"Your Valuabal Paper"

TO FIELD SPORTSMEN, CRICKETERS, BASE BALL CLUBS, PROPRIETORS OF COURSES, AND OTHERS,-We shall at all times feel under obligations to those gentlemen who will furnish us authentic accounts of all kinds of field-sports, running, and trotting, and barter-racing; cricketing, base ball matches, or accounts of a successful hunt, rowing matches, etc., in which they are participants, or which come immediately under their notice.1The above call, printed at the beginning of the Out-Door Sports section of the Sunday Mercury, was answered regularly in the period immediately before the Civil War by aficionados of the New York Game, which was taking the old informal game of base ball to new heights of public interest as a sport for participants and spectators. Going beyond the call for reports, William Cauldwell-at first a reporter, later coeditor and publisher-attended the week's most important local matches and, beginning in 1853, provided game accounts and box scores that were published.2 Of most importance for the present project, the Sunday Mercury was offered as a venue for answering readers' questions about the game: general information, etiquette, and points of play not covered by the sketchy set of existing rules.Published weekly in New York 1839-1897, the Sunday Mercury flourished for decades. Its circulation in the years before the Civil War is estimated at 145,000.3 Raised to prominence in the 1850s by editor and publisher Samuel Nicholls (or at least so claimed in his 1854 obituary),4 the Mercury adopted the rising New York Game as a continuing feature, a process in which it was aided by the presence of Cauldwell, who with Sylvester S. Southworth and Horace P. Whitney succeeded Nicholls as editors and publishers. Cauldwell was among the early settlers in Morrisania, the southeastern area of the modern Bronx. As a member of the group that founded the Union Base Ball Club of Morrisania in 1855, Cauldwell is credited with helping to bring the new game to the area.5 He continued through the 1860s as a club officer and delegate to the national conventions of the National Association of Base Ball Players; he is listed in the 1860 Beadle's Dime Base Ball Player as a member of the NABBP Rules Committee. In 1867 he made the leap from local politics (he was a member of the Board of Supervisors of the village of West Farms 1857-1873) to state office, as a state assemblyman and senator.It is a testament to the Mercury's reputation as a baseball organ that in the period covered (April-December 1859 and May-October 1860), baseball reports and game accounts were received from as far away as San Francisco and Toronto, and from remote baseball outposts like Milwaukee, St. Louis, Louisville, and New Orleans. Inquiries came from across New York State and northern New Jersey.The Mercury's reader correspondents were in turn a cross-section of the baseball community before the Civil War: individual junior and senior players, club officials, former players, umpires, spectators, and on one occasion a certain H. C. who wrote in to urge umpires to enforce the rules more thoroughly. (A suspicion that H.C. stood for Henry Chadwick follows naturally.) Correspondents used initials or pseudonyms, unless writing on behalf of their clubs.The attraction of examining contemporary correspondence from primarily unknown individuals is that of drawing aside a curtain, particularly when previous views have been filtered so largely through Chadwick's viewpoint. However praiseworthy Chadwick's goals and objectives for the game, his single-minded pursuit of them did not lend itself to the illumination for posterity of the entire and frequently variant baseball landscape. The Sunday Mercury correspondence thus represents an opportunity to experience the pre-Civil War game at the level of its participants.Cauldwell gives the impression that selectivity in publishing items was purely a function of the amount of space available (game accounts and box scores always took precedence). …

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