Abner Doubleday

Famous New Yorker Abner Doubleday Abner Doubleday was an authentic American war hero and an unsung pioneer in occult studies, but he remains best known for something he didn’t do and never claimed to have done. Doubleday was born in Ballston Spa, Saratoga County, on June 26, 1819. His father was a newspaper publisher who served two terms in the Congress in the 1830s. His father’s political connections probably helped Abner get into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1838. Abner graduated in 1842 and became an artillery offi cer in the U.S. Army. Abner Doubleday took part in the Mexican War and fought Seminole Indians in Florida. He was second-in- command at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor when South Carolina seceded from the United States in late 1860. Library of Congress, Prints After federal troops refused to surrender the fort to the new and Photographs Division Confederate States of America, Doubleday fought in the [reproduction number LC-B814-1497] fi rst battle of the Civil War on April 12, 1861. He claimed to have fi red the fi rst shot for the Union during the Confederate attack on Sumter. The outgunned federal forces eventually surrendered, but were allowed to return north. Doubleday continued to fi ght the Confederacy in the Second Battle of Bull Run, and was part of the Union victory at Antietam in 1862. During the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, Doubleday had to take command of an army corps after his general was killed in action. His outnumbered forces crucially delayed a Confederate advance before retreating, and he was wounded later in the battle. Despite his heroism, Doubleday was frustrated by claims that his line of defense had broken too soon. He spent the rest of the war in Washington D.C. in an administrative role. Doubleday remained in the army until 1873. While stationed in San Francisco he won a patent for a cable-car railway, but gave it up when he was reassigned to Texas. His 1871 request for “baseball implements” for his troops is the only known mention of baseball in Abner Doubleday’s life. As a civilian, Doubleday practiced law, wrote his war memoirs, and renewed an early interest in philosophy and spiritualism. In 1879, he became president of the Theosophical Society, one of the fi rst organizations dedicated to bringing spiritual wisdom from Asia to the western world. While the society’s founders traveled in India, Doubleday collected occult texts, translated some himself, and eventually donated his mystical library to the Theosophical Society. When Abner Doubleday died on January 26, 1893, he was remembered as a Civil War hero. The legend that overshadowed his real achievements began in 1905, when Abner Graves claimed to have seen Doubleday (then a West Point cadet) invent the game of baseball by sketching a diamond and marking bases on a Cooperstown lot in 1839. Graves’s story was impossible to confi rm, and historians now believe that Doubleday never left West Point while he was a cadet. But leading fi gures in Major League Baseball, including Theosophical Society member Albert G. Spalding, liked Graves’s story because it gave baseball a purely American origin. The legend led to the construction of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Doubleday Field in Cooperstown. The legend is a myth but Abner Doubleday wasn’t. He didn’t invent baseball, Ballston Spa is a but he defi nitely doesn’t deserve to be forgotten. small village 13 miles For more about Abner Doubleday and Doubleday Field visit the north of Schenectady. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum website at http:// It was known by Native baseballhall.org/discover/history-of-doubleday-fi eld. This is one Americans for its of a series of Famous New Yorker profi les written by Kevin Gilbert “healing” mineral springs. for the NYNPA Newspaper In Education Program. All rights reserved 2017. For a teaching guide go to www.nynpa.com/nie/niefamousny.html.

Load more