Civil War Period
During the American Civil War, soldiers from Massachusetts often played their brand of baseball when competing among themselves, but sometimes switched to New York rules when playing men from that state. Kirsch tells of the 19th Massachusetts Regiment encamped in Falmouth in early 1863 when a “base ball fever broke out.” Later that year the Clipper reported a Massachusetts Rules match for $60 a side, between the 11th Massachusetts and the 26th Pennsylvania Regiment.
While the Massachusetts Game was popular among soldiers, it was losing favor on the home front. Particularly damaging was a trip to Boston by the mighty Excelsior Club of Brooklyn in 1862. The Brooklynites defeated the Bowdoins 41-15, then a picked nine from the Tri-Mountains and Lowells 39-13. This began a conversion of the Boston clubs to the New York style of play. By the end of the war, the country standardized on one style of baseball. One sporting periodical announced:
The National Association or “New-York game” is now almost universally adopted by the Clubs all over the country ; and the Massachusetts, and still more ancient style of playing familiar to any school-boy, called “town ball,” will soon become obsolete. No lover of the pastime can regret this, as the New-York mode is superior and more attractive in every way ; and better calculated to perpetuate and render “our national game” an “institution” with both “young and old America.” - Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, March 18, 1865
Read more about this topic: The Massachusetts Game
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil, war and/or period:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance ... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother’s nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against Protestant ascendancy. ...The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others ...”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“There is a period near the beginning of every man’s life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)