American Nationalism and Cricket
The Story of America’s Shift from the “Gentleman’s Game” to the “Game of Men”
Between Manhattan’s 29th and 30th Streets stands Gilsey House, an opulent eight-story homage to the Gilded Age, erected in the years following the Civil War. Before its construction, the site was home to Casper Samler’s farmstead. Back then, a vast open field stretched north across 30th Street, delimited by Park Avenue to the east and Bloomingdale Road to the west. The latter may not ring a bell today because we now know it as Broadway. In 1838, an outfit of English expatriates called St. George Society came in possession of this parcel and started holding matches of a most English game ever at the venue.
Two years later, on St. George’s Day, that is April 23, the field was formally christened St. George Cricket Grounds, and the St. George Cricket Club was born. This was more than twenty years before the first recorded cricket match on the Indian subcontinent. And six years before the first baseball game. In fact, the first professional baseball club, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, wouldn’t appear until 1866. This is the most unlikely story of the most unlikely cricketing nation in the world. Of America’s first modern team sport. Of the time when cricket was America’s national sport. Not baseball, not football. Cricket.
An Unlikely Origin
The St. George Cricket Club came to be known by the nickname “the Dragonslayers” after the legend of the eponymous saint slaying a dragon. Although SGCC was the first professional cricket club in America, possibly the world, it was not the first to play the game on American soil. Evidence suggests that cricket was being played in British North America as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century. The earliest definitive reference comes from the 1709 diaries of William Byrd III of Westover, in Virginia, documenting games on his James River estates. For perspective, Aurangzeb had died just three years before, and George Washington wouldn’t be born for another twenty-three years. Byrd’s account places cricket in the American historical record, albeit in an informal setting. It was not the structured game we know today but rather a more casual affair, played with small teams and for wagers. Today’s teams have eleven players, back then it was four. Of course, Byrd’s games were private affairs, and the only spectators were friends and families.
This shouldn’t surprise since “Americans” at the time were still pretty much Britishers, not just as British subjects but also as cultural and religious affiliates. Many were even born in Britain. Byrd himself was a third-generation immigrant from Middlesex. In most American circles, the game was known not as cricket but as “wickets.” To them, it served as a leisure activity, a gambling opportunity, and a means of social connection among British expatriates and colonial elites. Despite its popularity, the game remained far from organized with little uniformity in rules across estates and cities. Until 1754 when Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers, brought back a copy of 1744 Laws, cricket’s official rule book, from England.
During the Revolutionary period, Americans even gave up their beloved tea as a sign of defiance against the crown and its oppressive tax regime, switching to coffee instead. What they didn’t give up, however, was cricket. In the story of America’s war of independence, the biggest turning point was arguably the encampment at Valley Forge. The Continental Army had just lost its capital at Philadelphia after a humiliating defeat in the Battle of Brandywine. That’s when Washington moved his men to Valley Forge to rearm and regroup over the winter. This was the peak of anti-British sentiments in American circles. And yet, this is where matches were played with both American and British troops in participation. Washington himself was documented participating in at least one game of wickets.
Years later after Washington was inaugurated as the country’s first President, the question of how to address him arose at the first congressional gathering. In fact, this matter took precedence over all else in those early sessions. While the House voted for a simple “George Washington, President of the United States,” the Senate proved more divided. Some favored “President” while the others favored “Excellency.” The latter group argued that President sounded most ordinary and lacked the aura demanded by the station. Part of this group was none other than John Adams, who would later succeed Washington as the second President of the United States. Although the “Excellency” camp lost this vote, John Adams is recorded to have observed that “even cricket clubs have presidents.”
Birth of Organized Cricket
The transition from informal matches to organized cricket in America began in earnest during the 1830s. A pivotal moment occurred in 1838 when several groups in the Albany vicinity engaged in formal matches. These early organized games set the stage for the establishment of the St. George Cricket Club in Manhattan in 1839, marking the beginning of cricket’s modern era in America. This represented a significant shift in American cricket culture. The club was established in the rear of a tavern on the old Bloomingdale Road in Manhattan, and its founding members included both English immigrants and American enthusiasts.
