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Lotteries and Overlapping Providences in Early America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 August 2021
Abstract
What kind of world did early American men and women believe they were living in? Did God choose lottery winners or did intellectual, economic, and scientific insights engender more reasonable, skeptical, or secular formulations? Lotteries were a common and uncontroversial presence in early American economic and civic life, funding the construction of everything from bridges to churches. George Washington liked giving lottery tickets as gifts. Denmark Vesey purchased his freedom by winning a lottery. Although scholars have used the lottery and other forms of gambling to make important claims about class and culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lotteries hold rich, untapped insights for American religious history. By offering a specific causal experience to explain, lotteries prompted answers from their participants, known as “adventurers,” about why things happened. Relying on firsthand accounts of lottery winners, correspondence among the managers who oversaw lotteries, promotional schemes designed to entice participation, and newspaper coverage, this article demonstrates providence's ongoing centrality to causality in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America. Far from jettisoning an animated, meaningful universe with the aid of reason or in the face of debilitating doubt, lottery adventurers employed both longstanding and novel versions of providence to explain how the world worked and how God worked in the world.
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- Copyright © 2021 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
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Notes
I would like to acknowledge the 2014–2016 cohort of Young Scholars in American Religion for their invaluable comments and assistance with this article. In addition, I would like to thank members of the University of Richmond's Religious Studies department—Doug Winiarski, in particular—for awarding me a National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professor fellowship. Both of these remarkable opportunities played an essential role in bringing this article to completion.
1 Thomas Brown, Recollections of Events of My Life, Accession 36108, Personal papers collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.
2 Brown, Recollections of Events of My Life.
3 Ezell, John Samuel, Fortune's Merry Wheel: The Lottery in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 29–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Millikan, Neal E., Lotteries in Colonial America (New York: Routledge, 2011), 88–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Millikan, Lotteries, 2–4; Lears, Jackson, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003), 70Google Scholar.
6 Welch, Evelyn, “Lotteries in Early Modern Italy,” Past and Present 199 (May 2008): 71–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Though lotteries formalized the random outcome of a lot, a classical and biblical practice designed to seek divine answers or resolutions, they should be carefully distinguished from the Protestant practice of “casting lots.” Most pronounced among the Moravians, casting a lot involved a deep commitment to a particular religious community and was fueled by a conviction that God (Christ) spoke through lots. Moravians used the lot to “ask the Savior” about everything from whether or not a couple should be married to where a particular missionary should be sent. Moravians usually included an affirmative (yes), a negative (no), and a neutral lot with which God could respond to an inquiry. The practice became increasingly disputed and controversial over the course of the eighteenth century. See Sommer, Elisabeth W., Serving Two Masters: Moravian Brethren in Germany and North Carolina, 1727–1801 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000)Google Scholar, chap. 4; and Katherine Carté Engel, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 40–47. Puritans disagreed about whether or not the use of a lot in decision making was an affront to God's providence. See Todd, Margo, “Providence, Chance and the New Science in Early Stuart Cambridge,” Historical Journal 29, no. 3 (September 1986): 703–11Google Scholar.
7 For an overview of English lotteries see Millikan, Lotteries in Colonial America, 5–21, Smith quotation from Millikan, 7. See also Ezell, Fortune's Merry Wheel, 1–11. James Raven offers an in-depth examination of regulations and debates surrounding lotteries in eighteenth-century Britain, arguing that “the regularization, and necessary enforcement of national lotteries are telling and far-reaching measures of the character and growth of state power.” James Raven, “Debating the Lottery in Britain c. 1750–1800,” in Random Riches: Gambling Past and Present, edited by Manfred Zollinger (London: Routledge, 2016), 89.
8 “Petties Island Lottery for Effects to the Full Value of 10,000 Dollars or £375 without Any Deductions,” Philadelphia, 1761, Early American Imprints no. 8979.
9 Kenneth Cohen provides an exquisite summary of these historiographical debates in “‘The Entreaties and Perswasions of our Aquaintance’: Gambling and Networks in Early America,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Winter 2011): 600–602. One camp of scholars has emphasized gambling's connection to masculine “honor,” North and South. Notable works include Nancy Struna, People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Breen, T. H., “Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling among the Gentry of Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 34 (April 1977): 239–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bertram Wyatt Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Another camp has centered on debates over gambling in the North after the American Revolution. These scholars emphasize middle- and upper-class critiques of gaming, which pilloried the lack of rationality, self-control, and work required to succeed in games of chance. As Cohen aptly puts it: “Reformers thus marginalized a variety of people without the wealth, connections, or good fortune to mask their risk-taking as legitimate and successful business.” Cohen, “‘The Entreaties and Perswasions of our Aquaintance,’” 601. Notable works in this camp include Fabian, Ann, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Sandage, Scott, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lotteries, however, were not wrapped up in these debates until, roughly, after 1815. Before then, their propriety and role in funding public works and the common good largely obviated their connection to the morally precarious world of gambling.
