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:
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“... as a result of generations of betrayal, it’s nearly impossible for Southern Negroes to trust a Southern white. No matter what he does or what he suffers, a white liberal is never established beyond suspicion in the hearts of the minority.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 2, ch. 10 (1962)
“Peace to the shacks! War on the palaces!”
—Georg Büchner (1813–1837)
“Stupid word, that. Period. In America it means “full stop” like in punctuation. That’s stupid as well. A period isn’t a full stop. It’s a new beginning. I don’t mean all that creativity, life-giving force, earth-mother stuff, I mean it’s a new beginning to the month, relief that you’re not pregnant, when you don’t have to have a child.”
—Michelene Wandor (b. 1940)