The Cotton Gin and the Compact of 1802
Before the Revolutionary War, southern plantations in America revolved primarily around tobacco, sugar, rice, and cotton. These businesses struggled for the most part in the aftermath of the War
for Independence until 1793, when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Though a tremendous boon to the agriculture industry, there was a price to pay for this great innovation. The downside of the success of “king cotton” came with the brutal expansion of the cotton fields and the desire for development. The Compact of 1802 forcibly removed Native Americans by clearing paths from the southeastern states west to today’s Oklahoma. The burden of this injustice thrust on the backs of Indian nations such as the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Seminoles ignited slavery. (1). Another forceable removal of the Indian Nation came about in the 1830s when President Andrew Jackson fostered what came to be known as the “Trail of Tears.”
Whitney also developed interchangeable mechanical parts, spurring the Industrial Revolution through manufacturing and mass produc- tion. Commercialization led to the emergence of the Market Revolution, which helped open the industrialization era wide. In its most simplistic form, the cycle was that the South grew the cotton on the backs of enslaved people and sold it to the North, where the great textile mills manufactured the fabric needed for the country’s growth. Population growth and transportation improvement helped mushroom the markets, opening the door to capitalism. (2) So, ascribing to this theory, it would seem to be against their interests for most Northerners to be in favor of abolition. Yet it proved to be far more complicated.
Leisure and Exercise
Baseball’s rise is purely up for conjecture. A new world opened to the citizenry as the people continued to recover from the War of Independence’s ravages and veer away from the Puritan legacy that condemned sports. Games of “ball” began to establish more structure in the early 1800s.
While these folk games of ball grew in popularity, there was a shift from an agrarian society to an urban community. (3) To understand the game’s true origins, let us take on a leisure and exercise game, which precipitated the game’s evolution.
“Base Ball”, as we know it, had various roots. As early as 1744, John Newbery reported a game played in his book, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Then, in 1777, General George Washington felt that his troops needed an escape from the dangers of war and the boredom of camp. As Elliot Gorn and Warren Goldstein wrote in their book, A Brief History of American Sports, “He urged his officers to promote exercise and vigorous amusements
among their troops, improve all the leisure time your brigades may have from other duties in maneuvering, and teach the men the use of their legs, which is infinitely more important than learning the manual exercise Games of Exercise may not only be permitted but encouraged.”
After the Revolutionary War, the United States government advo- cated leisure and exercise, including original games of “ball,” to help the citizenry recover from the doldrums of the war’s aftermath. After that, ball games were played in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1791—and likely earlier—in a document discovered by Major League Baseball historian John Thorn and former Major League pitcher Jim Bouton. (4)
The Commercialization and the Market Revolution
The Market Revolution, which began around 1800, precipitated many changes. The transformation occurred when most Americans saw more significant opportunities by leaving the countryside of the agrar- ian society and moving to the cities to work in factories, thus setting the tone for urbanization. “The market revolution occurred due to sweeping economic, cultural, and political changes between the American Revolution and the Civil War and affect how we live today,” as stated on Study.com. (5) Important factors precipitated by the Revolution:
- The agricultural explosion in the South and West and the textile boom in the North strengthened the economy in complemen- tary ways.
- Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and pioneering work with metal mechan- ical parts contributed significantly to industrialization.
- Large-scale domestic manufacturing, concentrated in the North, decreased dependence on imports and increased wage labor.
- The federal government’s power grew under influential Kentucky Congressman, House Speaker, and Secretary of State Henry Clay’s
- American System led to many improvements in expanded roadways and canal systems.
- The rapid development and westward expansion during the Mar- ket Revolution resulted in land speculation, which caused eco- nomic boom and bust. (6)
By 1820, the United States was moving toward the forefront of urbanization. Cities expanded into open fields as commerce burgeoned. Sporting fraternities began to evolve from the simple folk games into a more organized form of town ball. The Lower East Side of New York City increased as the Market Revolution increasingly drew more merchants and businesses there.
Urbanization and Industrialization
Robert Fulton established the first commercial steamboat, which traveled up and down the Hudson River in New York in 1807. Soon after, steamboats took over the waters of both the Mississippi River and the Ohio River.
