Yankee Pioneers, Merchants, and Missionaries: Cultural Diffusion and the Spread of Baseball
by Jeffrey Kittel
The playing of ball games has been a recorded part of the human social and cultural system since the beginning of Western Civilization and specific forms of these games, which would eventually evolve into the American game of baseball, developed within European culture during the medieval period. As variants of these games evolved in complexity over time, they were enjoyed by people of both sexes and all classes. When European culture began to spread to North America at the end of the 15th century, ball games arrived in the New World along with European colonists.
There is documented evidence of ball-playing at some of the earliest, permanent European settlements in North America. At Jamestown, there is a reference to a bat and ball game being played in 1609. In 1621, there is a reference to stool-ball being played at Plymouth Colony. There is also evidence of ball-playing in the New Netherlands Colony as early as 1656. Based on these records, it appears that, as the Europeans moved to North America, they brought with them a ball-playing culture that had been developing and evolving in Europe over the course of the previous few centuries. Certainly, this appears evident in the English and Dutch colonies that were established along the eastern North American seaboard, although there is also some evidence to suggest that ball games were being played in French-settled areas of the Illinois Country in the 18th century. Based upon these references as well as numerous 18th century references to ball-playing in the original American colonies and states, it is apparent that an active ball-playing culture existed in colonial America.
The spread of ball-playing culture from Europe to North America in the 17th century is an example of cultural diffusion, whereby the culture of a given society spreads to that of another society or geographical area. Prior to the arrival of European settlers in North America, proto-baseball games were unknown to the area. Once these settlers established permanent residence in a given North American area, these proto-baseball games were played. These Europeans brought their ball-playing culture with them to the New World and established it in a region where it had been previously unknown. It should be noted that the Native population of North America had their own rich, ball-playing culture and these games were amply noted by early French pioneers. However, these Native games do not appear to have had any influence upon the evolution or spread of American baseball and their failure to do so illustrates an evolutionary competition between cultures that fuels diffusion.
In writing about the diffusion of sports from one nation to another, Allen Guttmann wrote that the key factor is “the relative political, economic, military, and cultural power of the nations involved.”1 This certainly applied to the cultural competition between the native North American groups and the European settlers and explains why European, rather than native, bat and ball games dominate the cultural landscape of the United States. Guttmann also noted that this diffusion model is much more evident from nation to nation and it can be difficult to trace within a singular society or nation. But given the way in which Anglo-Americans settled the Trans-Appalachian frontier in the 18th and 19th century, it is possible to trace the diffusion of European ball-playing culture across North America.
It seems almost self-evident to state that, prior to the Anglo-American settlement of the Trans-Appalachian frontier, there was no culture of the playing of proto-baseball games in the area but it is an important fact. While there were French settlements in Louisiana prior to the arrival of the Anglo-Americans and there is evidence of ball-playing in St. Louis in the late 18th century, there is no evidence to suggest that, in America, the French culture of ball-playing had any influence upon the evolution of American baseball. French ball-playing, like the culture of Native ball-playing, appears to have played no role in the spread of proto-baseball games or in its evolution into its modern forms. The spread of ball-playing culture and of proto-baseball games was almost entirely a function of the spread of Anglo-Americans across North America. As the Anglo-Americans flooded across the Appalachians and into the heartland of North America, they took their ball-playing culture with them.
The earliest known reference to ball-playing west of the Appalachians comes from a 1795 entry in the diary of John Sevier, who a year later would be elected the first governor of Tennessee. Sevier noted that, on August 22, 1795, he, his son and two other gentlemen “played at ball” at his estate near Knoxville.2 This is significant because the Trans-Appalachian areas of Kentucky and Tennessee were the first part of the Trans-Appalachian frontier to be settled by Anglo-Americans, beginning in the late 1770s and 1780s. Less than a generation after the beginning of the settlement of the Trans-Appalachian west, we see evidence of the diffusion of the European ball-playing culture into the region. While we don’t know specifically what kind of game they were playing in Knoxville in 1795, the evidence suggests that it was a form of cat and therefore a game that had developed out of the Anglo-American tradition of ball-playing.
As the Anglo-Americans pushed westward, we see the same pattern of a ball-playing culture being introduced into a region soon after its settlement. There is ample evidence of this in Illinois. Exempting the earlier French settlements, Illinois was settled in two waves in the first three decades of the 19th century. The first decade of the 19th century saw the settlement of the southern river valleys by peoples from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, in a continuation of the original Trans-Appalachian migration. After 1818, there was a second wave of settlement in the central river valleys that saw peoples from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana enter the region. Almost immediately after the arrival of the Anglo-Americans, we find references to ball-playing in Illinois.