Through the 1840s, the SGCC fostered the growth of organized cricket in New York and beyond. The club’s early leadership, including John Richard, an English-born publisher of the upper-class sporting weekly, Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, played a crucial role in establishing cricket’s sporting legitimacy. In the spring of 1844, he launched his own outfit to rival SGCC, the New York Cricket Club. He and his editor William T. Porter, who served as the club’s first president, actively recruited members from the city’s literary and artistic communities, broadening the game’s appeal beyond its traditional Anglo-American base. But the new club still didn’t have a field. This problem was solved when a generous financial injection from John Cox Stevens scored them the grounds near Hoboken’s Elysian Fields, across the Hudson River in Jew Jersey. Stevens is sometimes noted as the man who introduced cricket to America, although given he was born in 1785, that seems rather unlikely.
A most widely covered event of the time was an 1844 match that lasted three days. The first day of the match was attended by no fewer than five thousand spectators who spent a staggering $100,000 in bets. That’s 1844 money. The reason for this outsized interest is that it was the world’s first international cricket match, played between the United States and Canada. That’s right, the first international cricket match was played neither in England nor by England. Canada won by twenty-three runs.
According to sport journalist Kevin Boller, the match had come about as a result of a hoax by one Mr. Phillpotts. In 1840, this gentleman had invited the St. George’s Cricket Club of New York to visit Canada for a friendly game against the Toronto Cricket Club, which was to be played on the northern shores of Lake Ontario. When the St. George’s team arrived on August 28, 1840, after a long and exhausting journey through New York and across Lake Ontario, they were shocked to find that the Toronto Cricket Club had no knowledge of the match. Of course, Mr. Phillpotts was nowhere to be found. But the officials of the Toronto Cricket Club, though uncomfortable with the situation, quickly scrambled to organize a game. A hastily convened meeting resulted in a challenge match between the two clubs, with a stake of fifty pounds or about $250 on the line.
Despite the rushed planning, a large crowd of spectators gathered, entertained by the band of the 34th Regiment. The Governor of Upper Canada, Sir George Arthur, was in attendance too. Although the match ended with a ten-wicket win for the Americans, the event was nonetheless a success. A gala dinner followed, and press accounts of the day suggested that the event was thoroughly enjoyed by all. The game in Manhattan, by Boller’s account, was in reciprocation of this gesture. The Americans, on the other hand, hold the Manhattan game as the first face-off between the two countries. At any rate, a lasting relationship between the St. George’s Cricket Club and the Toronto Cricket Club had blossomed. Some call the US-Canada rivalry as the longest running in not only cricket but sport in general.
Later the SGCC also moved out of Manhattan and relocated to Hoboken. As the nation’s population pushed west and south, cricket traveled with it. In 1849, Lincoln, who had just completed a term in Congress as a Whig Representative for Illinois, reportedly attended a match between Chicago and Milwaukee. By this time, approximately 10,000 Americans were playing the game, with countless others in attendance as spectators. Yet, the forces leading to cricket’s decline in the United States were already in motion.
The Philadelphia Cricket Scene
While New York’s cricket culture flourished under the SGCC’s influence, Philadelphia was developing its own distinctive cricket tradition. In fact, this city got into cricket even before New York. William Carvill, a gardener at Haverford College, had introduced the game to students as early as 1834, establishing what would become the first competitive entirely American cricket club. The New York club, on the other hand, was mostly made up of British expatriates. Though short-lived, this initiative planted the seeds for Philadelphia’s eventual emergence as America’s cricket capital.
The Union Cricket Club, founded in 1843 when Robert Waller of the SGCC moved to Philadelphia, became a cornerstone of the city’s cricket culture. The club embraced a more inclusive approach than typical antebellum American outfits, welcoming members from various social backgrounds, including mechanics and craftsmen. This democratic approach, though unusual for the time, helped establish cricket’s broader appeal in Philadelphia. In the mid-1840s, the University of Pennsylvania’s Junior Cricket Club gave another boost to the game’s growth in Philadelphia. The club charged an annual fee of fifty dollars, creating an exclusive but dedicated cricketing community. Their weekly matches and organized practice sessions helped develop a new generation of American cricketers.
