ABSTRACT

THE AMERICAN GAMBLER STORY IN THE
SENTIMENTAL TRADITION, 1794 TO 1870

BY

Clarence Ellsworth Brown, Jr.

Although critics, reviewers, and literary histor-
ians acknowledge the influence of the sentimental tradi—
tion on the American gambler story, none have examined
this tradition in detail. To this end, this study begins
by drawing upon socio-economic backgrounds as well as
Beggar Books and Coney—catching pamphlets of England
during the Renaissance. Further sentimental materials
are furnished by eighteenth-century dramas, particularly
those featuring prodigal sons, rakes, profligates, and
neglectful and abusive husbands. Notice of the possible
influence of Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa and
Henry Fielding's Amelia concludes this introductory
chapter.

In the second chapter, I examine the early maga-

zine stories starting with the 1794 American Bee and The

l

Clarence Ellsworth Brown, Jr.

Massachusetts Magazine. These stories establish senti—
mental criteria that appear in gambler fiction treated
in the remaining chapters of the study. In the third
chapter, I present several types of gambler stories found
in novels with a big city setting. This approach, in
which all types of gamblers-~Southern, Eastern, and Mid-
western--are described, harkens back to the first chapter
where London formed the milieu for low- and high-class
coney—catchers. For Chapter IV, I survey novels laid in
the South, another geographic region rich in gambler lore.

The final chapter describes the California gold
rush scene and its topsy-turvy society which created the
distinctive marks of mining camp gambler fiction. In
addition I examine the setting that Bret Harte reflected
in his gambler fiction and reveal the continuity of and
pervasive influence of the sentimental tradition on the
gambler genre. In an addendum I include Mary MacMichael's
"The Gambler's Fate," a typical "lady—book" magazine tale
of the nineteenth century by virtue of its unmistakable
tone, point of view, and style.

The American gambler story has never reached the
”acceptable" stage of literature. Devised to teach moral

2

Clarence Ellsworth Brown, Jr.

lessons to generations of ladies fearful of marital bond-
age to unreformed rakes, it offers little in terms of
aesthetic satisfaction. Nevertheless, it serves as an
accurate indicator of the state of mind of countless
Americans in the formative and developing stages Of our
society. Although it rarely deserved first-class rating,
the genre provided samples of Americana that deserve con-

sideration as an expression of our culture.

THE AMERICAN GAMBLER STORY IN THE

SENTIMENTAL TRADITION, 1794 TO 1870

BY

Clarence Ellsworth Brown, Jr.

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1970

1"“?

ML]

ACKNOWLEDGI‘ENTS

This study is especially indebted to my long-
sacrificing wife. A special word of thanks is also due.
to my thesis chairman, Dr. C. David Mead, a vessel of
patience, and to the other members of my committee:

Drs. Russel B. Nye and Sam S. Baskett whose suggestions
were always warmly extended. It would likewise be remiss
to overlook the help of the library staff of Michigan
State University, of the University of California at Los
Angeles, and of Miss Mary Isabel Fry, Head Librarian at
Huntington Library, San Marino, California, a great
workshop and haven of tranquillity in this troubled

world.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
Chapter

I. EUROPEAN BACKGROUNDS OF THE AMERICAN

SENTIMENTAL GAMBLER STORY . . . . . . . . 1

II. EARLY AMERICAN GAMBLER TALES. . . . . . . . 29

III. BIG CITY NOVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

IV. SOUTHERN GAMBLERS ASHORE. . . . . . . . . . 107

V. THE GOLD RUSH GAMBLER STORY . . . . . . . . 136

VI. CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

BIBLIOGRAPHY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

ADDENDUM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

iii

PREFACE

This study purports to treat the American gambler
story as a sentimental genre. I assume that the origin
of this genre is in two movements in the Renaissance, one
social and the other literary, both of which are inextri-
cably related. The social background begins with the
breakup of the European feudal system which sent thousands
of beggars, vagabonds, and rogues into London where many
had to survive by means of confidence rackets, including
gambling. In the city, sharp—eyed chroniclers of the
street scene wrote Beggar Books and Coney-catching pam-
phlets which I link with eighteenth—century plays featur-
ing rakes, profligates, and the fiction of Samuel Richard—
son whose Pamela and Clarissa are classics on the seduc-
tion theme. A further and more specific tie—up with the
literary aspect of the sentimental tradition is made with
Henry Fielding‘s Amelia (1751). This novel contains a
chapter which I use as a rough standard of reference along
with a "lady-book" type tale on the pOpular theme of

iv

ladies in distress, including abused wives of the Amelia-
type. By "a lady book" is meant a magazine like Godey's

that Specializes in subjects such as love, marriage, and

the home.

