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The Englishmen and Gambling
Horse racing in New York, South Carolina, and Virginia marked the high point of the development of traditional English recreations in the colonies.
But as colonists paid more attention to imitating the English forms, it must have become clear to them how much American gaming differed from play in the mother country.
Though non-Puritan settlers had tried to transplant the traditional games of England to the fresh fields of North America, they ended up with hybrid forms of gambling that departed from British precedents.
Nobility never made much impact in society on the imperial frontier.
The American wilderness swallowed up most vestiges of inherited privilege, and so prevented the successful duplication in the colonies of gaming in England, where aristocrats set the example of extensive betting during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
By all accounts, Englishmen gambled more often and more visibly than American colonists. Not even gentry Virginia could match the utter devotion of the mother country to gaming, a pastime that there ran 'like a red thread through eighteenth-century life'.
Englishmen of all classes wagered on all types of play. Observers were particularly struck by the national passion for such blood sports as cockfighting.
In fact, this seemingly perverse fascination with cruelty and risk provoked critical reconsideration of British ways.
Foreigners had long enough disapproved the English lust for such recreations as cockfighting, bull baiting, dog fighting, badger baiting, and cock scaling before William Hogarth became one of the first Englishmen to bring the point home to his countrymen in his print 'The Cockpit'.
Hogarth stressed neither the aggressiveness of the gamecocks nor the cruelty of their handlers, but the sadism of spectators, who typified the national tendency to derive pleasure from betting on brutal 'fight to the death'.
Additional voices soon joined the call to reform national pastimes. George III was another early opponent of gambling and discouraged it at Court.
By the 1790s, the urge to improve society by reducing vulgarity, to make the gentility truly genteel, had grown stronger. Perhaps incipient industrialism encouraged a social discipline that revitalized puritan attitudes toward play.
As reformers clamored for change, they yet pointed to two deeply entrenched obstacles.
One was the government, which had stoked the flames of the gambling craze by sponsoring regular nationwide lotteries to raise revenue.
The other was the intransigent aristocracy. How could reformers suppress the lowly gambling houses that degraded London, and convince sporting Englishmen to refine their pastimes, if noblemen continued to play so excessively in fashionable clubs?