Abner Doubleday (June 26, 1819 – January 26, 1893)[1] was a career United States Army officer and Union major general in the American Civil War.

His father, Ulysses F., fought in the War of 1812, published newspapers and books, and represented Auburn, New York, for four years in the United States Congress.

He was appointed brigadier general of volunteers on February 3, 1862, and was assigned to duty in northern Virginia while the Army of the Potomac conducted the Peninsula Campaign.

In the actions at Brawner's farm, just before the Second Battle of Bull Run, he took the initiative to send two of his regiments to reinforce Brigadier General John Gibbon's brigade against a larger Confederate force, fighting it to a standstill.

At Antietam, he led his men into the deadly fighting in the Cornfield and the West Woods, and one colonel described him as a "gallant officer ... remarkably cool and at the very front of battle.

[5] On July 2, 1863, Army of the Potomac commander Maj. Gen. George G. Meade replaced Doubleday with Major General John Newton, a more junior officer from another corps.

The ostensible reason was a false report by XI Corps commander Major General Oliver O. Howard that Doubleday's corps broke first, causing the entire Union line to collapse, but Meade also had a long history of disdain for Doubleday's combat effectiveness, dating back to South Mountain.

Doubleday was humiliated by this snub and held a lasting grudge against Meade, but he returned to division command and fought well for the remainder of the battle.

[6] He formally requested reinstatement as I Corps commander, but Meade refused, and Doubleday left Gettysburg on July 7 for Washington.

[10] Doubleday's staff nicknamed him "Forty-Eight Hours" as a compliment to recognize his tendency to avoid reckless or impulsive actions and his thoughtfulness and deliberateness in considering circumstances and possible responses.

[11] In recent years, biographers have turned the nickname into an insult, incorrectly claiming "Forty-Eight Hours" was coined to highlight Doubleday's supposed incompetence and slowness to act.

[11] Doubleday assumed administrative duties in the defenses of Washington, D.C., where he was in charge of courts martial, which gave him legal experience that he used after the war.

He was stationed in San Francisco from 1869 through 1871 and he took out a patent for the cable car railway that still runs there, receiving a charter for its operation, but signing away his rights when he was reassigned.

When two of the founders of that society, Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, moved to India at the end of that year, he was constituted as the president of the American body.

[12] Although Doubleday achieved minor fame as a competent combat general with experience in many important Civil War battles, he is more widely known as the supposed inventor of the game of baseball, in Elihu Phinney's cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.

The committee's final report, on December 30, 1907, stated, in part, that "the first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839."

It concluded by saying, "in the years to come, in the view of the hundreds of thousands of people who are devoted to baseball, and the millions who will be, Abner Doubleday's fame will rest evenly, if not quite as much, upon the fact that he was its inventor ... as upon his brilliant and distinguished career as an officer in the Federal Army.

He wrote, "Robert Henderson, Harold Seymour, and other scholars have since debunked the Doubleday-Cooperstown myth, which nonetheless remains powerful in the American imagination because of the efforts of Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown."

Furthermore, the primary testimony to the commission that connected baseball to Doubleday was that of Abner Graves, whose credibility is questionable; a few years later, he shot his wife to death and was committed to an institution for the criminally insane for the rest of his life.

[26] In World War II, the United States liberty ship SS Abner Doubleday was named in his honor.

In the mini-series North and South, George Hazzard is seen watching a primitive form of baseball with a wounded Orry Main, while referring to the game being invented by Doubleday, a fellow West Point cadet.