1863.59
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General Supports Ballplaying by RI Unit
| Salience | Peripheral |
|---|---|
| Tags | Civil War, MilitaryCivil War, Military |
| Location | VAVA |
| City/State/Country: | VA, United States |
| Modern Address | |
| Game | |
| Immediacy of Report | Retrospective |
| Age of Players | AdultAdult |
| Holiday | |
| Notables | |
| Text | The regimental history of the First Rhode Island Artillery, covering 1861-1865, contains 13 references to ball-playing between August 1863 and January 1864. It also shows several other more general references to playing games, some of them pitting different regiments, starting in August 1861. A General Hayes is mentioned as watching several games, sometimes along with his wife. The most detailed of the ballplaying entries occurred on January 25, 1864, in winter camp near Brandy Station VA: :On the 25th we had a fine game of ball in honor of General Hays, who had sent to Washington for balls and bats to enable us to play to good advantage. When the general and his wife came galloping into camp, with a number of officers and ladies, our captain went out to greet them and said: ‘Ah! general, I suppose you would like to see the battery on drill.’ The general quickly replied: ‘No; I want to see them play ball, which they can do better than any men I ever saw.’” Few other entries are more than minimal references. A typical example is for August 21, 1863: “The 21st was another fine day. The men continued to engage in different sports, and there were ball games, jumping, putting the shot, and other amusements.” Thomas M. Aldrich, The History of Battery A: First Regiment Rhode Island Light Artillery (Snow and Farnham, Providence, 1904), pages 272-273. Accessed 6/28/09 on Google Books via “’history of battery a’ aldrich” search. In August 1863 the regiment was back in Virginia from the Battle of Gettysburg, and in January it was in winter camp near Brandy Station. The Hays passage appears without citation in Kirsch, Baseball in Blue and Gray, page 41. Millen reports that Aldrich and a member of the 13th MA “believed or were thought to have believed, based on their track record of wins in the army, that their teams could have beaten any of the professional teams of the 1890. She does not give an original source for this, but cites L. Fielding, “Sport: The Meter Stick of the Civil War Soldier,” Canadian Journal of History of Sport, May 1978, pp 17-18. |
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| Source Image | [[Image:|left|thumb]] |
| External Number | 137 |
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| Submission Note | |
| Has Supplemental Text |
1863.59 General Supports Ballplaying by RI Unit"
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