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Diversity Towards Gambling

The threat to traditional notions of recreation appeared in the form of organized horse racing in Boston area.

This first rose around 1715 and became firmly entrenched after 1765.

To the south, particularly in less settled regions, planters grew alarmed after mid-century as evangelical Baptists, a product of religious upheaval, appeared bent on 'destroying pleasure in the country'.

Puritan and planter cultures grew more similar because New England and Virginia societies grew more complex.

The course of the development of gambling in the colonies suggests that Americans, in gaining independence from England, did not recapture homogeneity but rather 'legitimated' new kinds of conflict over cultural styles within the colonies.

Self-determination extended beyond politics and economics to lifestyles, and tended to be subsumed under the heading of religious toleration.

Independence mandated that evangelical Baptists, Massachusetts Puritans, Pennsylvania Quakers, or genteel Anglicans coexist with Americans of different religious preferences and, implicitly, different cultural orientations.

Tensions emerged between seaboard residents and backcountry settlers over a number of economic, political, and military issues as well as over cultural orientations.

The differences between coastal and interior populations became clearer after the American Revolution as the new republic paid increasing attention to its emerging West.

Observers of the early American frontier pointed so highly visible gambling as one of the characteristic features of the region.

In the 1760s, Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister, documented the prevalence of gambling amid footloose peoples in the Carolina backcountry.

The itinerant became particularly incensed at the tendency of the unsettled population, allegedly led by New Lights, or dissenting evangelical preachers, to indulge in gambling and immediately after his religious services.

Woodmason ultimately listed 'Gaming and Gambling among the many practices of the backcountry population that in his view prompted vigilantism by Regulators.

Other commentators confirmed Woodmason's observation that gambling flourished in newly settled regions among the many idle people.

Fithian, the Presbyterian cleric, noted how quickly a frontier militia in 1775, ostensibly mustered to prepare for war against the British, turned the occasion into a day of drinking and horse racing.

Similar sentiments were repeated a quarter century later by Timothy Dwight, who noticed the prevalence of 'low vices' among the people of western upstate New York, and by an English traveler, who wrote that the inhabitants of western towns were generally devoted to gambling on horse races, cockfights, card games, and billiards, and fighting over the outcome of such contests.

Adventurers were continuing to migrate westward and cultivate new forms of gambling.

The unique kind of horse racing that developed in western settlements summed up the novelty of gaming on the early frontier.