10 Sturtz, Linda, “The Ladies and the Lottery: Elite Women's Gambling in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 104, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 177Google Scholar.
11 Ezell, Fortune's Merry Wheel, 88.
12 Nic Butler, “Denmark Vesey's Winning Lottery Ticket,” Charleston County Public Library, February 23, 2018, accessed November 17, 2020, from https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/denmark-veseys-winning-lottery-ticket; Ezell, Fortune's Merry Wheel, 111–12. In another example of the lottery as a means of liberation, four enslaved men purchased their freedom after winning a 1791 Massachusetts lottery. See Ezell, Fortune's Merry Wheel, 88.
13 Reith, Gerda, The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 13–43Google Scholar; Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jackson Lears makes a similar, though more nuanced, argument that “cultures of chance” and “cultures of control” have been at odds throughout American history. He claims that, in the early twentieth century, “the American culture of control acquired real dominance, and then in a secular rather than a religious idiom.” Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing, 19. For a recent account of early American lotteries with a keen analysis of their relationship to eighteenth-century consumer culture and shifting notions of chance and fortune, see Millikan, Lotteries in Colonial America.
14 Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops, 4–5; John M. Findlay, People of Chance: Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas (New York: Oxford, 1986); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 16–20.
15 Todd, Margo, “Providence, Chance and the New Science in Early Stuart Cambridge,” Historical Journal 29, no. 3 (September 1986): 700–702Google Scholar; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), 96–107; Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 44–61.
16 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12.
17 Donagan, Barbara, “Godly Choice: Puritan Decision-Making in Seventeenth-century England,” Harvard Theological Review 76, no. 3 (July 1983): 319–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 John Demos, ed., Remarkable Providences: Readings on Early American History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 447.
19 David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 71–94.
20 Douglas Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 53–76; see especially 53–54 on repentance and godly living and holy obedience.
21 Donagan, Barbara, “Providence Chance and Explanation: Some Paradoxical Aspects of Puritan Views of Causation,” Journal of Religious History 11, no. 3 (June 1981): 397–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 11–30; Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 28–39,73–79; John Corrigan, The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 32–64; Ned C. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–1760 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 57–91.
23 Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 81–115; Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 50–88. On debates over weather prediction, see T. J. Tomlin, A Divinity for All Persuasions: Almanacs and Early American Religious Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 46–50.
24 “Pettie's Island Cash Lottery, in three classes” (broadside), Philadelphia, 1773, Early American Imprints, 1st ser., no. 12938.
25 Ezell, Fortune's Merry Wheel, 19–28.
26 “Potomack and Shenandoah Navigation Lottery Scheme,” Federal Republican and Commercial Gazette (Baltimore), March 5, 1811.
27 “Scheme of the Second Class of a Lottery Granted by the General Assembly of Rhode Island” (broadside) (Newport, RI: Printed by Samuel Hall, 1764), Early American Imprints, 1st ser., no. 41437; New Castle Lottery, Wilmington, DE, 1771; Scheme of a Lottery Granted by the Honourable General Assembly of the Colony of Rhode Island for raising Two Thousand Pounds Lawful Money, Newport, 1774.
28 Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), xii; see also Sheehan and Wahrman, Invisible Hands, 59–71, 206–212. For an introduction to probability theory, see Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms, Ten Great Ideas about Chance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 1–21.
29 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a risk or “risque” was a commodity created and used by merchants to offset the hazards of seaborne trade through marine insurance. To protect themselves from financial loss, merchants purchased risks from one another to protect their cargo. Over the course of the nineteenth century, “risk burrowed into popular consciousness” as American financial markets offered a host of new mechanisms, such as insurance policies or savings accounts, for dealing with and profiting from capitalism's uncertainties. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 5, see also 2–3, 21–23, 29–37.
30 Potomack and Shenandoah Navigation Lottery Scheme, Federal Republican and Commercial Gazette (Baltimore), March 5, 1811.
31 A Lottery Set forth by Bethiah Hedges of Newport, Rhode Island, Newport, 1733, Early American Imprints no. 40020.
32 Petties Island Lottery for Effects to the Full Value of 10,000 Dollars or £3750 without Any Deductions, Philadelphia, 1761, Early American Imprints no. 8979.
33 Cary Carson, “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial America: Why Demand?” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Carly Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 521–23; Millikan, Lotteries in Colonial America, 2–4, 29–30.
34 “Scheme of a Lottery for the College of New Jersey,” New York Mercury, January 9, 1764.
