Abner Doubleday

Abner Doubleday (1819-1893) was a soldier of the United States Army for more than thirty years, achieving the rank of major general of volunteers and brevet colonel of the Regular Army. He saw service in the Mexican War and in the American Civil War.

He was stationed at Fort Sumter, Charleston, South Carolina in the winter of 1860 and was part of the garrison which remained in the fort {federal property in US territorial waters) after the secessionist government of South Carolina demanded the fort's surrender. When South Carolina joined with six other secessionist states, its militia, under the Confederate flag, fired on Sumter.  Doubleday commanded the artillery batteries which responded to this bombardment and personally sighted and fired the very first shot fired in defense of the Union.  For this action he proclaimed himself the "Hero of Sumter."

In 1862 Doubleday, now a brigadier general of volunteers, commanded a brigade under Generals John Pope, George McClellan, and Ambrose Burnside during the disastrous campaigns of that year in northern Virginia and Maryland. In early 1863, Joseph Hooker's reorganization/purge of the Army of the Potomac saw Doubleday promoted to command a division, and he briefly commanded a corps at Gettysburg in the summer of that year. Despite a solid performance as a corps commander, he was demoted and replaced with a more junior officer by his superior, George Meade, with whom he had an antagonistic relationship. Doubleday served ably as a division commander for the final two days of the Battle of Gettysburg, but after the battle, when his request to be reinstated to corps command was denied, he transferred from the Army of the Potomac to the Department of Washington. (In Washington, DC he voluntarily testified before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War that Meade was unfit for independent command.) He would not see action again, though he did oversee preparations of some of the capital city's defenses in anticipation of Jubal Early's Valley campaigns in the summer of 1864.

After the war Doubleday held several regimental-level commands on the frontier and in Texas. He retired from the military in 1873 and may have practiced law. He was active in veterans' groups and the organization of the Gettysburg Battlefield National Park. He died of heart failure in 1893.

In 1905 National League President Abraham Mills chaired a committee assigned with determining the origins of the game of baseball. The committee's final report, issued on December 30, 1907, claimed that Abner Doubleday had created the rules of modern baseball as a significant modification of the game town ball in Cooperstown, NY in the summer of 1839. Mills's claims have since been discredited, not least because Doubleday moved away from Cooperstown a year earlier.

Abner Doubleday in "The Star and the Rockets"
As Joe Bauman's home run totals for the 1954 season approached 70, Bauman reflected that no ballplayer, on any team, in any league, had ever hit 70 home runs in a single year since Abner Doubleday created the game. Apparently Bauman was unaware of the evidence refuting the Mills Commission's findings.

Catehory:Republicans