The Baseball Found on One of America’s Bloodiest Battlefields

On this episode of Our American Stories, long before baseball became America’s pastime, soldiers carried the game with them into war. On the battlefield of Battle of Shiloh, one of the bloodiest clashes of the American Civil War, a forgotten baseball was discovered years later buried amid the history of combat and sacrifice.

Our American Stories regular contributor Ashley Hlebinsky shares the remarkable story of the Civil War-era baseball found at Shiloh and what it reveals about the soldiers who fought, the game they loved, and the unexpected ways Americans carried pieces of home onto the battlefield

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people coming to you from the city where the West begins.
Fort Worth, Texas. Baseball evolved from batan ballgames brought to
the New Country during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
From the late eighteen fifties throughout the eighteen sixties, baseball

(00:33):
exploded in popularity and became, as Walt Whitman famously said,
our game America's game with a snap, go fling of
the American atmosphere. Here to tell another story is Ashley Libinski.
Take it away, Ashley.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
When you look back in time, there are some things
that you expect to see on a battlefield and there
are some things you don't. So obviously you will see
cannonballs and other types of ammunition and weapons, and especially
during the American Civil War, you find letters and photographs.

(01:12):
Photography was an incredibly important part of documenting the war,
and you would find things like pieces of uniform and
other items from camps.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
But something you may not think about would be a baseball.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
But on the fields of the Battle of Shiloh, which
was one of the bloodiest early clashes of the American
Civil War.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
That's exactly what.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Was found, A small hand stitch ball that was worn, weathered,
and carried a simple inscription picked up on the Battle
of Shiloh before the war to give you some context baseball,
which was often written in two words. So base spaceball
was already being played, but it wasn't yet the national

(01:59):
pastime that we think about today.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
It was something that was regional.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
It was really popular in urban environments, and it was fragmented,
so different cities played by different rules. York had their version,
Massachusetts had another. There was no universal game. It was
just kind of a shared idea.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
But then came the Civil War, and you have to
picture this.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
You've got young men from across the country who are
brought together into these camps Union and Confederate armies, and
they brought a piece of themselves with them, and one
of those things were games. So in camp, between drills
they would play baseball, and sometimes they say even within
earshot of the front lines. They played when they had

(02:46):
the chance. So something that started as recreation became something
way more. It was almost a common language. Men who
had never met, who spoke with different accents, came from
different and states, and in some cases lived entirely different lives,
could suddenly share something so simple.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
They shared a bat, a ball, and a set of
rules that.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Were negotiated in real time. This wasn't the baseball though,
that we know today. The ball was a lot softer.
It was called a lemon peel, which was handstitched and uneven.

Speaker 3 (03:24):
The bat was called a willow, and there were no gloves.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Fielders caught line drives with their bare hands, and the
pitcher didn't throw overhand. He would deliver the ball underhand,
much more like a toss or something in softball than
a pitch, and the language that they used was different too,
So the batter was a striker, and ultimately the game
itself was less rigid, more fluid, and was shaped by

(03:51):
whoever showed up that day. And there are of course
a lot of stories that go along with them. There
are stories of Union soldiers playing ball in camp while
better prisoners watched, But there are also stories of guards
and prisoners joining in the same game, and there are
a few they're rare that claim opposing sites sometimes would
informally interact through shared recreation, because even in war, there

(04:16):
were moments they were brief, fragile moments when men stepped
out of the conflict. Actually, it was incredibly common because
they were living their lives as they moved, and so
in this instance they decided to pick up a ball
instead of a musket. It's important to understand the context, though,

(04:37):
of this battle, and that's at Shiloh in April of
eighteen sixty two, more than twenty thousand men were killed,
wounded or missing in just two days. This was violence
on a scale Americans had never really seen before. And
yet amidst that violence, there was a moment of levity.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
There was a baseball there.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
That recovered ball, the one that was inscribed from the
battlefield was reportedly picked up by an African American orderly,
a man who was moving through the.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
Aftermath of destruction.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
So it was a small object, but it carried a
lot of weight because it tells us something essential that
even in the darkest moments of the war, soldiers carried
pieces of their.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Normal life with them.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
When the war ended in eighteen sixty five, the soldiers
who survived went home and they brought that game with them.
Men who had learned baseball in the camp introduced it
to their towns and communities, and this is when rules
began to standardize. Clubs formed, and competitions grew, and within
a generation baseball was no longer regional.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
It was national.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Today at Shiloh National Military Park that history is still alive,
not just in monuments or markers, but in motion. Teams
gather on those same grounds to play vintage baseball.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
They wear the period uniforms, they.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Follow the flexible rules, They catch their ball with bare hands,
and they speak the language of the eighteen sixties, of strikers.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
And willows and gentlemen's play.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
And this is really neat because it gives visitors a
chance to watch history unfold, but not as a battle reenactment,
which is so common for a site like that, but
in something quieter, a game. Because baseball during the Civil
War wasn't just a pastime. It seemed a bridge between

(06:42):
regions and people, kind of this intermediary between war and peace,
and it reminds us that history isn't only found in
moments of conflict, rather also in the spaces between them.
On the fields of Shiloh, where thousands once fought and
fel you can still hear it if you listen closely.

(07:04):
Not cannon fire, not marching orders, but the crack of
a bat and the echo of a game that helped
bring a nation back together.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, and just a lovely story
by Ashley Lebinski, the story of Shiloh Battlefield and the
birth of modern baseball On Our American Story. This is
Lee Jabib, host of Our American Stories. Every day on
this show, we tell stories of history, faith, business, love, loss,

(07:39):
and your stories. Send us your story small or large
to out email oas at Ouramerican Stories dot com. That's
oas at Ouramerican Stories dot com. We'd love to hear
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