The Civil War Baseball Card Project is a unique initiative started in 2011 that aims to honor the lives of soldiers who fought in the American Civil War through baseball cards featuring their portraits and biographies. Baseball cards are a quintessential part of American culture and have long been used to memorialize athletes, so the project’s founders thought they would be a fitting way to remember the ordinary men who participated in America’s defining conflict.
The brainchild of Kentucky history professors James Ramage and Kevin Watkins, the Civil War Baseball Card Project seeks to collect information on at least one Union and Confederate soldier from every county in the United States that contributed troops during the Civil War. Their names, hometowns, military service details, and fates are then printed on baseball-style trading cards along with a photo or likeness of the soldier when possible. Over 250,000 men lost their lives in the Civil War, yet many remained nameless and faceless in the history books. This project personalizes the enormous human cost of the war by putting names and biographies to some of the individuals who fought and died.
To assemble the cards, Ramage and Watkins enlist the help of students, genealogists, historians, and others to research soldiers from each county. Vital records, muster rolls, pension applications, cemetery listings, and other primary sources are mined to uncover biographical details on particular soldiers. Photos are sought from libraries, archives, and private collections. If no image exists, artists are sometimes commissioned to render a likeness. Each card contains information like the soldier’s full name, birth/death dates, military unit, rank, key battles participated in, and fate such as killed, wounded, POW, or surviving the war.
So far over 1,200 baseball cards have been produced representing soldiers from 44 U.S. states and territories. The cards are available for free on the project’s website as well as through various history organizations and Civil War round tables. They have also been featured in local and national media outlets. Printed sets of cards for each state are distributed to schools, libraries, and historical sites to help teach students about the war’s human toll. Teachers have found the cards engaging for students by bringing the distant past to life through individual stories.
In addition to preserving soldiers’ memories, the project aims to spark new historical research. Researchers comb through records to find just enough biographical information to fill out a single card, but their work often uncovers many new details left undiscovered. This sheds new light on the service of lesser-known regiments and helps uncover lost stories from the home front. Genealogists in particular have been able to use the cards to break through brick walls in their family history research by identifying an elusive Civil War ancestor.
The project has also received support from professional sports organizations. In 2016 the Louisville Bats, a Minor League Baseball team, partnered with the project to produce a special set of baseball cards featuring local Civil War soldiers. The team sold the cards at games and donated proceeds to support further card production and research. Other teams have since followed suit. These partnerships have helped expand the project’s audience and financial backing while tying American national pastimes of baseball and history more closely together.
Looking to the future, Ramage, Watkins and their team of volunteers plan to continue researching soldiers to represent all 3,000 U.S. counties that supplied troops. They also aim to digitize and make searchable their entire card database online. This will allow for easy access to the biographical information and stories of soldiers from any location. As more primary records are digitized each day, the project founders are optimistic even more lost stories can be uncovered through continued collaboration. Their goal is that through creative history initiatives like the Civil War Baseball Card Project, we never forget the price paid by ordinary Americans on both sides of the conflict that shaped the nation.
