John Adams wrote that sports should be part of the celebration of America's independence.
Sports in the United States have been around for hundreds of years, including during colonial days before the Declaration of Independence was crafted and signed and the country broke free from British rule to eventually become a sovereign nation.
It was nothing like we know today, of course, where sports are everywhere and encompass much of our daily lives on one scale or another.
But sporting events of many types took place during the 1770s and as America prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary with the arrival of the Fourth of July, we examine the sporting landscape from those early days and how it’s grown and evolved just like the United States itself.
USA 250: Horse racing a winner
The biggest sport during the era of our Founding Fathers was horse racing, according to author and historian Kenneth Cohen, curator of Early American History at the Smithsonian Institution.
“In terms of attendance numbers and popularity it was certainly the largest spectator sport in the United States at the time of the (American) Revolution, there’s no question,” Cohen said, adding, “There was nothing that even came close.”
Backcountry quarter horse races, dashes not run by thoroughbreds, were the most common during the period, per Cohen’s research and that of other historians of early American life. Those races, mostly involving domesticated mustangs, were held around the Thirteen Colonies, but mostly in native American communities and in western frontier locations in such places as Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
“But the organized thoroughbred races where they actually already had stands in some cases, the big tracks there are New York City, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Maryland and Charleston, South Carolina,” Cohen says.
President George Washington was a huge fan of horse racing, often writing about it in his journals. As a colonel in the Virginia Militia, he noted that he attended races every year in Annapolis and how once, when he couldn’t find a room for lodging, he crashed at his stepson’s college dormitory.
Many, but not all, of the spectators were businessmen who attended races to conduct transactions of various types. They either had investments in expensive horses or were there to make investments with those who did and to help create change and work on building a better life for the Colonists.
“In 1774, the Continental Congress passes what is called the Continental Association,” Cohen explains, “which is basically a list of actions that the colonies should take – and this is before anybody’s declared independence, before any shots are fired – to get the King and Parliament to address their concerns about this taxation and regulations that’s coming down from England.
“The colonists are complaining about all the economic repercussions of these things and there’s actually somebody in Britain who’s like, ‘Well, I don’t understand. You guys are complaining but there’s a ton of horse races and theater going on over there, so how bad can it be?’ ”
The Continental Association responded with a form of reverse psychology.
“They’re like, ‘Fine, we’re going to outlaw horse racing and theatre so you can’t claim that it’s all so nicey, nicey over here,’ ” Cohen said. “Now the enforcement of this varies. It’s not 100 percent. But it is true you see a shrink, a diminishing number of recorded horse races and certainly, the organized theater troops that were going around the Colonies, those folks go down to the Caribbean because the Colonies won’t host them anymore.”
USA 250: Other sports during the 1770s
Horse racing might have reigned supreme but various sporting activities were prevalent and served as a vital part of our culture during the late 18th century.
Shooting matches to determine marksmanship and accuracy were commonplace in many areas, as was quoits (think horseshoes), ninepins (bowling), cockfighting (yes, that) and occasionally, boxing and wrestling (where and when it was allowed).
Bat and ball games, which had been popular in Europe and the British Isles, also firmly began to take root in early America. There were scaled-down versions of cricket and field hockey in addition to games, mostly played in the New England area, that served as a forerunner to what would become baseball.
Trap ball involved a bat, a ball and a seesaw. Stool ball involved a ball, sometimes a bat, and yep, you guessed it, a bar stool.
“There were games like One Cat and Two Cat, which are like whiffle ball with small numbers,” Cohen said. “You only have two bases, but you hit the ball and see how many bases you can run and touch before the ball gets back to the pitcher’s hands kind of thing.
“It’s uncommon to find Three Cat or Four Cat where there are three or four bases in the 18th century. Then in the 19th century, they start to get a little bit bigger and then you start to get baseball in the 1830s, 1840s.”