The earliest reference to ball-playing in Illinois comes from an anti-gaming law that was established in the Illinois territory in 1809, stating that gambling on various games, including “cards, dice, tables, tennis, bowles or any other game or games whatsoever…” was outlawed.3 While not specifically mentioning any proto-baseball games, this law does suggest the idea that a ball-playing culture (and gambling upon it) existed in the earliest Anglo-American settlements in Illinois. John Woods, a farmer who settled in southern Illinois in the second decade of the 19th century, supplied more specific evidence of the playing of bat and ball games in the area. In his memoirs, Woods noted that both cricket and trap-ball were being played in southern Illinois in 1818 and 1819.4 In later histories and memoirs, references to town-ball and cat appear that suggest these proto-baseball games were being played in southern Illinois beginning in the 1820s.
This same pattern of a ball-playing culture spreading with Anglo-American settlement can be found in central Illinois, which was settled a generation after the southern Illinois region. While there are few contemporary references to ball-playing in central Illinois in the first half of the 19th century, secondary sources are full of interviews with people who had lived in the area when it was originally settled by Anglo-Americans and their testimony suggests that an active ball-playing community existed in the region from the beginning of the settlement period. As Anglo-Americans moved into central Illinois, following the Illinois River northeast into the heart of the state, they brought their ball-games with them. In a series of county histories that were written in the 1870s, people who lived in central Illinois in the 1820s and 1830s mentioned a variety of ballgames that were played, including bullpen, bandy, cricket, cat, long town, corner-ball, over-ball and town-ball. The game mentioned most frequently in these histories was town-ball, which suggests that this was what the central Illinoisans called their local, proto-baseball variant, and there are contemporary sources from the 1860s that mention town-ball, by name, being played in the area.
While a comprehensive study correlating settlement patterns in the Trans-Appalachian west with the spread of proto-baseball games has not been completed, there is ample evidence to support the idea that, as the Anglo-Americans moved west into Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, they brought their ballgames with them and established a ball-playing culture in these areas. The evidence suggests that proto-baseball games spread across the Trans-Appalachian frontier through cultural diffusion, as the Anglo-Americans seized control of the American west. Prior to the codification of the New York game of baseball, a baseball playing culture already existed throughout most of the United States and the people of the Trans-Appalachian west were playing proto-baseball games similar to the ones that were being played in the Northeast and that would evolve, in New York, into the modern game of baseball.
The fact that a pre-existing baseball-playing culture existed in the United States prior to the spread of the New York game is significant for two reasons. First, the fact that this culture existed throughout the country made it easier for the New York game to spread. Most towns and cities had ball players, ball clubs, ball grounds and the necessary equipment to play the game. The idea of playing baseball, in whatever variant, was already culturally ingrained in these young American communities and a part of the social fabric. As the New York game spread across the nation in the 1850s, it found a solid foundation that had been laid by the spread of Anglo-American ball-playing culture in the first half of the 19th century. The New York game was in no way alien to the people of the American West because they had their own baseball variant that emanated from the same cultural source and, therefore, it was a simple step to transition from the local baseball variant to the New York variant.
The second reason that a pre-existing American baseball-playing culture is significant is because the local traditions of ball-playing, that in some places in the Trans-Appalachian west were three generations old, were supplanted by the New York game. While a pre-existing ball-playing culture helped facilitate the spread of the New York game, it was also something that the new game had to overcome. There is nothing in the history of baseball to suggest that the successful spread of the New York game was pre-determined. History did not have to unfold the way that it did; the New York game did not have to capture the imagination of the public, become as popular as it did and spread across the country. Local areas could have continued to play their local baseball variants, clinging to their own cultural traditions. There are plenty of references to local baseball variants being played through the 1860s. But the New York game did, in the end, supplant the local baseball variants to the extent that those games died and the New York game, evolved, is as popular as it ever was.
The cultural diffusion model suggests why this is so. If ball-playing, generally, spread across the United States in the first half of the 19th century as a result of the diffusion of Anglo-American culture, there is evidence supporting the idea that the New York game spread in the same way – that a dominant New York/Yankee culture spread the game across the United States. The Yankee culture of the Northeastern United States, centered in New York, dominated the nation economically to such an extent that their specific baseball variant not only spread across the nation but drove out the local variants. As Yankee culture spread across the United States in the antebellum era, the New York game spread with it.
