The Fort Sumpter action gave General Doubleday a footnote in the history books but, as even the most casual baseball fan knows, his greater claim to fame is that he is supposedly the father of baseball. Specifically, in 1839 in the remote New York village of Cooperstown, future home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Doubleday is supposed to have created the rules that made baseball the game we know today.

There is only one thing wrong with this story: it is a complete fabrication. This utterly bogus and preposterous claim, apparently invented out of whole cloth, is one of the most amazing hoaxes ever perpetuated on the American public.

Essentially, here is what happened. At the turn of the century, America was an emerging world power and baseball had already become known as America’s “national pastime.” A long-running debate was underway about baseball’s exact origins, with people such as journalist Henry Chadwick arguing (correctly as it happened) that baseball was the direct descendent of a number of British ball and bat games with interesting names like rounders, old cat, trap ball and, of course, cricket.

By this time, however, Albert Spalding, a wealthy businessman and baseball promoter, had become fixated on the notion that America’s national pastime had to be a sport invented solely in America and was untouched by any foreign “taint.” In 1907, Spalding persuaded Abraham Mills, president of the National League, professional baseball’s oldest organized league, to set up a commission to settle the dispute. The committee was heavily stacked in favor of the Spalding position.

During the course of their investigation, the commission received a letter from an elderly man, Abner Graves, who claimed he had played baseball with Doubleday as a boy and that in 1839, in Cooperstown, he had witnessed Doubleday create the new rules for the local ballgame. On the slim evidence of a 68-year-old recollection, the commission declared Doubleday to be the father of baseball and Cooperstown to be the place of its birth. Graves’s reliability can perhaps be put in context by noting that the old man shot his wife a few years later and was committed to a mental institution. Nonetheless, on this preposterous myth, baseball’s most sacred temple was built.

There is no evidence that General Doubleday played baseball or even witnessed a game, much less invented it. In his meticulously kept diary, the game is never mentioned, and it is a documented fact that he was a cadet at West Point during the time in which he was supposedly at Cooperstown organizing the first game. It is quite certain that the old gentleman went to his grave in 1893 completely oblivious to any association with the sport that would one day make him famous. But, although the general didn’t start baseball, a plausible case can be made that he started the Civil War.

If the title “the father of baseball” belongs to anyone, it is Alexander J. Cartwright, a New York businessman and sporting club member who, in 1846, reworked the various rules of existing ballgames to produce a game that was closely akin to the version of baseball played today. The first game played according to those rules was held in Elysian Fields park in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1846.

As it turns out, there are connections aplenty between baseball and the Civil War – the two events filmmaker Ken Burns describes as the “two Rosetta Stones” for deciphering the American character. The stories of both are indeed intertwined, and even after the myths have been stripped away, it’s still a compelling tale.

By the late 1850’s, baseball had spread throughout New England and the Midwest. Cartwright traveled to the West Coast, introducing the game along the way, and even sailed to Hawaii where he immediately gained enthusiastic new converts. Baseball was also played in parts of the South at the time, particularly in Virginia and the Carolinas, and in and around the ports of New Orleans and Galveston.

The Great Emancipator, former Illinois lawyer and politician Abraham Lincoln, was himself a baseball player and fan – although again we find fact and fiction to be intertwined. There is a well-known story, false in all likelihood, that Lincoln was actually playing baseball on the Springfield, Illinois common when he was informed of the arrival of a delegation dispatched from the Republican party’s convention in Chicago to advise him that he had received the Republican presidential nomination.

Another giant whopper told about Lincoln was popularized in the 1940’s by radio announcer Bill Stern. According to Stern, when Lincoln lay dying after being shot by John Wilkes Booth, he summoned General Abner Doubleday to his side and with his last breath said, “Abner, don’t let baseball die.” That one is doubly false. Not only did Lincoln never utter those words after being shot, but, as we have said, Doubleday had nothing to do with the game.

But what is unquestionably true is that there are definite and certain connections between the game and the war. When hostilities broke out and armies were raised in both the North and the South, their ranks contained thousands of men who played baseball – especially in the North. According to the Baseball Hall of Fame Library, which compiled the statistics, 11 members of the National Baseball Association served in the military during the Civil War.

And the game remained popular on the home front as well. For instance, at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, an all-star game was played on October 21, 1861 between teams from Brooklyn and New York. The game reportedly drew an audience of 15,000 spectators. In September of 1862, thousands of fans watched a game in New York City between the Atlantics and the Brooklyn Eckfords on the same day that word arrived about the Battle of Antietam. Baseball was also played in prison camps in both the North and South. One of the most famous paintings of the Civil War is of Union soldiers playing baseball in 1862 in the Confederate prison camp at Salisbury, North Carolina. The painting, by Otto Boetticher, a major in the Union army and a prisoner in Salisbury, shows a large crowd watching the game in the prison yard.

It is also true that Confederate soldiers learned the game in Northern prison camps. There are accounts of rebel prisoners learning to play baseball in the camp on Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie, for instance. And a New Orleans newspaper account from after the war noted that the city’s traveling baseball team, the Southern Club, was made up of men who had organized as prisoners on Johnson’s Island.

In many other cities, including Washington, D.C., baseball continued to be a popular diversion during the war. In 1862, the Washington Nationals even played soldiers from New York’s 71st Regiment shortly after the men returned from the Second Battle of Bull Run where they sustained heavy losses. It is no wonder that the Nationals beat the soldiers, 28 to 13. The game was quite popular among the armies and navies of both the North and South. In the North, the U.S. Sanitary Commission even recommended that “when practical, amusements, sports and gymnastic exercise should be favored among the men,” with baseball listed as one of the approved sports.

Perhaps no other example of ball playing during the war is as striking as that involving Company L from New York. Company L was a war weary unit of the 14th Brooklyn Division fresh from the Battle of Spotsylvania, fought just north of Richmond, Virginia during the spring of 1864. Company L had been assigned to guard the army’s flank, and its men were deployed in the deep woods around their periphery. Tired and disgruntled, some of the soldiers decided to seek diversion playing a game of baseball. As they were warming up in a clearing, it is reported that a voice with a Southern drawl rang out, “Do you call that a speedball?”

Emerging from the woods, a company of the 12th Alabama Regiment approached the Union soldiers. What happened next proves that truth is often stranger and more unbelievable than fiction. The Rebels suggested a nine-inning truce for an inter-army game of baseball. The Northerners agreed and both teams began to play – a dangerous diversion indeed, given the likelihood of court martial or death if this gross violation of military rules were to be discovered.

And there’s more. Just as the game of baseball was played on and off the battlefield during the Civil War, the national pastime itself served as a national form of reconciliation, helping bind the wounds of years of deadly battle. In 1869, commenting on the visit of the New York Mutuals Club to New Orleans, the publication Wilkes’ Spirit said, “This National game seems destined to close the National wounds opened by the late war. It is no idle pastime, which draws young men separated by two thousand miles together to contest in Friendship, upon fields but lately crimsoned with their brothers’ blood in mortal combat.”

National reconciliation was, of course, a burden that baseball alone could not carry. But this game, which by the war’s end had truly become the national pastime, probably did a great deal to help our war torn country put itself back together. Then, as now, hopes and dreams were invested in the game. And for 150 years, far longer than most institutions, baseball has stood the test.