The Sheer Audacity of Gambling
The American wilderness permitted greater mobility between social strata.
At the same time that it also encouraged an individualism and a pragmatism that undermined conventional paths of hierarchical authority--- by weakening notions of gentility and noble virtue.
The wilderness also eroded to some degree the extremes of wealth and status that characterized society in the mother country, and it inhibited the urban and business orientations that were hastening the commercialization of leisure in Britain.
As a result, while many colonists strove to follow aristocratic example, the cultural milieu of eighteenth-century America already differed so much from England's that faithful imitation was well nigh impossible.
The distinctive gambling habits of colonists and Englishmen mirrored a broader divergence between the two societies.
The colonists adopted many traditional games but often in modified form.
They played cards, but without the wide publicity or the enormous wagers that typified high living in London clubs; they raced horses, but not in the opulent and pedigreed manner of the English nobility; they attended cockfights, but never so frequently or enthusiastically as Englishmen.
Gambling did become a fashionable pastime in tidewater Virginia and South Carolina.
But there was a great difference between a planter staking a hundredweight of tobacco on the outcome of a horse race in the Virginia countryside, and a nobleman wagering thousands of pounds sterling during a single setting in an exclusive London club.
Virginia gentlemen also worried about preserving the landed basis of authority, but they were surely more concerned with protecting their family estates and their hand-earned personal liberty.
Members of the colonial elite remained ever aware that they had wrested success from the wilderness.
They consequently lacked the nobleman's senses of tradition and absolute self-certainty, for what toil had won might also be lost in North America. Along with their estates, planters had acquired an independence.
Ownership of land conferred some degree of self-determination, and Virginians guarded that liberty vigilantly. One of the benefits of economic self-sufficiency had traditionally been the right to gamble freely, but now excessive gaming came to be regarded as a threat to that precarious independence.
Landon Carter voiced the opposition of the planter elite to excessive gambling. He viewed betting less favorably than other leading planters, in part because of his 'old ill luck' at cards and in part because the practice had supposedly corrupted his intemperate children.
Carter noted resentfully that his sons mocked his inept cardplaying, neglected their aged father and their own families by periodically leaving home in order 'to push fortune', and ran up high gambling debts that he was expected to pay.
He was most seriously concerned, however, that too much betting threatened a man's freedom to govern his own life. Fearing that his heirs would gamble away the whole estate as well as the family reputation, the diarist was unhappily sure that his sporting son had become 'every man's man, but his own and his father's'.
