From the very beginning, the American Civil War has been closely tied to the origins of baseball. Abner Doubleday, the sport’s mythical inventor, was a Union general in the war who fought at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, and throughout the war, soldiers on both sides played the game when not marching or in battle to pass the time. As Steve Light writes, “Baseball came of age during [the] American Civil War.”
The evolution of town ball into the game of baseball began in Northern cities during the antebellum period, most notably in New York and Massachusetts.