New Internet Casino Report Center
Gambling as a form of Amusement
A style of risk taking had blossomed as a cultural attribute that marked Americans as a distinctive people.
Their attachment to risk and change intensified their urge to gamble.
On the one hand, betting games created for participants the conditions of pure equality denied them in real life.
The mixture of chance and comparison, in a sphere set apart from the working world, appealed to this generation of egalitarians, for all white male adults who gambled stood as equals shared the opportunity to gain.
Gambling differentiated between winners and losers, and so provided the distinctions that individuals hoped would set themselves apart from each other.
Almost every American prided himself on his country's democratic condition, but he simultaneously strove to prove that he was better than others by making the most of his opportunities to stand apart from the undifferentiated mass.
Gambling facilitated this quest ideally. A man displayed his equality by sitting down to play in the first place, but hoped that the game's outcome would make him more equal than other citizens.
Gambling reiterated both the egalitarianism and the enterprising individualism of the antebellum period.
While nationwide attitudes reinforced the urge to wager, within the United States the residents of different regions approached gambling in different ways.
Timothy Dwight, a staunch New Englander, resented European accounts that portrayed vulgar betting at a national pastime in the new republic, and insisted that his own chaste region be distinguished from southern and western societies.
Within several years, foreign travelers' perceptions had sharpened enough to recognize the distinctions between North, South, and West.
The Southerner's fondness for gambling received some some attention from those seeking to understand the distinctiveness of the Slave States.
The South and its frontier contained not only the sharpers who flourished along the rivers of the region, but also the national 'fountain head' of gaming, New Orleans, and the majority of American race tracks.
The section's tolerance for gaming has mostly been explained as a consequence of European cultural orientations that took deep root in southern, rather than northern,, soil.
Gambling as practiced in new Orleans resulted in part from the weight of Spanish and French tradition.
Moreover, Southerners inherited colonial Virginians' preference for English fashions of horse racing and card playing.
British gambling traditions no doubt appealed to a slave-owning gentry that liked to identify with English gentlemen.
Elite southerners consequently continued to try to imitate the customs of their supposedly genteel English forefathers, and, like colonial Virginians and Carolinians before them, they never quite succeeded.
Gaming continued to help distinguish between classes. Many a southern gentleman bred and ran thoroughbreds less for the sport than for the honor and distinction that his participation brought.
As in colonial Virginia and Jackson's Tennessee, horse racing remained a proven means of establishing and maintaining bonds between men of kindred status and spirit.