This process of the diffusion of Yankee culture was not accidental and there were groups in the Northeast that actively sought to spread their cultural values to what they saw as the untamed wilderness of the American west. There were specific efforts, specifically among the religious communities, to transplant traditional Eastern institutions in the West because of the fear that social and moral disorder would result without them. Two examples of this is the founding of Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois and Washington University in St. Louis. Illinois College was founded in 1829 by a group of Yale graduates and Washington University was founded in 1853 by a graduate of Harvard divinity school. The Yale graduates who founded Illinois College moved from the Northeast to central Illinois and believed that what they were doing was missionary work, bringing religious, cultural and educational institutions to the American frontier. William Greenleaf Elliot, the Harvard divinity school graduate who helped found Washington University, was born in Massachusetts and established the first Unitarian church west of the Mississippi. One of the more prominent leaders in St. Louis, Elliot also helped establish the St. Louis Art Museum, another example of Eastern cultural institutions being transplanted to the west. Interestingly, several of Elliot’s students from Washington University, including members of his family, started one of the first baseball clubs in St. Louis in 1860. These transplanted Yankees, like Elliot and Jacksonville’s Yale Band, took it upon themselves to bring Yankee culture to the rest of the United States, establishing institutions such as schools, churches, libraries and museums that would be, in their eyes, a civilizing influence on the wild, savage and untamed west. They saw an unorganized civilization in the west that lacked the cultural institutions needed to establish a stable community and saw an opportunity to create a shining city on a hill, organized around their culture and values.5
While, within the Yankee religious community, there was a conscious, organized effort to transmit Yankee culture to the West, the economic influence that New England, in general, and New York, specifically, exerted upon Western cities played a larger role in the diffusion of Yankee culture.6 The new towns of the Trans-Appalachian west lacked the capital and the financial institutions to sustain economic growth in their communities. They lacked banks and currency and a political system that could or was willing to establish either. A local St. Louis business in 1840, for example, lacked the liquidity to purchase stock or expand its operations and they did not have access to credit markets that could alleviate their liquidity problem. At the same time, New England had recovered strongly from the depressed economic conditions of the 1830s and, by the 1840s, the region had a surplus of capital and stock that the region could not absorb and Yankee businessmen needed an outside market where they could invest this surplus. The new towns of the Trans-Appalachian west provided that outlet. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Yankee surplus capital flooded into the Trans-Appalachian west. Yankee capital and, more specifically, New York money helped build towns like Cincinnati, Mobile, New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago into booming cities. More importantly, with the money came the people. The population of places like St. Louis and Chicago double and doubled again within a decade and a large number of the people flooding into these new western boomtowns were New York merchants, who not only brought their money with them but also brought their culture.
One of the more interesting things about these New Yorkers who flooded into the western boomtowns in the 1840s and 1850s is their demographic makeup. For the most part these were young, unmarried men in their twenties. They were the sons of successful merchant families who often were sent west by their family to establish a business outpost in the west or, lacking the opportunity for advancement in the east, sought new opportunities in the booming western cities. They did not, for the most part, put down roots in the west. They did not marry or purchase property. If economically successful, they took their profits, returned home and invested in new businesses in the east. If unsuccessful, they ran out of capital and returned home a failure. But rarely did they stay long enough to become absorbed by the local culture, remaining, in words, thoughts and deeds, a Yankee.
However, while for the most part they did not integrate themselves into the local, western community, they had a significant impact on the culture of these western boomtowns. The capital they brought with them created some of the largest and most stable businesses in the west and their ties to eastern markets helped integrate the western towns into a credit and distribution system that allowed for economic expansion. These transplanted New Yorkers helped establish institutions such as hospitals, fire departments, schools, churches, museums and cultural organizations and the constant influx of New Yorkers into these cities over the course of twenty years helped transplant Yankee culture in the American west. The business and cultural elite of the western cities, who had more interaction with the New Yorkers than the rest of the population, aped their taste in fashion and the arts, supported the attempts to establish Yankee institutions and sent their children east to be educated.
The influence that New Yorkers had on western cities in the antebellum era was significant as far as the spread of New York game of baseball is concerned. At the same time as the New York game developed, was codified and became popular, young New York men were traveling around the United States and living, for short periods of time, in western cities, establishing businesses and influencing the local culture. The people most likely to be familiar with the New York game were, demographically, the ones most likely to move to Cincinnati or St. Louis or Chicago for a couple of years in the 1850s, taking their knowledge and love of the game with them. They influenced locals to read New York papers, which likely had information about the game in it, and to send their children to eastern colleges, where the game was already being played. Locals, under the sway of a Yankee culture which dominated them economically, may have been predisposed to replace their local baseball variants with the New York game. Playing the New York game in the 1850s could have been seen as culturally fashionable in the same way it was culturally fashionable to send your son to an eastern college or help establish a library.
