Sports

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Sports

Sports—that is, athletic activities requiring skill or physical prowess and often competitive in nature, have existed since ancient times, when the Greeks and Romans held contests that evolved into the modern Olympic Games. In the nineteenth century, Americans enjoyed such sports as baseball, fishing, hunting, horse racing, rowing, skating, cockfighting, running, bowling, and boxing. Although newspapers did not report much about sports until Reconstruction, the articles that do exist from earlier years give glimpses into the history of American sports.

Game Hunting

Hunting and fishing can be considered sports only when they become optional instead of necessary to the subsistence of the hunter or fisherman. The methods employed to hunt game in the period of the Civil War were much different from the managed game hunts of later centuries. Newspaper articles dating from the first decades of the nineteenth century describe organized hunts involving dozens of shooters that took place over large tracts of land in New York and Connecticut. During the hunt the hunters would move systemically so that the game was shepherded into crossfire. Wholesale slaughter ensued. For example, during a two-day outing in North Carolina in 1820, sixty-one men killed 4,028 squirrels (July 14, 1820, n.p.)

The same technique was used with fishing, if this excerpt from the "Cape Cod" section of the Lowell (MA) Daily Citizen and News is any indication: "Four boats…succeeded in driving ashore at Brewster a large school of blackfish, which, with the aid of the people on shore, they slaughtered with spears, lances, scythes, and whatever came to hand" (August 23, 1859, n.p.) With this approach to hunting, it is easy to see why the passenger pigeon became extinct, and why the American bison was reduced to a few hundred animals by the mid-1880s.

Fighting Sports

Fighting sports consisted of cockfighting, dogfighting, and bare-knuckle boxing. In 1859 a Vermont Chronicle contributor noted an increase in cockfighting, in which two trained roosters fight until one kills the other. The writer remarked, "The effect of such exhibitions upon the populace is demoralizing in the extreme" (November 22, 1859, n.p.). Boxing, a sport that dates from antiquity, was not thought to be more uplifting, especially when it became the subject of gambling. In fact, in 1849 the State of Massachusetts banned prizefighting; yet bare-knuckle boxing (without gloves) continued on a limited basis along the East Coast. On October 20, 1858, a match held in Long Point, Ontario, between John Morrissey (1831–1878), "Old Smoke," and John Carmel Heenan (1833–1873), "the Benicia Boy," sparked the public's imagination and revived the sport, which eventually evolved into gloved boxing (Mee 2001, pp. 137–139).

Water Sports

Water sports of the time included swimming, rowing, and boating. The Eastern colleges such as Yale, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard fielded rowing teams in annual regattas. In the winter, inland bodies of water became the sites of skating parties. On natural lakes and ponds, and at artificial ponds in places such as the forty-acre rink in Central Park in New York City and Jamaica Pond in Boston, men, women, and children could take part in this "most delightful, agreeable and health-giving of winter recreations," to quote a New York Herald writer (December 11, 1859, p. 4).

Sleighing (or sledding) might take place wherever there was a snowy incline. The Scots brought curling (a game resembling bowling, played with granite stones that slid across a sheet of ice) with them when they immigrated.

Racing

People had long liked to gamble on a race, whether human or animal. Any harvest festival or other gathering—such as a Fourth of July picnic—might become the site of a horse race, though horses were usually reserved for more important work during the war years. Human track and field events took somewhat longer to become popular than the equine versions, yet by the late 1850s a Philadelphia Pedestrian Association had been formed to help its members become better athletes. Foot races were also one of the activities with which Union soldiers filled their idle hours (Cumming 1981, p. 49).

The civilian version of foot racing, which went dormant during the war years, resumed quickly after the cessation of hostilities. Distance races and challenges from across the nation appeared in the newspaper New York Clipper and were soon followed with competitions of jumping, sprinting, and throwing. Cumming describes the usual events of a typical athletic meeting in the mid-1860s as walking, running, leaping, taking a standing leap over a height, taking a standing leap over a width, a running leap over a height, a running leap over a width, the hop-step-and-jump, and the pole vault. It was not uncommon for such unusual types of races as sack races, or sprints run while carrying weights, to find their way into the competition as well (Cumming 1981, pp. 64–65).

Bowling

Bowling or similar games have existed for centuries. During the Middle Ages in Germany, bowling was an integral part of such gatherings as village dances and festivals. The French, English, and Spanish also played games that were forerunners of modern bowling. They were played outdoors or indoors; the number, shape, and configuration of pins varied. Although the British settlers first brought the game to the colonies, the German immigrants, who arrived in several waves in the mid-1800s, had the greatest impact on the popularity of the game in the United States (Weiskopf 1978, pp. 25–26). In 1854, according to one witness, "the only bowlers were Germans and the only alleys were the very crude ones at the picnic groves and other German resorts" (Hemmer & Kenna 1904, p. 30).

Yet the popularity of bowling was not dimmed by its early crude surroundings. Conversely, it continued to grow. The largest German population was located in New York City, where the first indoor bowling alley was opened in Manhattan in 1840. Like racing and boxing, bowling later suffered from the gambling and cheating that disreputable people brought to it and was banned in some areas. After the Civil War, however, bowling again grew in popularity.

America's National Pastime

Baseball beat out other stick-and-ball games (rounders, cricket, stickball) to become the premier organized American team sport. Although some variation of baseball had existed since the early 1800s, it was not until 1842 that the first club was founded—the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club—and until 1845 that the rules of the game were first recorded.

Prior to the Civil War, most organized teams were located in cities, with the largest number located in the New York City area, the Hudson River valley, central and upstate New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Yet such Midwestern and Western cities as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul, San Francisco, and Sacramento also hosted organized teams (Kirsch 2003, p. 20). "[Baseball] has become almost universal, every State in the Union having its clubs, and the rules of the game are laid down by a regular convention," wrote a New York Herald reporter in September of 1859. "The growth and popularity which this fine game has attained within a few years is amazing. Young men of all classes and ages indulge in it, and the matches are witnessed by immense crowds of spectators" (Kirsch 2003, p. 4).

Shortly before the outbreak of the war, newspapers began covering baseball and cricket games, as is evident in this headline from the New York Times, "The New and Philadelphia Cricket Match" (July 6, 1860). "Next to swimming, which is the finest exercise in the world," wrote a New York Herald writer, "we think base ball is the best exercise" (July 27, 1859, p. 4). Though the press coverage helped popularize the game further, it still developed more slowly in the antebellum South, where New Orleans, Louisville, St. Louis, and Houston had teams (Kirsch 2003, p. 25).

Yet one of the most significant events affecting the popularization of baseball was the gathering together of large groups of men who were idle a portion of each day. Whether in the military or in prison camps, Civil War soldiers played baseball (Kirsch 2003, p. 135). Although the growth in popularity of baseball slowed during the war, the conflict contributed to the eventual diffusion of the sport. After the war, newspapers began regular coverage of sports, creating the first sports columns (p. xiv).