1863.60

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New Bats and Balls Arrive, But 91st NY Loses Again

Salience Peripheral
Tags Civil War, Military
Location Louisiana
City/State/Country: New Orleans, LA, United States
Immediacy of Report Contemporary
Age of Players Adult
Text

“Saturday, November 21, 1863. Fine and cool. The Base Ball match comes off and the 91st gets beat by two runs and the[y] come home jolly.”

From a telephone auction offering that has this description: “Fascinating personal journal was carried on the person of 91st New York Volunteer Infantry Private Edwin Keay during the Union Army campaign of 1863 through the bayous and battlefields of Louisiana. . . Diary is perhaps most valuable, however, for its several mentions of the game of baseball, which are all but impossible to find in journals from the war . . . . ‘Thursday, December 3 . . . The new bats and balls have come up and the match takes place this afternoon . . . the 91st gets beat.’” Accessed at the Giamatti Center of the Baseball Hall of Fame [Civil War file] on June 26, 2009. The auction clip is not dated. The 91st was organized in Albany. It was garrisoned at New Orleans for much of 1863 and early 1864. Note: does the December entry imply that the Union Army supplied bats and balls to the troops? Note: It appears that other baseball-related entries are in the diary. Can we find it? A copy of a Keay diray, possibly a later one, is reportedly held as item MDMS-5433 in the Maryland Manuscript Collection [Keay spent some of 1865 stationed in Baltimore].

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External Number 139



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