Places like St. Louis and Chicago were built by the influx of Yankee money in the antebellum era and the impact of Yankee culture is evident when you look at the spread of the New York game to those two cities. While St. Louis was the first large beneficiary of Yankee investment in the West, by the 1850s it had, to a certain extent and for a variety of reasons, fallen out of favor with the New York business community, who turned their attention to Chicago. The young New York men who would have moved to St. Louis and started businesses instead were moving to Chicago. Just as the first explosion of baseball’s popularity struck in New York, the young men most likely to be familiar with the game where more likely to move to Chicago than to St. Louis. As a result, the New York game appeared in Chicago first. The first baseball game in Chicago, played by the rules of the National Association, occurred in 1858 and it’s possible that the New York game was played in the city as early as 1856.
While New York investment in St. Louis declined in the 1850s and regional tensions were beginning to have a profound impact on the city’s cultural tendencies, the influence of Yankee culture in antebellum St. Louis can be seen in how the New York game came to the city. In 1859, a young engineer and baseball player from Brooklyn by the name of Merritt Griswold moved to St. Louis seeking to establish himself in business. He got a job at the newly founded Missouri Glass Company and, that summer, started the Cyclone Base Ball Club, the first baseball club in St. Louis to play under the New York rules. The co-founder of the Cyclone Club was local St. Louisan Edward Bredell, Jr. Bredell’s father was one of the wealthier men in St. Louis and had built the Missouri Glass Company for his son, who was named the company’s business manager. Bredell, Sr., in 1855, had sent his young son to be educated in the east, at Brown University, which had clubs playing the New York game by 1857. It is rather likely that Bredell had seen the game played at Brown and it is possible that he played the game while at school. So in St. Louis, in 1859, a transplanted New Yorker brought his knowledge of the game to the city and met a young man who had most likely learned the game while at college in the east. Together the two founded the first baseball club in St. Louis. Without the influence of Yankee culture on the city, it is unlikely that Griswold would have moved to St. Louis or that Bredell would have went east to attend college.7
In the end, there are no simple answers to the question of how the New York game spread across the United States in the later part of the 1850s and there is most likely no one reason why it happened. However, the evidence supports the idea that baseball spread as a result of cultural diffusion. There is ample evidence that shows proto-baseball games spreading across the Trans-Appalachian west in the first half of the 19th century by this process. Ball-playing was an important part of Anglo-American culture and wherever Anglo-Americans settled in the new west, there is evidence showing that ball games were being played. It was a highly mobile society and wherever the Anglo-Americans went, they brought some form of baseball with them. This model also appears to apply to the spread of the New York game. The economic influence of New York during the antebellum era and, by extension, the cultural influence of the city on the American west cannot be understated. In many ways, it can be argued that Yankee money built the American west and that New Yorkers, through their economic dominance, established Yankee colonies through out the west. Places like Chicago and St. Louis were, in the antebellum era, described as Yankee cities. New Yorkers, purposefully and not, transplanted their culture across the United States in the twenty years prior to the Civil War. And baseball was an important part of that culture. The Regulation game was born in New York. It grew there. It became popular there. And from there, it spread across the country. The influence of culture, and specifically that of Yankee/New York culture, helps explain how that spread happened.
1 Guttmann, Allen; Diffusion of Sports, Global; Berkshire Encyclopedia of World Sport (Christensen. Karen and David Levinson, editors); Great Barrington, MA; Berkshire Publishing Group and ABC-CLIO Inc; 1995. Accessed at http://www.berkshirepublishing.com/assets/pdf/SportsBytes/DiffusionOfSports_Global_Byte.pdf; p 2.
2 The Diary of John Sevier; Accessed at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Tennessee/_Texts/THM/5/3/Sevier_Journal/1795*.html.
3 Alvord, Clarence; Illinois in the Eighteenth Century: A Report on the Documents in Belleville, Ill., Illustrating the early history of the State; Illinois Historical Library, Volume 1, Number 1
4 Woods, John; Two years’ Residence in the Settlements on the English Prairie, in the Illinois Country; Longman, Hurst, Reessa, Orme, and Brown; London, 1822.
5 For more on diffusion efforts of Eastern missionaries see Don Harrison Doyle’s The Social Order of A Frontier Community.
