Professional Gamblers' Take on Gambling

Southerners tried with little success to borrow English customs.

As a result, their cultural practices inevitably reflected the nature of their own slave society more than their imitation of Europeans.

Gambling was encouraged by the same distinctly regional conditions that fostered dueling.

The planter elite cultivated a pessimistic world view that stressed restraint of such passions as competitiveness and aggression, instincts which, if left unchecked, threatened to undermine a precarious social order.

To defuse disruptive tensions, Southerners tended to personalize and ceremonalize potentially explosive disagreements.

The symbol and ceremony of the duel helped to minimize social dangers by reducing conflict to purely personal terms and formalizing it as a drawn-out ritual.

Gambling likely served a similar function in planter society by ritualizing competition and confining aggression in a personal context that still managed to uphold codes of honor and manliness.

Like dueling, card playing and horse racing assumed of considerable cultural importance in the old South as valuable outlets for troublesome passions.

Gambling thus became an integral strand in the fabric of southern civilization. When Southerners migrated to the frontier, their attitudes toward betting became even more tolerant.

In the North and the South, gaming had been encouraged by national and regional orientations, but it had remained comparatively moderate in tone and stagnant in form.

In the lower Mississippi Valley, gambling became a legitimate, highly organized enterprise.

In that region, professional sharps and their gaming practices mirrored frontier ways of life, came to be identified closely with unsettled frontier conditions, and changed as the frontier itself evolved into a more stable society.

Gambling along the western rivers assumed both the openness that Northerners tried to repress and the passion that Southerners sought to subdue.

As a result, gaming practices new to the American scene, such as casino games and draw poker, took root there and eventually branched out to the rest of the nation.

Between 1800 and 1848, the old Southwest served as the principal point of origin for new kinds of American betting.

The southern frontier consisted of two geographic components. Between the settled coasts and river valleys stood numerous backcountries in the forests and hills of the interior that comprised an 'inner frontier'.

These patches, dispersed and heterogeneous, are difficult to conceptualize as one geopgraphic or social entity.

Similarly, because the areas were settled at different times and at different paces, they defy description as a single chronological frontier.

When pioneers entered these diverse locales, they did not often stay for long, so circumstances of life there, including gambling games, sometimes retained a degree of western unsettledness.

Patches of the southern interior are best viewed as backwoods districts, not as a well-defined frontier.

Southerners tried with little success to borrow English customs.

As a result, their cultural practices inevitably reflected the nature of their own slave society more than their imitation of Europeans.

Gambling was encouraged by the same distinctly regional conditions that fostered dueling.

The planter elite cultivated a pessimistic world view that stressed restraint of such passions as competitiveness and aggression, instincts which, if left unchecked, threatened to undermine a precarious social order.

To defuse disruptive tensions, Southerners tended to personalize and ceremonalize potentially explosive disagreements.

The symbol and ceremony of the duel helped to minimize social dangers by reducing conflict to purely personal terms and formalizing it as a drawn-out ritual.

Gambling likely served a similar function in planter society by ritualizing competition and confining aggression in a personal context that still managed to uphold codes of honor and manliness.

Like dueling, card playing and horse racing assumed of considerable cultural importance in the old South as valuable outlets for troublesome passions.

Gambling thus became an integral strand in the fabric of southern civilization. When Southerners migrated to the frontier, their attitudes toward betting became even more tolerant.

In the North and the South, gaming had been encouraged by national and regional orientations, but it had remained comparatively moderate in tone and stagnant in form.

In the lower Mississippi Valley, gambling became a legitimate, highly organized enterprise.

In that region, professional sharps and their gaming practices mirrored frontier ways of life, came to be identified closely with unsettled frontier conditions, and changed as the frontier itself evolved into a more stable society.

Gambling along the western rivers assumed both the openness that Northerners tried to repress and the passion that Southerners sought to subdue.

As a result, gaming practices new to the American scene, such as casino games and draw poker, took root there and eventually branched out to the rest of the nation.

Between 1800 and 1848, the old Southwest served as the principal point of origin for new kinds of American betting.

The southern frontier consisted of two geographic components. Between the settled coasts and river valleys stood numerous backcountries in the forests and hills of the interior that comprised an 'inner frontier'.

These patches, dispersed and heterogeneous, are difficult to conceptualize as one geopgraphic or social entity.

Similarly, because the areas were settled at different times and at different paces, they defy description as a single chronological frontier.

When pioneers entered these diverse locales, they did not often stay for long, so circumstances of life there, including gambling games, sometimes retained a degree of western unsettledness.

Patches of the southern interior are best viewed as backwoods districts, not as a well-defined frontier.