Victor Salvatore’s article about baseball and Abner Doubleday (June/July 1983 issue) did not get all the facts correct. If he is going to kill a myth, he should do it properly. If he is going to shoot Santa Claus, he should shoot him dead!

I grew up with Abner Doubleday. My interest in him came about naturally; it was genetic. My mother used to call him “Uncle.” So did her five sisters and two brothers, and all of her maternal cousins. In 19601 began gathering all the material I could about “Uncle Abner” for a biography of the man.

Two characteristics soon emerged. Abner Doubleday was primarily a military man—outspoken, verbose and critical, and an intense nationalist; he was also very much a family man and visited relatives whenever the opportunity presented itself (though he was not always welcome, as one relative testified who thought him “an SOB” and proceeded to spend the whole course of Abner’s visit in the outhouse!).

The basis of the claim that Doubleday “invented” baseball was the letter submitted by Abner Graves to the Spalding Commission in which he stated that “the game of baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, N. Y. either the spring prior to, or following the ‘Log Cabin and Hard Cider’ campaign of General Harrison for President. ” The selection of the year 1839 was arbitrarily made by A. G. Mills, who drafted the commission’s report. In fact, the campaign took place in 1840, the year that Abner Doubleday was granted a two-plus month leave from West Point. Without doubt, he would have gone to Scipio, New York, where his father had taken up farming. It is inconceivable that Abner would have by-passed Cooperstown, where he still had many cousins.

The existence of order No. 30, dated June 18, 1840, granting Abner Doubleday a leave of absence from West Point, gives credence to the thought that he was in Cooperstown during the “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign. And Doubleday’s West Point training would be an ideal background for estimating the fine points of the first baseball diamond.

Abner Doubleday’s wartime accomplishments were remarkable, but he seems to have been denied credit for many of them and suffered intense frustration as a result. The prime example was his treatment by Gen. George Gordon Meade after the Battle of Gettysburg. Doubleday performed brilliantly on July 1, 1863, the first day of the fighting. With nine thousand men against an attacking Confederate force of thirty thousand he managed to capture his old classmate James Archer’s brigade and held on until forced to retreat. It was Doubleday’s command that repulsed Pickett’s charge two days later, “thereby saving the battle and the Union.” Afterward, Meade, for some inexplicable reason, assigned Doubleday to the command of a warehouse in Buffalo, New York. President Lincoln rescinded Meade’s order by assigning Doubleday to the command of a military commission with primary