Sport and War

Sport and war have been linked in the American experience since the early years of the republic. In some eras, the use of sport to pass time and gain relief from boredom or stress of military service has been the most prevalent phenomenon. At other times military officers have seen sport as an important means for training their personnel, whether to enhance physical readiness and aptitude for the rigors of warfare, to affect the troops’ psychology by inculcating martial spirit, or both. Finally, advocates of sport and supporters of the military have sometimes indulged in elaborate exchanges of metaphor, conflating sport and war in an effort to achieve their usually very different respective interests. The first of these tendencies—the least structured and the least self-conscious—has shown itself throughout American history, while the other two have been bound more closely to specific, though sometimes long, periods in the development of the military, sport, and society.

There is little evidence to suggest official, formal, and regular support for sport and organized games within the American military until well into the 19th century. This is not surprising, since other institutions later closely associated with sport, such as colleges and universities, similarly kept their distance. The general sporting culture in the colonial and early national periods was shaped largely by small groups united by common interests (such as Southern gentlemen engaged in horse racing), by spontaneous action of citizens seeking release from tedium and drudgery, and by brief seasonal participation in an American variation of England's “festive tradition.” The military itself, whether the militia before or immediately after the Revolution or the very small professional force created after 1789, was organized and trained more narrowly than was the case a century or more later. Sport in the military, then, was generated largely from the bottom up, and, as in colleges, the primary interest of responsible officials was that nothing develop that was untoward and disruptive of traditionally defined military training and military proficiency.

Prior to the Civil War, sports such as baseball were only beginning to find a substantial following of participants and spectators in the country at large, let alone within the military. During the war, however, Union soldiers especially used such games as remedies for the long periods of boredom that intervened between the horrific demands of combat. These activities reflected spontaneous interest and enthusiasm shared among the soldiers—not an organized effort by officers to instill discipline and character or to ensure health. They took place in training areas, and even in prison camps and near fields of battle. After the war, as after some later wars, some veterans who had been exposed to sport while in uniform [Page 802]became advocates of that sport in the postwar period, while many others formed part of a new base of spectators.

Even so, there were occasional “statistical outliers,” notably those who prefigured the middle-class and uppermiddle class preoccupation with the pursuit of sport to transform personal values, to prepare practically for the rigors of war, and to strengthen societal institutions. A primary example of such outlying enthusiasts was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ardent promoter of “muscular Christianity” in the antebellum years and the commander of a black regiment during the Civil War. In his Army Life in a Black Regiment, Higginson insisted not only that his antebellum sporting pursuits had given him the requisite spirit to fight steadfastly but also that they had specific applications; he claimed, for example, that his recreational boating and swimming had prepared him to be the commander of a flotilla of armed steamers during the war.

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