Baseball is often called America’s pastime, but its rise to national prominence is closely tied to one of the most turbulent periods in the nation’s history. In my recent interview with Our American Stories hosted by Lee Habeeb, I discuss the discovery of a baseball found on the battlefield of Shiloh and how the Civil War helped spread the game across the United States.
The episode explores how soldiers from different regions brought their local versions of baseball into military camps, where the game became a common language among men from vastly different backgrounds. What began as a recreational activity between drills and battles ultimately helped standardize the sport and introduce it to communities across the country after the war. The discovery of a baseball at Shiloh serves as a powerful reminder that even amid one of America’s bloodiest conflicts, soldiers carried pieces of everyday life with them. That simple ball tells a larger story about resilience, shared culture, and the role baseball played in helping reunite a divided nation.
Listen to the full episode here and find the transcript below.
Full Transcript Below
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 bat and ball games brought to the New Country during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. From the late eighteen fifties throughout the eighteen sixties, baseball 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 Hlebinsky. Take it away, Ashley.
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. Photography was an incredibly important part of documenting the war, and you would find things like pieces of uniform and other items from camps.
But something you may not think about would be a baseball.
But on the fields of the Battle of Shiloh, which was one of the bloodiest early clashes of the American Civil War, that’s exactly what was found, a small hand stitched 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 ball, was already being played, but it wasn’t yet the national pastime that we think about today. It was something that was regional. It was really popular in urban environments, and it was fragmented, so different cities played by different rules. New York had their version, Massachusetts had another. There was no universal game. It was just kind of a shared idea.
But then came the Civil War, and you have to picture this. 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 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 towns and states, and in some cases lived entirely different lives, could suddenly share something so simple.
They shared a bat, a ball, and a set of rules that 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. The bat was called a willow, and there were no gloves.
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 whoever showed up that day.
And there are, of course, a lot of stories that go along with this. There are stories of Union soldiers playing ball in camp while Confederate 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 sides sometimes would informally interact through shared recreation. Because even in war, there were moments, 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, of this battle. 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. There was a baseball there.
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 aftermath of destruction. 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 normal life with them.
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 camps introduced it to their towns and communities. This is when rules began to standardize, clubs formed, and competitions grew. Within a generation, baseball was no longer regional. It was national.
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. They wear the period uniforms, they follow the flexible rules, they catch the ball with bare hands, and they speak the language of the eighteen sixties, of strikers and willows and gentlemen’s play.
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 served as a bridge between regions and people, kind of this intermediary between war and peace. It reminds us that history isn’t only found in moments of conflict, but also in the spaces between them.
On the fields of Shiloh, where thousands once fought and fell, you can still hear it if you listen closely. 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.
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and just a lovely story by Ashley Hlebinsky, the story of Shiloh Battlefield and the birth of modern baseball on Our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell stories of history, faith, business, love, loss, and your stories. Send us your story, small or large, to our email oas@ouramericanstories.com. That’s oas@ouramericanstories.com. We’d love to hear them and put them on the air. Our audience loves them too.