A Regiment of New York Frenchmen at Tenleytown

On January 8, 1862 President and Mrs. Lincoln attended a celebration hosted by the 55th New York Infantry at Tennalytown, D.C. to mark their receipt of a new regimental flag.  Newspaper reports from the winter of 1861-62 are full of stories about various regiments being presented with regimental flags in events attended by prominent home state politicians.  What made this particular  flag presentation unique was that the regiment was comprised heavily of French-born New Yorkers who had answered their adopted homeland's call for volunteers.  The flag presentation ceremony was scheduled for January 8th to coincide with the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans, a battle in which French Creoles had fought with Americans against the British.  This at a time when Washington was stridently trying to ensure that England and France did not intervene in the war on the Confederacy's behalf.  Besides, this regiment also knew how to dine.

Photograph of the camp of the 55th New York Infantry, near Tennallytown, D.C.  At the time, the regiment was part of General Peck's Division. Civil War era records often spell the area as "Tennallytown."   (Library of Congress)

Baseball in Washington During the Civil War

Depressed about the current state of professional baseball in our nation's capital, I decided to devote this posting to the topic of baseball in Washington during the 60's, the 1860s that is.  In the decade before the Civil War, the evolving sport of "base ball"-- then generally spelled as two words and derived from cricket and townball-- began to gain a following as at least 50 amateur clubs sprouted up, mostly in the North.  The New York City area was the vanguard of the sport's evolution under rules devised by Alexander Cartwright and the New York Knickerbocker Club.

By 1859, Washington, D.C. had at least two baseball clubs: the Washington Potomacs and the Washington Nationals.  The original nucleus of both teams was a group of government clerks. (One of the Nationals' founders, Arthur Gorman, was a Senate staffer and later a U.S. Senator from Maryland.)   The Nationals generally played on ground near the Capitol while the Potomacs frequented he public grounds just south of the White House known as the White Lot, today's Ellipse.  The first match between the Nationals and the Potomacs was played on the White Lot on May 5, 1860 and resulted in a Nationals' victory of 35-15.  The Washington Star wrote approvingly that "it is good to see health-promoting exercises taking the place of insipid enervating amusements."