Gambling in Virginia Against the Norm

Quakers experienced a like fate as they tried to found the colony of Pennsylvania with similar regulations against gaming.

Basing their restrictions upon Sabbatarian ideals, an aversion to idleness, an attachment to the godly life, and an apprehensiveness about the disruptive effects of gaming on society, the followers of William Penn tried to prohibit betting between 1682 and 1740 through a series of 'blue laws'.

The statutes proved somewhat successful among the relatively homogeneous settlers of the early colony, but as the population grew more diverse after 1715, gambling became more common.

The Friends were also thwarted by the continuing opposition of English monarchs and Privy Councils to saintly limitations on gaming.

The Crown objected not only to the colony's ban of lotteries, which interfered with the sale of English tickets in Pennsylvania, but also to Quaker laws against traditional pastimes like cockfights, card games, and stage plays, which all the King's subjects had a right to enjoy.

Settling in the New World, they hoped to leave behind the aristocratic traditions that plagued England and established instead more lofty guidelines for conducting life.

The saintly colonizers did not initially reckon with the disruptive forces, from both within and without, that undermined the purity of new societies.

Infections like Morton of Ma-re Mount could easily be cured in the early years of settlement, but as time passed, the immunity of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to gambling diminished in the face of growth and diversity inside the colonies as well as royal protests from across the Atlantic.

Although doomed to decline, however, these holy experiments succeeded for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in upholding saintly attitudes toward leisure and recreation and preserving sanctions against such practices as gambling and cockfighting.

The degree to which these colonies challenged conventional patterns of play can be measured by contrasting them with early Virginia, Maryland, New York, and South Carolina, where settlers generally adhered to traditional notions of popular recreation.

In the seventeenth century, Virginians led the way in transplanting English patterns to the New World in an effort to preserve aristocratic culture.

Though gaming in the Old Dominion underwent significant changes in adjusting to the western frontier of the British empire, it drew its inspiration from the types of play that characterized preindustrial stratified land-based society in Tudor-Stuart England.

The founders of Virginia initially placed gambling on the same legal footing as in England.

Betting supposedly remained a 'gentleman's privilege', except during the Christmas season when commoners could wager in private homes, or in their master's household with his consent.

This restriction no doubt fell short of banning year-round play among the lower orders, but it did reiterate the elite's customary leadership in matters of gaming.

Without the refinements of English society, however, colonists on the imperial frontier adopted a type of racing more fitted to the wilderness of the New World.

Early Virginia sportsmen held informal road sprints rather than organized meets at regular tracks, and nobody kept or bred horses strictly for the turf during the seventeenth century.