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The Colonists and Early Forms of Gambling

The English aristocracy supplied the money and the example that turned gaming into a popular commercial pastime pervading much of eighteenth-century life.

However, the nobility never really made the Atlantic crossing. Members of the new American elites generally had neither the leisure, wealth, nor inclination to gamble like peers of the realm.

The imperial frontier offered a chance for new governing high living and deep play among the nobility in Britain.

Mid-eighteenth century colonists, even in New England and Pennsylvania, showed great interest in borrowing English cultural forms, perhaps to demonstrate the arrival of civilization in the American wilderness.

So some imported English bloodstock, built regular race tracks, attended cockfights, and played cards and dice.

Yet gambling in the colonies still lacked the commitment, the excess, and the entrepreneurial organization that belonged to the more stratified, genteel commercial society of Georgian England.

Colonists wagered as adventurers, not aristocrats, and American forms of gambling reflected frontier culture more than they mirrored British precedents.

The nobility did not provide the only difference between gambling in the two societies. The extent to which the colonies diverged from the mother country was expressed as well in their approach to the lottery, which evinced the shaping of the frontier.

Lotteries in England survived the demise of the Virginia Company and on the eve of the eighteenth century had become an important source of government revenue.

The contests remained a Crown monopoly until 1694 when Parliament began exercising the privilege.

The government permitted private lotteries from time to time, but for the most part of it suppresses unauthorized schemes that competed with state contests.

England raised substantial amounts of revenue from lotteries throughout the eighteenth century. The importance of the device was no doubt heightened by the conspicuous failure of other new measures developed to find government.

Lotteries remained a reliable source of revenue while Englishmen considered other methods of raising money.

Until reformers protested against them toward the end of the century, the schemes were well-suited to a people intrigued by speculation but unsure how best to turn it to their advantage.

Colonists in North America included the lottery among the cultural freight they imported from England. They sponsored schemes similar in operation to traditional forms, and they often employed lotteries to raise money for the same purposes as Englishmen.

Americans generally scaled their lotteries down in size and used the device to facilitate private as well as public business. Their schemes suited a decentralized society on the western edge of empire.