The Wife Who Went Away

Abner Doubleday (June 26, 1819–Jan. 26, 1893) may not have invented baseball, but he was certainly a soldier. His grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War. His father, a New York congressman, aided his admission to West Point, from which he graduated in 1842. He fought against Mexicans and Indians (in Texas and Florida) before assignment to Atlantic coastal forts. The secession of South Carolina found him stationed at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, second-in-command to Maj. Robert Anderson. The day after Christmas 1860, Robert Anderson moved his garrison quietly across the harbor to Fort Sumter. Captain Doubleday, as married officers at army posts usually did, had his wife Mary with him. After the withdrawal to Sumter, Mary with other officers’ wives found lodging in the city. Or tried to. Mrs. Doubleday was told by a boarding-house keeper, as Abner relates in his Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–’61 (1876), “that, as the house depended on the patronage of the Southern people for support, she (the landlady) could not undertake to harbor the wives of Federal officers.” Mary Doubleday took the hint. On January 8, 1861, she and other Northern officers’ wives left Charleston, northward-bound.

This is the caption as printed in 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War. It has not yet been through this site’s research and fact-checking pass.