The fifth decade saw Philadelphia become the unofficial “Cricket Capital of America” with a large assortment of clubs like the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1854 and the Germantown and Young America clubs in 1855. An 1857 report in Porter’s Spirit spoke of a “cricket fever” raging through Philadelphia and said that “Everybody plays cricket in Philadelphia from the child to the old man.” By now, cricket had become a national obsession. A contemporary report described cricketers as having “faces beaming with, good humor and ruddy health, engendered by exercise,” demonstrating the game’s positive association with a healthy lifestyle. By 1860, cricket had completely edged townball, Philadelphia’s favorite ballgame before cricket, out of the city’s sporting scene. Cricket even spread to the Pennsylvanian countryside where it became the star highlight of village fairs and other such events.
The Expansion Years
By the middle of the nineteenth century, cricket had conquered many cities and towns, including Baltimore, Savannah, Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and even San Francisco. This expansion was facilitated by both English immigrants and American enthusiasts who established new clubs and organized matches in their communities.
By the time of the Civil War, cricket was already far more prevalent in the west than in the south. The game had reached California around 1852. By 1855, San Francisco alone had three clubs, mostly composed of transplants from the East Coast. In the antebellum America, at least 125 cities across twenty-two states were engaged in the game of cricket. According to Wilkes’ Spirit, America had as many as a thousand cricket clubs in the year 1859. The same year, Porter’s Spirit reported some six thousand cricket players within a hundred miles of New York City.
The growth of cricket during this period was supported by extensive media coverage. New York’s sporting journals, particularly Wilkes’ Spirit and The New York Clipper, provided detailed coverage of matches, club activities, and cricket conventions. These publications helped standardize the game’s rules and practices while promoting its spread throughout the country. In fact, as late as 1855, New York newspapers were still devoting more space to cricket than to baseball.
The popularity of cricket in America also attracted English touring teams. Following the English cricket seasons of 1859, 1868, and 1872, sides from England toured the US and Canada as commercial ventures. The 1859 team, captained by George Parr, won all five matches they played. The 1872-73 side included the famous W. G. Grace.
Most matches of these early English touring teams were played “against odds.” This meant that the home team was allowed to have more than eleven players, often twenty-two, to make the contest more even. This practice shows the disparity in skill levels but also the desire to make the games competitive and engaging. The matches were well-attended, with crowds of ten thousand reported at many of the games. The tours helped popularize cricket in the US, while also exposing the significant difference in playing ability between American and English teams.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, especially the early decades, cricket spilled out of its cozy aristocratic confines and became a mainstay in steers and neighborhoods. One of those days, the Newark Daily Advertiser noted how cricket had taken over the sidewalks and neighborhood parks like a possession. Stories of women being hit on their bonnets or even noses by the ball became increasingly commonplace. As did ruined gardens and shattered windowpanes. The mania was so overpowering that youngsters even disregarded local ordinances that banned sports on Sabbath in Jewish neighborhoods. Arrests over such misdemeanors became a daily affair.
Many enthusiasts lived their whole lives obsessed with cricket, down to their final breath. One such example was Thomas Dodsworth who in an address at the SGCC marking its twenty-first anniversary, read out his own epitaph:
Bowled out by death, Here lies old Doddy, A cricketer both soul and body, Who hoped he’d cricket find in Heaven, That he might join some good eleven.
Another enthusiast wrote an even more elaborate ode to the omnipresent game in a newspaper piece:
To the uninitiated, particularly foreigners, cricket appears very tame and stupid: they cannot conceive what amusement there can be in standing up with a log of wood in your hand and devoting all your energies in preventing a ball from hitting three pieces of stick which are placed in the ground. But such men know nothing of the quickness of eye and hand, the bodily strength and activity which are required; and to one not skilled in the game, it must appear wonderful that a good bat is not only able to stop, but even to hit a ball delivered with immense velocity—at such an instant of time that the ball shall fly off at any particular angle which he pleases.