6 For more on the economic impact of New York on Western cities, see Jeffrey Adler’s Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West.
7 For more on Griswold, Bredell and the founding of the Cyclone Base Ball Club, see Base Ball Pioneers, 1850-1871.
There is documented evidence of ball-playing at some of the earliest, permanent European settlements in North America. At Jamestown, there is a reference to a bat and ball game being played in 1609. In 1621, there is a reference to stool-ball being played at Plymouth Colony. There is also evidence of ball-playing in the New Netherlands Colony as early as 1656. Based on these records, it appears that, as the Europeans moved to North America, they brought with them a ball-playing culture that had been developing and evolving in Europe over the course of the previous few centuries. Certainly, this appears evident in the English and Dutch colonies that were established along the eastern North American seaboard, although there is also some evidence to suggest that ball games were being played in French-settled areas of the Illinois Country in the 18th century. Based upon these references as well as numerous 18th century references to ball-playing in the original American colonies and states, it is apparent that an active ball-playing culture existed in colonial America.
The spread of ball-playing culture from Europe to North America in the 17th century is an example of cultural diffusion, whereby the culture of a given society spreads to that of another society or geographical area. Prior to the arrival of European settlers in North America, proto-baseball games were unknown to the area. Once these settlers established permanent residence in a given North American area, these proto-baseball games were played. These Europeans brought their ball-playing culture with them to the New World and established it in a region where it had been previously unknown. It should be noted that the Native population of North America had their own rich, ball-playing culture and these games were amply noted by early French pioneers. However, these Native games do not appear to have had any influence upon the evolution or spread of American baseball and their failure to do so illustrates an evolutionary competition between cultures that fuels diffusion.
In writing about the diffusion of sports from one nation to another, Allen Guttmann wrote that the key factor is “the relative political, economic, military, and cultural power of the nations involved.”1 This certainly applied to the cultural competition between the native North American groups and the European settlers and explains why European, rather than native, bat and ball games dominate the cultural landscape of the United States. Guttmann also noted that this diffusion model is much more evident from nation to nation and it can be difficult to trace within a singular society or nation. But given the way in which Anglo-Americans settled the Trans-Appalachian frontier in the 18th and 19th century, it is possible to trace the diffusion of European ball-playing culture across North America.
It seems almost self-evident to state that, prior to the Anglo-American settlement of the Trans-Appalachian frontier, there was no culture of the playing of proto-baseball games in the area but it is an important fact. While there were French settlements in Louisiana prior to the arrival of the Anglo-Americans and there is evidence of ball-playing in St. Louis in the late 18th century, there is no evidence to suggest that, in America, the French culture of ball-playing had any influence upon the evolution of American baseball. French ball-playing, like the culture of Native ball-playing, appears to have played no role in the spread of proto-baseball games or in its evolution into its modern forms. The spread of ball-playing culture and of proto-baseball games was almost entirely a function of the spread of Anglo-Americans across North America. As the Anglo-Americans flooded across the Appalachians and into the heartland of North America, they took their ball-playing culture with them.
The earliest known reference to ball-playing west of the Appalachians comes from a 1795 entry in the diary of John Sevier, who a year later would be elected the first governor of Tennessee. Sevier noted that, on August 22, 1795, he, his son and two other gentlemen “played at ball” at his estate near Knoxville.2 This is significant because the Trans-Appalachian areas of Kentucky and Tennessee were the first part of the Trans-Appalachian frontier to be settled by Anglo-Americans, beginning in the late 1770s and 1780s. Less than a generation after the beginning of the settlement of the Trans-Appalachian west, we see evidence of the diffusion of the European ball-playing culture into the region. While we don’t know specifically what kind of game they were playing in Knoxville in 1795, the evidence suggests that it was a form of cat and therefore a game that had developed out of the Anglo-American tradition of ball-playing.
As the Anglo-Americans pushed westward, we see the same pattern of a ball-playing culture being introduced into a region soon after its settlement. There is ample evidence of this in Illinois. Exempting the earlier French settlements, Illinois was settled in two waves in the first three decades of the 19th century. The first decade of the 19th century saw the settlement of the southern river valleys by peoples from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, in a continuation of the original Trans-Appalachian migration. After 1818, there was a second wave of settlement in the central river valleys that saw peoples from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana enter the region. Almost immediately after the arrival of the Anglo-Americans, we find references to ball-playing in Illinois.
