European Sport Bets

Changes of Styles in Betting

Communities up and down the river purged professional gamblers--- sometimes quite violently as in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where vigilantes lynched five blacklegs in 1835.

Such actions, crude as they were, seemed a requisite step toward prosperity and stability, and marked the end of another phase in the development of an American culture of gambling.

Newly created styles of betting, however, survived the attack on the sharpers who had first cultivated them.

They made their way on to riverboats, later grew popular throughout the country, and continued to influence American gaming as well into the twentieth century.

One traveler's guide to the new territories ranked 'gaming adventurers, black legs, &c' as the lowest 'class of people' in the Mississippi Valley, and advised emigrants to steer clear of the nefarious plots of these confidence men.

While Mississippi Valley gamblers signified the arrival of another profession in the United States, they were little more than a New World manifestation of an old European problem.

Englishmen had worried about sharpers since the seventeenth century, when Charles Cotton had pointed out the large number of career 'gamesters' fated to hang on as precious jewels in the ear of Tyburn', the English gallows.

Professional gamblers naturally accompanied the commercialization of sport and recreation in Tudor-Stuart Britain.

Now, as American society also became increasingly commercial in character during the early nineteenth century, professional gamblers appeared in the West to make the most of a new line of business.

They adopted the entrepreneurial approach to betting, and from Europe they borrowed the games most suited for making money. Then they tailored Old World practices to suit the American frontier.

Riverfront districts in such western towns as Louisville, St. Louis, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, and New Orleans constituted an ideal spawning ground for the new class of professional gamblers and helped to shape the emerging styles of American betting.

Professional gamblers preferred to deal in games that promised the surest profit.

These included both banking and percentage games that English colonists had not established in America, such as French favorites faro, roulette, and vingt-et-un where the dealer had the odds on his side, as well as card games such as poker and three-card Monte in which dealers could easily win by manipulating the deck.

By establishing percentages, gamblers made sure that they would make money. Then they increased their profits not by increasing the stakes and regularizing cheating. Sharpers also organized into groups like the threesome that fleeced William C. Hall in Natchez-under-the-Hill.

While one confederate dealt with the cards, others found willing victims and encouraged them to stake more money. Most operators had at least one partner who assisted in the confidence games and shared the income.

Professional gambling was generally not an individualistic enterprise.