Abner Doubleday: Fort Sumter's First Shot, Gettysburg and the Baseball Myth

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Abner Doubleday was born in Ballston Spa, New York, in 1819 into a family of soldiers: both grandfathers fought in the Revolution and his father in the War of 1812. He worked two years as a surveyor and civil engineer before graduating from West Point in 1842. In April 1861, as second in command to Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter, he aimed the first Union return shot of the Civil War at the Confederate battery on Cummings Point. He went on to steady his division at Brawner's Farm when Rufus King suffered a seizure, and at Antietam he was thrown from his horse by a shell and kept directing the fight. His staff called him 48 Hours for his deliberate style.

On July 1, 1863, after John Reynolds was killed, Doubleday commanded the I Corps' 9,500 men for five hours against more than 16,000 Confederates at Gettysburg, buying time to secure Cemetery Hill. George Meade replaced him with John Newton after Oliver Howard falsely blamed the I Corps for the collapse. Doubleday later patented a San Francisco cable car system, commanded the 24th U.S. Infantry in Texas, and led the American Theosophical Society. In 1908 the Mills Commission declared he had invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839.

The Fort Sumter storm flag arranged its stars in a diamond.
Seven attacking Confederate brigades lost between 35 and 50 percent of their men on July 1.
Doubleday was wounded in the neck on July 2 and later testified against Meade before Congress.
In 1839 he was a plebe at West Point, and his diaries, letters and memoirs never mention baseball.
The commission relied on Abner Graves, who later killed his wife and was committed to an asylum.

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