35 Millikan, Lotteries in Colonial America, 41–43.
36 Thomas Smith to Robert Ogden, December 26, 1763, Ogden Family Collection (hereafter OFC), box 1, folder 54, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey.
37 Despite Quaker efforts to squelch lotteries in Pennsylvania, the colony has a complex lottery history between 1729, when the Assembly passed an act banning all lotteries, and 1762, when it banned all unsanctioned (that is, by the legislature or the crown) lotteries. These years included lotteries sanctioned by the governor, another attempt at legal suppression in 1759, and a number of illegal lotteries. Ezell, Fortune's Merry Wheel, 18–25.
38 Smith to Ogden
39 Receipts for Tickets and Money to Ogden from the New Jersey College Lottery, OFC, box 1, folder 52.
40 Ogden distributed 1,976 tickets to associates and sold another 2,000 himself. These records can be found in OFC, box 1, folder 53.
41 Jeremiah Halsey to Robert Ogden, April 5, 1764, OFC, box 1, folder 54.
42 Millikan, Lotteries in Colonial America, 49–52.
43 Scheme of a Lottery for One Hundred Thousand Acres of Land in the Province of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1735, Early American Imprints no. 40081.
44 OFC, box 1, folder 53.
45 Deposition of John Crockwell, Augusta County (VA) Chancery Cases, 1746–1912, (Joseph Stover etc. vs. John Crockwell Index No. 1802–018), Local Government Records Collection, Augusta County Court Records, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.
46 Deposition of John Crockwell.
47 Poulson's Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), December 28, 1802.
48 Although Smith mentions these details regarding South Carolina law, they are confirmed in Ezell, Fortune's Merry Wheel, 25. The Second Newcastle Lottery's scheme, initially printed in Newcastle, New York, on April 6, 1772, can be found in The Connecticut Journal (New Haven, CT), June 26, 1772.
49 Josiah Smith to John Rodgers, January 11, 1772, in the Josiah Smith Letter Book #3018, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter JSLB).
50 Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010): 214. This version of providence was one of many stemming from the concept's dynamic interaction with materialist philosophy in the late seventeenth century. See Sheehan and Wahrman, Invisible Hands, 11–46.
51 Josiah Smith to John Rodgers, April 10, 1772, JSLB.
52 On Colman and the wider religious and cultural worlds he inhabited, see John Corrigan, The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Ned C. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–1760 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 57–91. On the Reverend Josiah Smith, see Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 68–82.
53 Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize, 1–10, 178–233, 248–49.
54 Josiah Smith to John Rodgers, September 4, 1772, JSLB.
55 Josiah Smith to John Rodgers, October 6, 1772, JSLB.
56 Josiah Smith to John Rodgers, November 25, 1772, JSLB. The newspaper Smith references here was the New York Gazette, October 26, 1772 (printed by H. Gaine in Hanover Square), which includes a list of winning numbers and confirms ticket number 4953 as the $4,000 prize winner.
57 Josiah Smith to John Rodgers, February 13, 1773, JSLB.
58 Josiah Smith to Walter Buchanan et al., March 17, 1773, JSLB.
59 Josiah Smith to John Rodgers, March 29, 1773, JSLB.
60 Michael Winship, Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 40–45; Sheehan and Wahrman, Invisible Hands, 18–21; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, 77–78.
61 Josiah Cotton, History of the Cotton Family, 1726–1755, MS Am 1165, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 363. For details on Cotton's life and missionary work among natives in New England, see Winiarski, Douglas, “A Question of Plain Dealing: Josiah Cotton, Native Christians, and the Quest for Security in Eighteenth-Century Plymouth Colony,” New England Quarterly 77, no. 3 (September 2004): 368–413Google Scholar.
62 Josiah Cotton, History of the Cotton Family, 1726–1755, MS Am 1165, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 357, 359.
63 Douglas Winiarski, “Pale Blewish Lights and a Dead Man's Groan: Tales of the Supernatural from Eighteenth-Century Plymouth, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 4 (October 1998): 497–530; Eric Seeman, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 109–11.
64 Margaret Fleming to William Fleming, July 4, 1791, Fleming-Edmonds Family Papers, 1762–1938, folder 6: Correspondence, 1786–1792, The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.
65 Brown, Recollections of Events of My Life.
66 Brown, Recollections of Events of My Life.
67 Brown, Recollections of Events of My Life.
68 Ezell, Fortune's Merry Wheel, 272–74.
69 Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops, 114–28.
70 Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing, 169–78.
71 This biographical information is taken from the Library of Virginia's catalog record for Thomas Brown's autobiography, accessed December 22, 2017, http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/using_collections.asp, call number 36108.
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