The working class too fell in the grip of this new contagion as employers grew increasingly worried about their workers skipping work to play ball. In 1859, a bank in Philadelphia grew so concerned that it brought a blanket ban on all athletic clubs for its employees. At the same time, there also existed more progressive businesses that saw cricket and baseball as spirit-enhancing activities for their employees and openly fostered participation. Friendly matches were common among such companies. One New York publication even commended such initiatives because “all work and no play” was, in its view, “not the most liberal or humane maxim on which to conduct a business.”
The Death of Cricket
While cricket dominated America’s sporting scene during Lincoln’s early years, things had shifted much by the time he was President. A new game of bat and ball was starting to capture public attention for its simplicity and accessibility. Just before the Civil War, a New York publisher released Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player. The book sold more than 50,000 copies across America and quickly became a favorite among soldiers on both sides of the conflict, who carried it with them as a source of entertainment. The game held appeal for its fast pace, simplicity, and minimal material barrier. Unlike cricket, which demanded skillful craftsmanship for its specialized bat and wickets, baseball only needed a bat, a ball, and four gunnysacks to mark the bases—making it easy for anyone to set up and enjoy, even in the midst of war. An army making a brief stop could easily organize a game of baseball on almost any clear patch of ground.
Baseball wasn’t exactly a novelty though, with the first outfit, the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club going as far back as 1845. At least some publications had already started mentioning the “national game of baseball” by the later years of the fifth decade. In an 1856 issue, the Clipper observed that as a game born “on this Continent,” baseball “is now thoroughly established as an American game, equal, to a certain extent, to the English game of Cricket.” So, evidently, baseball was already making its presence in the lead-up to the Civil War. But after the war, it hit a whole other stratosphere of popularity. In just a few short years, the game eclipsed cricket as America’s new obsession. By the early 1870s, the country had 2,000 clubs, 100,000 players, and well over a quarter million enthusiasts.
Many local cricket clubs too began encouraging the crossover to baseball. Harry Wright, a talented young bowler from the SGCC, moved to the newly established Cincinnati Red Stockings, and applied the “scientific” batting and specialized fielding he learned from cricket to his new sport. This development was instrumental in creating the Cincinnati team’s undefeated 1869 season. Wright’s transition from cricket to baseball helped crystallize the latter’s place as the national pastime.
While the ease of gameplay and inexpensive equipment barrier certainly played a role, a third equally instrumental factor in the decline of cricket was racism. Cricket clubs, often comprised of the English American elite, were also known to have rejected Irish, Italian, and German immigrants from playing, which did not help the game’s popularity. As new waves of immigration brought more non-English speakers to American shores, cricket became less and less accessible to bigger and bigger demographics. Also, Americans may have desired a national game distinct from that of their former colonial master. Cricket was considered “the English game” and became increasingly associated with foreign heritage. In 1923, Seattle would even ban cricket, fearing that residents were becoming too similar to their Canadian neighbors. The terrible defeats inflicted on Americans by a traveling English side in 1859 may have also disheartened Americans, making them believe they could never be successful at a game that didn’t belong to them. A case in point is the Boston Cricket Club from Massachusetts. Founded in 1857 and maintained as a key domestic rival to the clubs of New York, the outfit pretty much lost its will to continue three years later after suffering a series of defeats against other Massachusetts clubs.
But cricket didn’t go down with a whimper, particularly in Philadelphia. The Merion Cricket Club was founded just as the Civil War came to an end, and its members resolutely refused attempts to turn the club into a baseball club. This was the only place in all of America where the upper-class patrons actively resisted every move to democratize cricket because they truly held it in a higher esteem than baseball. Its leisurely pace and the high degree of skill it demanded appealed to the amateur gentlemen who prided themselves in their love of what they called a “pure sport” and a “morally superior” alternative to the American sport. This is why even as baseball swept across the continent as the new favorite, Philadelphia remained a resilient island of cricketing tradition well into the twentieth century.
