In one of our early weekly newsletters we began a conversation about baseball during the War Between the States. Early forms of baseball had already become High Society's pastime years before the first shots of The War were fired at Fort Sumter, but it was the mass participation of everyday soldiers that helped spread the game's popularity across the nation. 

During the War Between the States, countless baseball games were organized in Army Camps and prisons on both sides of the Mason Dixon Line. Very little documentation exists on these games and most information has been derived from letters written by both officers and enlisted men to their families on the home front. 

For the hundreds of pictures taken during The War there is only one photo in the National Archives that clearly captured a baseball game underway. Several newspaper artists also depicted primitive ballgames and other forms of recreation devised to help boost troop morale and maintain physical fitness. Regardless of the lack of "media coverage", military historians have proved that baseball was a common ground in a country divided, and helped both Union and Confederate soldiers temporarily escape the horror of war. 

Some soldiers, both Northern and Southern, actually took baseball equipment to war with them. When proper equipment was not available the soldiers often improvised with fence posts, barrel staves or tree branches for bats & yarn or rag-wrapped walnuts or lumps of cork for balls.

In 1863 the 24th Alabama records playing daily baseball games while awaiting the advancing Federal Army led by General William Tecumseh Sherman. 

In 1864, as the war was winding down, POW's from the 11th Mississippi played a game against their guards at the Union Prison Camp in Sandusky, Ohio. They played 9 innings and beat their captors 19-11.  

On the same day Yankee POW's played their guards at the Confederate Prison Camp in Salisbury, North Carolina. The Yankees won.   

Following Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, soldiers from both sides played a series of baseball games. Was the first "World Series," or at least the first national championship series, a contest between The Army of the Potomac "Invaders" and The Army of Northern Virginia "Defenders"? The "Invaders" won the war. But the "Defenders" went home with baseball's first pennant.