Nov. 12, 2013: Rotarian Dave Echols introduced The Honorable Alex Sanders. Judge Sanders, the first Chief Judge of the South Carolina Court of Appeals, discussed how baseball has united America since the Civil War.
Judge Sanders has been a lawyer, appellate court judge, and president of the College of Charleston. He is also one of the founders of the Charleston School of Law where he currently serves as Chairman Emeritus. He has taught law at the Harvard Law School and the University of South Carolina School of Law.
Sanders began his remarks by saying he was not going to talk about law and education. “I am sick of all that. I am going to talk baseball.”
Sanders’ grandfather was a Confederate soldier and he uses his grandfather’s shotgun every dove season.
The Civil War, in which his grandfather fought, involved baseball. Right in the middle of the war, the largest crowd ever to attend a sporting event at that time, 41,000 people, gathered together on a remote island off of the coast of South Carolina. The date: December 25, 1862. The location: Hilton Head Island, where Union forces kept Confederate prisoners. Escape from the island was virtually impossible. This baseball game was truly “an extraordinary event,” chronicled by military records.
Before the Civil War, baseball was played primarily in the North and “the game was reserved for gentlemen,” Sanders said. However, during the war, officers and enlisted men played side by side. Almost every soldier, Union and Confederate, learned to play baseball during the Civil War, “thus, linking baseball with patriotism.” The popularity of baseball quickly spread throughout the South.
Judge Sanders discussed an old acquaintance of his, “Shoeless Joe Jackson,” whose records in baseball surpassed players of his day as well as today. After 1921, Shoeless Joe Jackson was stripped of all of his records. He traveled the country playing “outlaw” ball under an assumed name before returning to his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina after all efforts at reinstatement were denied.
Sanders concluded his remarks by saying, “It has been 150 years since Americans went to war with one another yet Americans are still struggling to understand one another. However, we have one single thing in common and that is baseball – all across the South – in every state that was a part of the Confederacy.”
Submitted by Molly Blatt