The earliest known reference to baseball comes in a 1744 children's book called A Little Pretty Pocket-Book by British publisher John Newbery. It contained a description of "base-ball" and featured a woodcut showing a playing field that somewhat resembled that of the modern game.
The first recorded game of baseball reportedly took place in Britain in 1749, where two of the participants were asserted to be the Prince of Wales and the Earl of Middlesex. Author, journalist and filmmaker David Block discovered a mention of the event in the Whitehall Evening Post, published Sept. 19, 1749.
The item read: “On Tuesday last, his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and Lord Middlesex, played at Bass-Ball, at Walton in Surry; notwithstanding the weather was extreme bad, they continued playing several hours."
Apparently, it wasn’t long before the game made its way to America, if it wasn’t already here in some variation such as “rounders” or “punchball.” But something very akin to what we know as baseball was being played in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1791.
That’s because in 2004, John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian at the time, found a reference to a document from 1791 in Pittsfield detailing a local law that prohibited the game from being played within 80 yards of the town’s First Congressional meeting house.
Thorn located the bylaw in an 1869 book on Pittsfield's history and shared his find with former major-leaguer Jim Bouton, a best-selling author, actor, activist and sportscaster.
“George Washington was president. There were still only 13 states. But there was already baseball here in Pittsfield,” Thorn said during a news conference announcing the 2004 discovery. “How do we know? Because kids were knocking windows out of the town church!”
The law read, in part, “For the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House, no Person, an Inhabitant of said Town, shall be permitted to play at any Game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball … or any other Game or Games with Balls within the Distance of Eighty Yards.”
“It’s clear,” Thorn said, “that not only was baseball played here in 1791, but it was rampant.”
The revelation prompted James Roberto, the then-Mayor of Pittsfield, to proudly exclaim, “Pittsfield is baseball’s Garden of Eden!”
USA 250: Sports had its place
When it came to athletic events and the sporting culture in general during the 1770s, John Adams wasn’t quite the curmudgeon and fuddy-duddy he was said to have been. A member of the Founding Fathers and the second president of the United States, he didn’t truly detest sports in the way one famous quote attributed to him might imply.
"I was not sent to this world to spend my days in sport, diversion and pleasure," Adams once wrote. "I was born for business; for both activity and study."
According to Cohen, the historian at the Smithsonian, that quote often gets misinterpreted because Adams wasn’t necessarily saying he was against sports. He was just stating what his own priorities were.
On July 3, 1776, a day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Adams, a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress, penned a letter to his wife, Abigail, to mark the historic document, which would be unanimously ratified on July 4.
“I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the Great Anniversary Festival,” Adams’ letter, read in part. “It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parades with show, games, sport, guns, bells, bonfires and illumination from one end of this Continent to the other from this time forward forever more.”
Adams’ own words clearly state that the idea of sports should be part of the celebration. Of course, that’s something that truly wouldn’t become reality until the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 and the signing of the Treaty of Paris, when the British monarchy acknowledged the independence of the Thirteen Colonies, leading to the establishment of the U.S. as an independent and sovereign nation.
“He was perfectly fine with sports being part of the celebration,” Cohen said. “That other quote is him saying like, ‘Let’s not take that too far.’ So, he wasn’t opposed to sports. It just had to be in its rightful place and time.”
Playing games and sports were generally forbidden by the early Pilgrims in the New England Colonies, mostly because of religious reasons, but also because there was simply too much work at hand. As time wore on and the fight for true independence emerged, a cultural rift occurred.
Like many other experiences that were to come, folks began to embrace the idea of competition and the gamesmanship and enjoyable distraction that sports had to offer.
“The underlying concept that regardless of who might be opposed to sport, the majority of the population clearly believes that competition is at the heart of American culture,” Cohen said. “That is a driving force for all kinds of things that happened in American history moving forward.
“And it’s expressed in a very tangible way from the time you’re very young all the way until the time you’re very old through sports in the United States. We need to be balanced in how we view what sports contribute to our culture, but I don’t think we should ignore or downplay its centrality.”
