Baseball in Blue and Gray: the National Pastime during the Civil War.

Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime during the Civil War. By George B. Kirsch. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, c. 2003. Pp. xviii, 145. $19.95, ISBN 0-691-05733-8.)

Sport historians have long debated the impact of the Civil War on the game of baseball. The interpretation stated most often is that the war temporarily stunted the growth of baseball but that in the long term the conflict contributed to the growth and popularity of the game that would become the national pastime. George B. Kirsch, expanding on his previous research on early American team sports, carefully and judiciously analyzes the impact of the Civil War on baseball beginning with the immediate prewar years and concluding in the late 1860s.

Kirsch begins by reviewing the Doubleday-Cooperstown myth, in which postwar baseball boosters, most notably Albert G. Spalding, attempted to attribute the founding of the modern game to Union general Abner Doubleday. One of Kirsch's main themes in the book is that the growth of baseball was intricately tied to the intense nationalism of the period before, during, and after the Civil War. Kirsch then focuses on the rise of baseball in the prewar years and the eventual ascendancy of the New York game over various other styles of play most often designated as town ball. For those unfamiliar with the competing varieties of baseball at the time, Kirsch provides a succinct summary of the different games, their rules, and why the New York game became the most popular type of baseball.

The heart of the book deals with how the war impacted baseball on the battlefront and the home front. Kirsch cites numerous accounts of soldiers in both armies playing baseball between battles and also in prison camps. He is cautious, however, in attributing too much significance to these games and the eventual expansion of baseball. Because of the lack of adequate equipment, among other factors, Kirsch doubts that baseball was the most popular leisure activity among soldiers. On the home front, however, Kirsch notes that after a two-year period during which baseball languished around the country, the game made a surprising comeback in the North, especially in the larger cities. He found no similar resurgence of baseball in the South. Kirsch attributes this vitality of baseball in areas of the North in part to wartime prosperity but mostly to baseball's link with intense competition and nationalism.

Kirsch also emphasizes the themes of competition and nationalism with regard to baseball in the postwar years. He views the trends toward more championship contests, commercialism, and professionalism to be partly a legacy of the war. Baseball, Kirsch shows, also provided a bridge between the North and South that promoted some healing and unity between the sections. Excluded from this bridge, however, were thousands of African Americans who played the game in the postwar years on segregated teams. There is not much to dislike about Kirsch's careful study. The lack of endnotes to expedite further study is disappointing, as is the rather meager commentary on and attention to how the war impacted the Confederate states in terms of sport. All in all, however, Kirsch has made a valuable contribution for those interested in sports and in our nation's bloodiest war by examining how the Civil War impacted baseball.

JOHN M. CARROLL 

Lamar University