Abner & Me (12 page)

“But Joey, it would be so
simple
,” Mom said. “All we have to do is get to the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas, Texas, on November 22nd, 1963. It won't be like the Lincoln thing at
all
. There were plenty of photos taken that day. Please?”

“No!” I said. “And that's final!”

Everything in this book is true, except for the stuff I made up. It's only fair to tell you which is which.

Abner Doubleday was a real person. He was born in 1819 and grew up in Cooperstown, New York, which is the main reason why the Baseball Hall of Fame is located there. While many people think of him as the inventor of baseball, historians agree it is a myth.

But Doubleday
was
an American hero. He graduated from West Point in 1842 and quickly advanced through the ranks of the United States Army. He aimed the first Union shot at Fort Sumter, which started the Civil War. He led troops in the battles of Antietam, South Mountain, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and, of course, Gettysburg.

At Gettysburg, Doubleday took command of First Corps after General John Reynolds was killed on the first day of fighting. But that night Doubleday was replaced when it was reported that
his division ran from the battlefield at the first contact with Confederate forces. Even though it wasn't true, he was demoted and ordered back to Washington.

Humiliated, Doubleday said he would leave the army if he was not reinstated. He wasn't, so he did. He took a low-level desk job working for the government in Washington. That's where he was when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Doubleday was
not
at Ford's Theatre on the night of Lincoln's assassination. I made up that part. But all other facts about the assassination are accurate.

Doubleday died from Bright's disease at age seventy-four on January 26, 1893, at his home in Mendham, New Jersey. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. But, believe it or not, a fragment of skin from his thigh is on display at The Baseball Reliquary in Monrovia, California, a very unusual museum! He and his wife, Mary, had no children.

Abner Doubleday wrote three books about his life, as well as a guidebook to Gettysburg. None of them mentioned baseball, and Doubleday never claimed to have invented the game. Stephen Jay Gould, the famous scientist and baseball fan, once wrote, “Abner Doubleday didn't know a baseball from a kumquat.”

But a decade or so after Doubleday died, a committee was formed to determine who invented baseball. A man from Cooperstown, New York, named
Abner Graves claimed that one day in 1839 his boyhood friend Abner Doubleday sketched out the game in the dirt with a stick. The committee liked the idea that an American hero had created “the national pastime,” and the Doubleday myth was born.

As it turned out, Abner Doubleday wasn't even
in
Cooperstown in 1839. Abner Graves, the man who claimed Doubleday invented the game, eventually went insane. He murdered his wife, Minnie, and ended his life in a Colorado institution for the criminally insane.

But the Baseball Hall of Fame has exhibited a small display case with a battered old ball inside identified as the Abner Doubleday Baseball. After an explanation of the Doubleday story, the caption on the wall read, “In the hearts of those who love baseball, he is remembered as the lad in the pasture where the game was invented. Only cynics would need to know more.”

Nobody really knows who invented baseball. Most likely, it evolved from other ball and bat games that had been played for hundreds of years.

 

The Battle of Gettysburg and the scenes of the Civil War were described in this book as accurately as possible. In three days of fighting, the North and South combined lost more than 50,000 men (plus 5,000 horses and mules).

A newspaper report from the
New-York Tribune
on the Battle of Gettysburg

Baseball during the Civil War

The day after the Union Army chased Robert E. Lee and his men out of Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant beat the Confederates at Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Civil War had reached its turning point. Lee's army was staggered, the Confederacy was divided, and the Mississippi River was opened up. Yet they would hold on for two more years before Lee surrendered.

Four months after the Battle of Gettysburg, President Lincoln went to the battlefield. He delivered his famous Gettysburg Address, dedicating a national soldiers' cemetery at the north end of Cemetery Ridge.

When the Civil War finally ended, more than 600,000 Americans had died. That is more than the combined totals of deaths in all our other wars.

A great many of those Americans were boys. Although Willie, Little John, Alexander, Rufus, and Joshua were fictional characters, as many as 420,000 men under the age of eighteen served. In fact, more than 100,000 Union soldiers were younger than fifteen years old.

There is no evidence that any baseball was played during the three-day Battle of Gettysburg. I made that up. But baseball
was
played behind the lines at many Civil War battlefields. In fact, the war played a large role in spreading the new game across the country. There are even stories of games that were played between Union and Confederate soldiers.

Frederick Fairfax, a soldier in the 5th Ohio infantry, wrote this in a letter home dated April 3, 1862:

The gory scene with Stosh and his mother in the hospital tent pretty much told it like it was. Seventy-five percent of all operations performed by Civil War doctors were amputations.

Joe Stoshack, his mother, his father, and Flip Valentini are fictional characters. Time travel does not exist.

At least not yet.

The Civil War was one of the most important and fascinating parts of American history. If you'd like to read other stories about it, I recommend:

Banks, Sara Harrell.
Abraham's Battle: A Novel of Gettysburg
. New York: Atheneum Books, 1999.

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell.
No Man's Land: A Young Soldier's Story
. New York: Blue Sky Press, 1999.

Crisp, Marty.
Private Captain: A Story of Gettysburg
. New York: Philomel Books, 2001.

Denenberg, Barry.
When Will This Cruel War Be Over?: The Civil War Diary of Emma Simpson New York: Scholastic, 1996.
.

Ernst, Kathleen.
Retreat from Gettysburg.
Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Books, 2000.

Gauch, Patricia Lee.
Thunder at Gettysburg
. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975.

Hunt, Irene.
Across Five Aprils
. Chicago: Follett, 1964.

Murphy, Jim.
The Journal of James Edmond Pease: A Civil War Union Soldier
. New York: Scholastic, 1998.

Osborne, Mary Pope.
My Brother's Keeper: Virginia's Diary
. New York: Scholastic, 2000.

Paulsen, Gary.
Soldier's Heart: A Novel of the Civil War
. New York: Delacorte, 1998.

Wisler, G. Clifton.
The Drummer Boy of Vicksburg
. New York: Lodestar Books, 1997.

This author would like to acknowledge the following for use of photographs: National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY: 30. Library of Congress: 35, 53, 57, 131, 136, 162.