It’s part of our history, after all. Sports have grown in the United States just like the country itself. We’ve come from horse racing and horseshoes to full daily slates of games and events at the professional, college and amateur levels that constantly flood our stadiums, arenas, televisions, tablets and smartphones.
Besides a full-day’s schedule of MLB games, other sporting events on July 4 include a FIFA World Cup Round of 16 match at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia and Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, New York.
“We go back and think about what the differences are between those early sports and how they’ve evolved today,” Cohen says, “and I think we learn a lot about how America has evolved.”
The gambling connection
Colonists didn’t just participate in sports in 1776. They bet on them, too.
“Gambling was everywhere back in the day just as it is now,” Cohen said, noting that wagering often occurred during horse races and in taverns and coffee houses where folks were fond of playing backgammon, forms of billiards and various card games.
Colonists liked to wager on just about anything, which Cohen referenced in his 2017 book, "They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic."
“There were some crazy bets that aren’t even game-related,” he said. “They were like, ‘How much ice can I cut in two hours?’ There was a guy in Philadelphia, which is also in my book, who says he can smoke 100 pipes of tobacco in a day. He does. And then he dies.”
What was the great fascination with gambling 250 years ago?
“One is pretty much the same as today,” Cohen says, “which is to prove that you know enough to be able to predict better than other people. Bragging rights. But bragging rights weren’t just about machismo, although there was some of that for sure. It is about being able to sort of read the room, right?
“It’s like, ‘I know this horse is going to beat that horse. I know this guy is going to beat that guy because this guy is smarter. Therefore, when I tell you what we should do in business terms or political terms, you should listen to me.’ ”
There was little time or place for sports during the American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775-Sept. 3, 1783). Gambling nonetheless found its way into the ranks of the militias and the Continental Army, which aggravated commanding officers to no end.
“Generals in the 18th and 19th centuries were always complaining about how much time their men spent gambling,” Cohen explained, “because again, there is this culture in the United States of it being a demonstration of your manliness to take these risks and come out as the wiser one who wins.
“(George) Washington complained like other generals about men gambling away things and sort of frittering away their resources while they’re in camp. That was a common complaint. They tried various bans on it. But as my book makes clear, there’s a lot of history books out there that talk about how strict and puritanical Colonial America was in sport with gambling.”
The bans rarely, if ever, solved the problem. Although it is true many laws were passed to appease a very loud minority who wanted those restrictions, the enforcement of those laws was always very lax. Cohen equated it to the speed limit, saying, “The sign might say 55 mph, but does everybody drive 55?”
Sports began to prosper after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, although the culture was welcomed more in the South than in the North. According to Cohen and other historians, the North wanted its citizens to be more virtuous and draw limits around their own self-interests.
“Even though (James) Madison will ultimately write in favor of the Constitution that the American government should be based on everybody pursuing their own interests, there’s a sense that if everybody goes too far with that then nobody’s looking out for the greater good of the nation,” Cohen said.
Those types of concerns aren’t as central in the South, he said, because they saw competition and manly expression and demonstration of superiority as something that benefits the nation. That’s part of the reason, Cohen said, why so many of the officer corps of the United States in those early years were from the South.
There’s no way of telling how some of today’s top athletes would have fared in sports 250 years ago, but Cohen is convinced they wouldn’t have had much fun.
“I think they would find it very different,” he said. “First of all, the level of pay wasn’t there. They might be celebrities, but they’re not making enough money off that celebrity status to have anywhere near the kind of lifestyle that our sports stars have today.”
No matter how you plan to observe the Fourth of July, just remember that sports were intended to be part of the celebration 250 years ago.
Reach McManaman atbob.mcmanaman@arizonarepublic. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @azbobbymac and listen to him live every Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. on Roc and Manuch with Jimmy B on ESPN 620 (KTAR-AM) and every Thursday on the Doug Franz Unplugged podcast via Apple or Spotify.
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Source: AZCentral
