubleday's legacy is accordingly twofold. On the battlefield, he is commemorated at Gettysburg by Doubleday Avenue and an equestrian monument on Oak Ridge, near where his corps made its stand, and by his grave at Arlington National Cemetery. In American cultural memory, however, he remains inextricably linked to baseball: the apocryphal story of his invention of the national pastime, though untrue, gave baseball a founding myth and fixed the site of its hall of fame. His life thus spans two domains of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American identity—the Civil War and the rise of organized sport—each of which adopted, in very different ways, the name of Abner Doubleday.