In 1878, the city witnessed a notable achievement when a local team held the formidable Australian squad to a draw before fifteen thousand spectators. The Philadelphia cricket scene reached even greater heights fifteen years later, when they defeated the Australians outright. At its peak, Philadelphia boasted more than a hundred cricket clubs. Haverford College remains the only American institution still maintaining a varsity cricket team. Every neighborhood had its own cricket team, and contributed players to the prestigious Gentlemen of Philadelphia, who toured England in the nineteenth century.
At the onset of the Civil War, the Clipper launched a new campaign to keep the New York cricketing tradition from dying. As part of this campaign, cricket clubs were encouraged to recruit baseball players and hold matches between baseball players and cricketers. Much cross-pollination followed as a result and baseball players started showing up on cricketing rosters in increasing numbers. An all-star match between Newark and Long Island elevens in the fall of 1860 saw a number of celebrated baseball players compete on both sides. The event drew the largest audience ever seen on the East New York grounds and led to the formation of Brooklyn’s American Cricket Club with some of the most famous baseball players of the time on its team. Friendly games of both cricket and baseball between cricketers and baseball players became a common New York phenomenon and proved wildly successful. In other words, at least in New York, cricket’s biggest nemesis also proved to be its only lifeline in these years of relative decline.
Other cities, including St. Louis, Boston, Detroit, and Baltimore, also saw new cricket clubs form during this time. In 1881, five elite academic institutions—Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Trinity College—came together to form the Intercollegiate Cricket Association. Haverford and Cornell later joined, and though Yale and John Hopkins never fielded teams, the ICA lasted until 1924. In New York, members of the Seabright Lawn Tennis Club became so interested in cricket that they changed the name to the Seabright Lawn Tennis and Cricket Club in 1885.
The bastion of American cricket, however, even in its dying years, remained in Philadelphia. The biggest name in nineteenth century cricket was also a Philadelphian. John Barton King was the first bowler to have employed the swing bowling technique deliberately. It gave him a significant advantage over other bowlers, earning him the nickname “the angler” for his seemingly effortless ability to dismiss batsmen.
In 1897, the Philadelphians embarked on their first strictly first-class tour of England, following years of planning. The tour was ambitious, and they did not necessarily expect to win many matches. They faced top county teams, the Oxford and Cambridge University teams, and the Marylebone Cricket Club. Initially, they struggled, but in a match against Sussex at Brighton, King scored 107 runs, and then took seven wickets for just thirteen runs, leading the team to victory. In the second innings of that same match, King took six for 102 and led the team to an eight-wicket victory.
The Philadelphians toured England again in 1903 and this time, the team was rarely outmatched. One highlight of this tour was the defeat of Gloucestershire by an innings and twenty-six runs, which was the worst defeat an American side had ever inflicted on an English county team. This success led some to believe that the US was on the verge of bursting onto the world cricket stage. King’s bowling was particularly remarkable, and English observers were comparing the Philadelphians to some of the best Australian sides they had seen until that point.
During a 1908 tour of England, King set bowling records that would stand for over fifty years. He closed the tour with a bowling average of with an average of 11.01, a record that would only be beaten in 1958. Legend has it he could send a cricket ball to a second-story window with the snap of his fingers. By the time his career ended, however, cricket was on its way out of the continent. The last first-class match in Philadelphia was played in 1913, and Barton King’s Belmont Cricket Club sold its grounds and disbanded the following year.
Today’s America views cricket as an effeminate sport and dismisses it as one for delicate, elitist players. This stereotype likely arises from the game’s slower pace and its traditional white uniforms, with players even breaking for tea during lengthy international matches. Ironically, the sport that replaced it was one that itself evolved from rounders, a game once played by British schoolgirls.
Further Reading
St. George’s Society of New York. A History of St. George’s Society of New York: From 1770 to 1913. USA, St. George’s Society of New York, 1913.
Kirsch, George B. The Creation of American Team Sports: Baseball and Cricket, 1838-72. USA, University of Illinois Press, 1989.
McCullough, David. John Adams. USA, Simon & Schuster, 2001.
“The History of Cricket in the United States.” Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian Institution, 12 October 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-history-of-cricket-in-the-united-states-132185661. Accessed 26 December 2024.