The earliest reference to ball-playing in Illinois comes from an anti-gaming law that was established in the Illinois territory in 1809, stating that gambling on various games, including “cards, dice, tables, tennis, bowles or any other game or games whatsoever…” was outlawed.3 While not specifically mentioning any proto-baseball games, this law does suggest the idea that a ball-playing culture (and gambling upon it) existed in the earliest Anglo-American settlements in Illinois. John Woods, a farmer who settled in southern Illinois in the second decade of the 19th century, supplied more specific evidence of the playing of bat and ball games in the area. In his memoirs, Woods noted that both cricket and trap-ball were being played in southern Illinois in 1818 and 1819.4 In later histories and memoirs, references to town-ball and cat appear that suggest these proto-baseball games were being played in southern Illinois beginning in the 1820s.
This same pattern of a ball-playing culture spreading with Anglo-American settlement can be found in central Illinois, which was settled a generation after the southern Illinois region. While there are few contemporary references to ball-playing in central Illinois in the first half of the 19th century, secondary sources are full of interviews with people who had lived in the area when it was originally settled by Anglo-Americans and their testimony suggests that an active ball-playing community existed in the region from the beginning of the settlement period. As Anglo-Americans moved into central Illinois, following the Illinois River northeast into the heart of the state, they brought their ball-games with them. In a series of county histories that were written in the 1870s, people who lived in central Illinois in the 1820s and 1830s mentioned a variety of ballgames that were played, including bullpen, bandy, cricket, cat, long town, corner-ball, over-ball and town-ball. The game mentioned most frequently in these histories was town-ball, which suggests that this was what the central Illinoisans called their local, proto-baseball variant, and there are contemporary sources from the 1860s that mention town-ball, by name, being played in the area.
While a comprehensive study correlating settlement patterns in the Trans-Appalachian west with the spread of proto-baseball games has not been completed, there is ample evidence to support the idea that, as the Anglo-Americans moved west into Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, they brought their ballgames with them and established a ball-playing culture in these areas. The evidence suggests that proto-baseball games spread across the Trans-Appalachian frontier through cultural diffusion, as the Anglo-Americans seized control of the American west. Prior to the codification of the New York game of baseball, a baseball playing culture already existed throughout most of the United States and the people of the Trans-Appalachian west were playing proto-baseball games similar to the ones that were being played in the Northeast and that would evolve, in New York, into the modern game of baseball.
The fact that a pre-existing baseball-playing culture existed in the United States prior to the spread of the New York game is significant for two reasons. First, the fact that this culture existed throughout the country made it easier for the New York game to spread. Most towns and cities had ball players, ball clubs, ball grounds and the necessary equipment to play the game. The idea of playing baseball, in whatever variant, was already culturally ingrained in these young American communities and a part of the social fabric. As the New York game spread across the nation in the 1850s, it found a solid foundation that had been laid by the spread of Anglo-American ball-playing culture in the first half of the 19th century. The New York game was in no way alien to the people of the American West because they had their own baseball variant that emanated from the same cultural source and, therefore, it was a simple step to transition from the local baseball variant to the New York variant.
The second reason that a pre-existing American baseball-playing culture is significant is because the local traditions of ball-playing, that in some places in the Trans-Appalachian west were three generations old, were supplanted by the New York game. While a pre-existing ball-playing culture helped facilitate the spread of the New York game, it was also something that the new game had to overcome. There is nothing in the history of baseball to suggest that the successful spread of the New York game was pre-determined. History did not have to unfold the way that it did; the New York game did not have to capture the imagination of the public, become as popular as it did and spread across the country. Local areas could have continued to play their local baseball variants, clinging to their own cultural traditions. There are plenty of references to local baseball variants being played through the 1860s. But the New York game did, in the end, supplant the local baseball variants to the extent that those games died and the New York game, evolved, is as popular as it ever was.
The cultural diffusion model suggests why this is so. If ball-playing, generally, spread across the United States in the first half of the 19th century as a result of the diffusion of Anglo-American culture, there is evidence supporting the idea that the New York game spread in the same way – that a dominant New York/Yankee culture spread the game across the United States. The Yankee culture of the Northeastern United States, centered in New York, dominated the nation economically to such an extent that their specific baseball variant not only spread across the nation but drove out the local variants. As Yankee culture spread across the United States in the antebellum era, the New York game spread with it.
