Class of 1881, 2/2: Col. James Lee

Colonel James Lee (1796-1874), Builder
Eligible: 1871
Contributions: Original Gotham member (1837), likely importer of the (prototypical) game to New York City.

This will be a quick one, because so little is known of Lee's life and his baseball career. Because the historiography of baseball starts, essentially, with the Knickerbocker's 1845 rules and scorebook, little is known of the history of the game to that point. We do know that, according to Wheaton's late-19th-century interview that Col. Lee was one of the original 1837 Gotham club members, the first group we know of to write the rules of the game down. He was important enough to the Gotham and to baseball that in 1846 the Knickerbockers, shortly after forming, named him an honorary member.

Col. Lee was born in 1796 and remembered later in life playing a version of baseball growing up in New York. A soldier stationed typically in New York, John Thorn suggests that he fraternized and played ball with fellow soldiers during the War of 1812, possibly at the 'Parade,' a plot of land set aside for military drills that would become Madison Square, the site of many Manhattan ballgames in later decades, and eventually Madison Square Garden.

President of the New York Chamber of Commerce as an adult, John Montgomery Ward in his 1888 attempt at writing the early history of the game described him as a "gentleman eminently worthy of belief." Lee, as one of the earliest players in New York and one of the founders of the Gotham, had a heavy hand in baseball's selection as the game of choice for young men, according to Ward (via his source and original Knick William Ladd). He wrote that Lee and his friends chose Base Ball as an inherently American game, and not a foreign invention like cricket. Mere years after the revolution, America was quickly building an identity, and baseball proved an excellent proxy for the culture war against cricket and the English.

In 1907 when Spalding sent reams of evidence to AG Mills (who came to the unfortunate conclusion that Abner Doubleday invented baseball), Spalding listed Lee as one of the seven most influential originators of the sport. Considering that Spalding had been entrenched in the highest levels of the game since the amateur era, and considering the amount of research and discussion he had conducted, his findings were not baseless.

We don't know much of Lee's later life, but he passed in 1874, leaving a little-told and hardly explored, but undoubtedly significant impact on the sport of baseball in New York and, ultimately, America.

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