In 1811, a commission appointed by the New York City Legislature laid out the famous street grid pattern for New York City. The city grew northward by leaps and bounds. Yet this clean design later thwarted ballplayers’ opportunity to establish a place for their baseball games in Manhattan, continually pushing the location of the early ball games into real estate prime for development.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 further contributed to urban growth during the Market Revolution. The canal quickly became the primary conduit to the West. Construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the first public railroad in the United States, followed in 1828. Urbanization energized the development of sport as the cities underwent a rapid growth rate. It became the primary reason for developing organized sports and athletic pastimes in America.
(7) Through the next decade, hundreds of steamboats moved up and down western rivers carrying manufactured goods and people. Shortly after that, base ball became more of an organized game. The northeastern cities of Philadelphia, New York, Brooklyn, and Boston in the United States, plus Beachville in Ontario, Canada, all became hotbeds for the game. In City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports, Steven A. Riess wrote,
Clean sport provided sedentary workers a substitute for the slow pace of life by improving health, morals, and character. Men who subscribed to this ideology were sporting gentlemen—respectable individuals who believed in hard work, planning for the future, and leading Christian lives. Their favorite sports, such as baseball, were moral, personally uplifting, and socially functional. (8)
The earliest documented evidence of the game’s origins played in New York was at a staged match to draw patrons to a saloon known as Jones’ Retreat, located around Broadway and 8th Street. George Thompson, who stated that baseball emerged gradually, not by the invention, reported in the New York Times in 2001, the following article written anonymously in the National Advocate newspaper on April 25, 1823:
I was last Saturday much pleased in witnessing a company of active young men playing the manly an athletic game of “base ball” at the Retreat in Broadway (Jones’). I am informed they are an organized Association, and that a very interesting game will be played on Saturday next at the above place, to commence at half past 3 o’clock P.M. Any person fond of witnessing this game may avail himself of seeing it played with consummate skill and wonderful dexterity…. It is surprising, and to be regretted that the young men of our city do not engage more in this manual sport; it is innocent amusement, and healthy exercise, attended with but little expense, and has no demoralizing tendency. (9)
While base ball was still in its developmental stages, the country witnessed the advent of the railroad. The railroad’s growth provided a connection that allowed baseball and American history to establish a formidable relationship. Then, in 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse introduced long-distance communications in the form of the telegraph. The wiring of the transmitter paralleled the tracks laid by the railroad. It is hard to picture telegraph wiring without train tracks in the same scenario. These cultural and technological advances became a significant part of the Industrial Revolution and furthered the spread of base ball.
The Origin of Ball Games/Town Ball to Organized Baseball
Philadelphia and Camden, N.J., reported organized games as early as 1831. The New York Gotham Base Ball Club came together in 1837 with the first set of bylaws. Known as the “New York, or Gotham, or Magnolias, or Washington clubs from the 1830s through the 1860s, these clubs were lineally the same and appeared to have gone by several names simultaneously time,” as stated in Base Ball Founders. (10) In 1838, ball games appeared in Beachville, Ontario, Canada. There was no specific date that the original term “base ball” unified with “baseball.” Still, we know “base ball” was used in the latter part of the nineteenth century; after that, the term became commonly referred to as “baseball.”
So, who were the “founders” of this game? Until recently, two prom- inent names linked baseball’s origins. Abner Doubleday was the first. Doubleday, a career soldier, ordered the first shots fired by the Union in defense of Fort Sumter that commenced the Civil War. He fought in the titanic battles at Antietam, Bull Run, and Gettysburg, ending the war with major-general rank. Yet, upon his death in 1893, nothing in his obituary mentioned anything about the game he would be eternally linked to.
(11) It was while Doubleday was a cadet at the United States Military Academy in 1839 that he was retroactive—and erroneously—credited as the “founder of base ball.” (This fabrication was fostered by former pitcher and sporting goods magnate Albert Goodwill Spalding in a com- mission that he set up in 1905).
