Counting both sides, a total of more than three million soldiers fought in the Civil War. Alexander Babcock was two of them.

Alexander Babcock was the brother of William Babcock, a founding member of the Atlantic baseball club of Brooklyn, baseball’s first dynasty and the winningest club of the pre-professional era. In the 1850s both men worked as engravers, lived in Brooklyn, and played for the Atlantics. Like thousands of their fellow baseball players, when the Civil War broke out in 1861, they joined the Union army.

In the fall of 1862, after he had finished his service with a New York regiment, Alexander Babcock joined a group of friends including A. T. Pearsall, star first baseman of another Brooklyn baseball club, the Excelsiors, snuck down to Richmond, Virginia, and offered his services to the Confederacy. A practicing physician, Pearsall spent much of the war as a military surgeon in the (Confederate) 9th Kentucky Cavalry. Babcock helped print currency in Richmond before putting down his burin, picking up a Colt, and joining the infamous cavalry unit Mosby’s Rangers. (That’s another story — and a good one).

What led Babcock and Pearsall to switch sides? They never said. But there is an over-sized clue in their timing. On June 19, 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Territorial Abolition Act, which outlawed slavery in all territories outside the control of any state, i.e., much of the West. On July 22nd the other shoe dropped; Lincoln read the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. From that moment onward Lincoln was publicly committed to abolishing slavery throughout the United States; it was only a matter of how and how soon. Before and during the Civil War, many New Yorkers and other Northerners were torn between loyalty to the Union and ideological support of slavery. (It is widely forgotten that slavery had ended only a generation earlier in New York state). Pro-slavery and even pro-Confederate sentiment ran high in New York City, where in 1861 Mayor Fernando Wood threatened that the city would secede from the Union rather than cooperate with the Northern war effort. For men like Pearsall and Babcock, preservation of the Union was a worthy cause; abolition of slavery was not.

Alexander Babcock (back row, third from right), posing with fellow members of the notorious irregular cavalry unit Mosby’s Rangers, who frightened even their own commander, General Robert E. Lee. Colonel John S. Mosby himself is seated in the center with legs crossed.

Babcock’s military career raises an interesting legal question. Was he a traitor? By the nature of civil war itself, treason was a thorny issue in the postwar years. Immediately after the war President Lincoln issued individual pardons for treason to various ex-Confederates. The legal consensus then and now is that accepting a pardon carries an implicit acknowledgement of guilt. Certainly, there are many examples of Americans refusing pardons on the grounds that they are innocent. In 1867 former CSA President Jefferson Davis was about to stand trial on treason charges. His lawyers were preparing to argue that when his home state of Mississippi left the Union, he was no longer a citizen of the United States. This, of course, begs the question that was the casus belli. If secession was legal and the Confederacy was a legitimate independent state, then a citizen of that state could not be committing treason merely by serving in its army. A person cannot be guilty of betraying someone else’s country. A possible point in favor of Davis’s argument is the fact that the U.S. government treated captured Confederate soldiers as POWs, not as criminals. Perhaps partly out of fear that trying Davis might establish awkward precedents on the legality of secession, President Andrew Johnson issued a blanket pardon for the crime of treason that covered all former Confederate soldiers and officials. The Jefferson Davis trial never took place. Of course, it is hard to see how Davis’s hypothetical legal defense would have applied to Alexander Babcock, who was born and raised in New Jersey.

After the war Babcock remained in Richmond, started a successful ice business, and played baseball with a local club into the late 1860s. A. T. Pearsall married a nurse from Alabama and settled in her hometown after the war. He helped found one of the first baseball clubs in that state. In 1878, however, the divorced Pearsall returned to the Binghamton area in upstate New York, where his family came from. When he died there in 1903 his obituaries said nothing about his military service or his time in the South.