In 1862 fifty-one-year-old Captain Otto Boetticher of the German-American 68th NY celebrated the Fourth of July in a North Carolina POW camp. A highlight of the festivities was a baseball game played by prisoners. A professional painter and lithographer who had served in the Prussian Army, Boetticher was known for military subjects; his 1851 work, Seventh Regiment on Review, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows the famous New York City militia unit parading on Washington Square. Boetticher returned to the city after the war, serving as a German consular agent, and died there in 1886. He drew a poignant panorama of the Salisbury prison camp that includes the baseball game of July 4th, 1862. The drawing served as the basis of the above color print, published in 1863. Dozens of the participants, the umpire, scorers and spectators are clearly portraits of individuals. The players on one side are wearing red ribbons pinned to their their shirts.

Boetticher conveys prison life with some humor. Pigs are being fed. Oblivious to the baseball game, Confederate prison guards are throwing dice. A prisoner is caught stealing food from the camp kitchen. Behind a low wall in the distant shadows we get a glimpse of a man squatting on a latrine. In 1912 the Buffalo Enquirer reported that Chicago Cubs owner Albert Spalding had discovered a copy of the Boetticher print and was looking for former Salisbury POWs to help him identify its subjects. “Those who have carefully examined the drawing,” wrote the Enquirer, “feel convinced” that two of the men in the picture were the famous Generals Phil Kearny and Franz Sigel. Convinced or not, they were wrong; neither one was ever imprisoned at Salisbury (and Kearny would have been pretty conspicuous with his one arm). But the officer with the good seat, the rightmost spectator, is clearly Colonel Michael Corcoran, the charismatic Irishman who commanded New York’s Fighting 69th. Both the uniform details and the unusual forward sweep of his hair are correct.

In his memoirs Oberlin College Classics professor Giles W. Shurtleff, one of the second basemen in this game, describes playing daily baseball games at Salisbury. He recalled one particular game in which his team held a late-inning, one-run lead. “A long fly ball was hit toward the Captain in right field,” Shurtleff said, “but in order to catch it and win the game, he was forced to cross the ‘deadline,’ the demarcation between the prison yard and escape. In that instant he had to decide if he would cross the line, with the very real risk of being shot, or let the ball drop harmlessly to the ground giving advantage to the other team. He opted to make the catch because he was fairly certain the guard on duty that day would not shoot. They won the game.”