The second touted “founder” of the game was Alexander Joy Cart- wright, a New York City bank teller who served as a volunteer fireman. Cartwright was an instrumental member in the forming of the Knicker- bockers. And later on, through a great publicity campaign by his heirs, he was claimed to have been the “true” founder of baseball since he was a leader of the “Knickerbocker Fire Company” and proffered the rules of the “Knickerbocker Game.” Most of the credit Cartwright received fell short of reality. Cartwright later received a plaque in his honor in the Baseball Hall of Fame. (12)
William R. Wheaton and Doc Adams were two gentlemen who were very involved with the game in its early stages of development. In a letter in a San Francisco newspaper in 1887, former original Gotham/ Knickerbocker, William R. Wheaton, also considered a “father of base ball,” wrote in a letter published in a San Francisco newspaper:
In the ’30s, [sic] I lived at the corner of Rutgers Street and E Broadway in New York. I was admitted to the bar in ’36 and was very fond of physical exercise…. There was a racquet club in Allen Street with an enclosed court. Myself and intimates, young merchants, lawyers, and physicians, found cricket too slow and lazy a game. We couldn’t get enough exercise out of it. Only bowler and batter had anything to do, and the rest of the players might stand around all afternoon without get- ting a chance to stretch their legs. Racket was lively enough, but it was expensive and not in an open field where we could have a full swing and plenty of fresh air with a chance to roll on the grass. Three-cornered cat was a boys game and did well enough for slight youngsters, but it was a dangerous game for powerful men, because the ball is thrown to put out a man between bases, and it had to hit the runner to put him out….
We had to have a good outdoor game, and as the games then in vogue didn’t suit us we decided to remodel three-cornered cat and make a new game. We first organized what we called the Gotham baseball club. This was the first ball organiza- tion in the United States, and it was completed in 1837….
Among the members were doctor John Miller, a popular physician of that day; John Murphy, a well-known hotel- keeper; and James Lee, president of the New York Chamber of Commerce…. The first step we took in making baseball was to abolish the rule of throwing the ball at the runner and order that it should be thrown to the baseman instead, who had to touch the runner with it before he reached the base…. During the regime of three-cornered cat there were no regular bases, but only such permanent objects as a bed- ded boulder or an old stump, and often the diamond looks strangely like an irregular polygon. We laid out the ground at Madison Square [sic] in the form of an accurate diamond, with home plate and sandbags for bases. You must remem- ber that what is now called Madison Square [sic], opposite the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the thirties was out in the coun- try, far from the city limits. We had no short-stop, and often played with only six or seven men on a side. The scorer kept the game in a book we had made for that purpose, and it was he who decided all disputed points. The modern empire and his tribulations were unknown to us….
After the Gotham club had been in existence for a few months, it was found necessary to reduce the rules of the new game to writing. This work fell to my hands, and the code I then for- mulated is substantially that in use today. We abandoned the old rule of putting out on the first bound and confined it to fly catching. The Gotham played a game of ball with the star Cricket Club of Brooklyn and beat the Englishman out of sight, of course. That game and the return were the only two matches ever played by the first baseball club. (13)
The earliest recorded rules of a baseball game in the United States were written by Wheaton on September 23, 1845. The first recorded baseball game was played on October 6, 1845, at Elysian Fields, in Hoboken, New Jersey. (14) The first match game that incorporated the Knicker- bocker bylaws came on June 19, 1846, between the New York Ball Club and the New York Knickerbockers—the New York Nine defeated Cart- wright’s Knickerbockers.
Overall, Americans continued to enjoy the combination of athletics and social life during the formative years of team sports. However, although the game did help to provide a sense of fraternity and cohesion that was lacking in mid-nineteenth-century America, it sometimes contributed to further contention and fragmentation. George Kirsch, in his book, Baseball and Cricket: The creation of American Team Sports, summarized the transformation of leisure time into organized baseball:
America’s earliest amateur clubs aimed to provide healthful recreation and promote goodwill among players, and to a considerable extent, they succeeded. However, they could not escape the athletic and social tensions inherent in competi tion. While the goal was “friendly strife,” each contest aimed a victory; winning was joyous while defeat was bitter. In cities that were diverse in religion, nationality, and economic class, inter-club rivalries inevitably involved personal, social, and athletic conflicts. (15)
As the culture of New York was responding to urbanization, so too was the outlook on sports. In Our Game, author Charles Alexan- der quoted Melvin Adelman: “Baseball fulfilled the sporting universe’s requirements created by the changing social and urban environment in the antebellum period.” (16)