This process of the diffusion of Yankee culture was not accidental and there were groups in the Northeast that actively sought to spread their cultural values to what they saw as the untamed wilderness of the American west. There were specific efforts, specifically among the religious communities, to transplant traditional Eastern institutions in the West because of the fear that social and moral disorder would result without them. Two examples of this is the founding of Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois and Washington University in St. Louis. Illinois College was founded in 1829 by a group of Yale graduates and Washington University was founded in 1853 by a graduate of Harvard divinity school. The Yale graduates who founded Illinois College moved from the Northeast to central Illinois and believed that what they were doing was missionary work, bringing religious, cultural and educational institutions to the American frontier. William Greenleaf Elliot, the Harvard divinity school graduate who helped found Washington University, was born in Massachusetts and established the first Unitarian church west of the Mississippi. One of the more prominent leaders in St. Louis, Elliot also helped establish the St. Louis Art Museum, another example of Eastern cultural institutions being transplanted to the west. Interestingly, several of Elliot’s students from Washington University, including members of his family, started one of the first baseball clubs in St. Louis in 1860. These transplanted Yankees, like Elliot and Jacksonville’s Yale Band, took it upon themselves to bring Yankee culture to the rest of the United States, establishing institutions such as schools, churches, libraries and museums that would be, in their eyes, a civilizing influence on the wild, savage and untamed west. They saw an unorganized civilization in the west that lacked the cultural institutions needed to establish a stable community and saw an opportunity to create a shining city on a hill, organized around their culture and values.5
While, within the Yankee religious community, there was a conscious, organized effort to transmit Yankee culture to the West, the economic influence that New England, in general, and New York, specifically, exerted upon Western cities played a larger role in the diffusion of Yankee culture.6 The new towns of the Trans-Appalachian west lacked the capital and the financial institutions to sustain economic growth in their communities. They lacked banks and currency and a political system that could or was willing to establish either. A local St. Louis business in 1840, for example, lacked the liquidity to purchase stock or expand its operations and they did not have access to credit markets that could alleviate their liquidity problem. At the same time, New England had recovered strongly from the depressed economic conditions of the 1830s and, by the 1840s, the region had a surplus of capital and stock that the region could not absorb and Yankee businessmen needed an outside market where they could invest this surplus. The new towns of the Trans-Appalachian west provided that outlet. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, Yankee surplus capital flooded into the Trans-Appalachian west. Yankee capital and, more specifically, New York money helped build towns like Cincinnati, Mobile, New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago into booming cities. More importantly, with the money came the people. The population of places like St. Louis and Chicago double and doubled again within a decade and a large number of the people flooding into these new western boomtowns were New York merchants, who not only brought their money with them but also brought their culture.
One of the more interesting things about these New Yorkers who flooded into the western boomtowns in the 1840s and 1850s is their demographic makeup. For the most part these were young, unmarried men in their twenties. They were the sons of successful merchant families who often were sent west by their family to establish a business outpost in the west or, lacking the opportunity for advancement in the east, sought new opportunities in the booming western cities. They did not, for the most part, put down roots in the west. They did not marry or purchase property. If economically successful, they took their profits, returned home and invested in new businesses in the east. If unsuccessful, they ran out of capital and returned home a failure. But rarely did they stay long enough to become absorbed by the local culture, remaining, in words, thoughts and deeds, a Yankee.
However, while for the most part they did not integrate themselves into the local, western community, they had a significant impact on the culture of these western boomtowns. The capital they brought with them created some of the largest and most stable businesses in the west and their ties to eastern markets helped integrate the western towns into a credit and distribution system that allowed for economic expansion. These transplanted New Yorkers helped establish institutions such as hospitals, fire departments, schools, churches, museums and cultural organizations and the constant influx of New Yorkers into these cities over the course of twenty years helped transplant Yankee culture in the American west. The business and cultural elite of the western cities, who had more interaction with the New Yorkers than the rest of the population, aped their taste in fashion and the arts, supported the attempts to establish Yankee institutions and sent their children east to be educated.
The influence that New Yorkers had on western cities in the antebellum era was significant as far as the spread of New York game of baseball is concerned. At the same time as the New York game developed, was codified and became popular, young New York men were traveling around the United States and living, for short periods of time, in western cities, establishing businesses and influencing the local culture. The people most likely to be familiar with the New York game were, demographically, the ones most likely to move to Cincinnati or St. Louis or Chicago for a couple of years in the 1850s, taking their knowledge and love of the game with them. They influenced locals to read New York papers, which likely had information about the game in it, and to send their children to eastern colleges, where the game was already being played. Locals, under the sway of a Yankee culture which dominated them economically, may have been predisposed to replace their local baseball variants with the New York game. Playing the New York game in the 1850s could have been seen as culturally fashionable in the same way it was culturally fashionable to send your son to an eastern college or help establish a library.
Places like St. Louis and Chicago were built by the influx of Yankee money in the antebellum era and the impact of Yankee culture is evident when you look at the spread of the New York game to those two cities. While St. Louis was the first large beneficiary of Yankee investment in the West, by the 1850s it had, to a certain extent and for a variety of reasons, fallen out of favor with the New York business community, who turned their attention to Chicago. The young New York men who would have moved to St. Louis and started businesses instead were moving to Chicago. Just as the first explosion of baseball’s popularity struck in New York, the young men most likely to be familiar with the game where more likely to move to Chicago than to St. Louis. As a result, the New York game appeared in Chicago first. The first baseball game in Chicago, played by the rules of the National Association, occurred in 1858 and it’s possible that the New York game was played in the city as early as 1856.
While New York investment in St. Louis declined in the 1850s and regional tensions were beginning to have a profound impact on the city’s cultural tendencies, the influence of Yankee culture in antebellum St. Louis can be seen in how the New York game came to the city. In 1859, a young engineer and baseball player from Brooklyn by the name of Merritt Griswold moved to St. Louis seeking to establish himself in business. He got a job at the newly founded Missouri Glass Company and, that summer, started the Cyclone Base Ball Club, the first baseball club in St. Louis to play under the New York rules. The co-founder of the Cyclone Club was local St. Louisan Edward Bredell, Jr. Bredell’s father was one of the wealthier men in St. Louis and had built the Missouri Glass Company for his son, who was named the company’s business manager. Bredell, Sr., in 1855, had sent his young son to be educated in the east, at Brown University, which had clubs playing the New York game by 1857. It is rather likely that Bredell had seen the game played at Brown and it is possible that he played the game while at school. So in St. Louis, in 1859, a transplanted New Yorker brought his knowledge of the game to the city and met a young man who had most likely learned the game while at college in the east. Together the two founded the first baseball club in St. Louis. Without the influence of Yankee culture on the city, it is unlikely that Griswold would have moved to St. Louis or that Bredell would have went east to attend college.7
In the end, there are no simple answers to the question of how the New York game spread across the United States in the later part of the 1850s and there is most likely no one reason why it happened. However, the evidence supports the idea that baseball spread as a result of cultural diffusion. There is ample evidence that shows proto-baseball games spreading across the Trans-Appalachian west in the first half of the 19th century by this process. Ball-playing was an important part of Anglo-American culture and wherever Anglo-Americans settled in the new west, there is evidence showing that ball games were being played. It was a highly mobile society and wherever the Anglo-Americans went, they brought some form of baseball with them. This model also appears to apply to the spread of the New York game. The economic influence of New York during the antebellum era and, by extension, the cultural influence of the city on the American west cannot be understated. In many ways, it can be argued that Yankee money built the American west and that New Yorkers, through their economic dominance, established Yankee colonies through out the west. Places like Chicago and St. Louis were, in the antebellum era, described as Yankee cities. New Yorkers, purposefully and not, transplanted their culture across the United States in the twenty years prior to the Civil War. And baseball was an important part of that culture. The Regulation game was born in New York. It grew there. It became popular there. And from there, it spread across the country. The influence of culture, and specifically that of Yankee/New York culture, helps explain how that spread happened.
1 Guttmann, Allen; Diffusion of Sports, Global; Berkshire Encyclopedia of World Sport (Christensen. Karen and David Levinson, editors); Great Barrington, MA; Berkshire Publishing Group and ABC-CLIO Inc; 1995. Accessed at http://www.berkshirepublishing.com/assets/pdf/SportsBytes/DiffusionOfSports_Global_Byte.pdf; p 2.
2 The Diary of John Sevier; Accessed at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Tennessee/_Texts/THM/5/3/Sevier_Journal/1795*.html.
3 Alvord, Clarence; Illinois in the Eighteenth Century: A Report on the Documents in Belleville, Ill., Illustrating the early history of the State; Illinois Historical Library, Volume 1, Number 1
4 Woods, John; Two years’ Residence in the Settlements on the English Prairie, in the Illinois Country; Longman, Hurst, Reessa, Orme, and Brown; London, 1822.
5 For more on diffusion efforts of Eastern missionaries see Don Harrison Doyle’s The Social Order of A Frontier Community.
6 For more on the economic impact of New York on Western cities, see Jeffrey Adler’s Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West.
7 For more on Griswold, Bredell and the founding of the Cyclone Base Ball Club, see Base Ball Pioneers, 1850-1871.