The first of five chapters in this study provides
a background of the EurOpean sentimental tradition, par-
ticularly the English; the second, synthesizes, as it
were, the sentimental strains in American gambler fiction
but also provides a standard of reference in the aforemen—
tioned lady-book gambler tale. The remaining chapters
which cover the geographic areas of the East, South and
Southwest, and West, I have titled Big City, Gamblers
Ashore, and Gold Rush gambler stories. In an addendum I
have included a short magazine gambler story with comments
on it. The story is typical of those in the sentimental
tradition of the nineteenth century.

A few technical terms that need to be cleared up
are sentimental story, gambler, roper, pigeon, and green-
hggg. By sentimental story is meant a species of fiction
designed to elicit a melancholy, tearful mood, and al-
though it usually combines a woman with a gambler, the
woman is not an indiSpensable element. By a gambler I

V

mean a man who has reached or almost reached the addict
or compulsive stage in his enchantment with gambling and
is motivated either by avarice or amusement or by both
factors. A roger is a confidence agent who works alone
or with a dealer or other member of his swindling frater-
nity. He catches pigeons or gulls by means of an oral
"pitch" or some other trickery and then escorts them to
the dealer to be fleeced or plucked. A qreenhorn has
many connotations, but in our period it means a rustic

or clerk who comes to the big city and falls prey to the
practices of the roper or capper. In the gambler tale,
the argot situations are as follows: the ggpgg ropes in
a gull and accompanies him to the Barnard (dealer) who
fleeces or plucks the gull who has flown in from the
country to see the sights of the city or to close a busi-
ness deal.

To get a cross section of the various types of
gambler stories in publications in different sections of
the country,I have relied mainly on the New York Spirit
ggythe Times for the East; the New Orleans Times Picayune
for the South and Southwest, and the Golden Era and The
ngrland Monthly for the West. These seemed the best

vi

Sports depositories of their kind and representative of
their region.

On occasion, I depart from the sentimental tradi-
tion and use gambler stories in other traditions, namely,
the adventure and humor traditions. This liberty seems
appropriate inasmuch as these traditions are not "pure"
and contain sentimental elements in their tales, although
action or humor may be their raison d' etre.

Of the many works on American gambling, those most
useful are Henry Chafetz's Play the Devil, Herbert Ase
bury's §ucker's Pppgress, and the gambler autobiographies
and expose books of Jonathan Green, John Morris, and Mason
Long. For the EurOpean literary background or rogues,
Frank Wadleigh Chandler's The Literature of Roguery and
the Cambridge History of English Literature prove indis—
pensable. Other sources most helpful to compile a bib-
liography on gambling and gamblers are Frederick Jessel's
A Bibliography of Works in English of Playing Cagds and
Gaming, Rose Eyring's University of California Disserta-
tion, The Portrayal of the California Gold-Rush Period
ipilmaginative Literature from 1848 to 1875, and Lyle H.
Wright's two volumes: American Fiction 1774-1850 and

vii

American Fiction, 1851-1875. Important books that supply
information on.a114phasescfifgambling are John Ashton's
The History of Gambling in England, John Philip Quinn's
Fool§ of Fortppg, and Theophilus Lucas's Memoirs of the
Lives, Intrigpgs and Comical Adventures of the Most Famous

Gamesters.

viii

CHAPTER I
EUROPEAN BACKGROUNDS OF THE AMERICAN

SENTIMENTAL GAMBLER STORY

A proper perspective of the American sentimental
gambler story depends upon an awareness of certain English
develOpments. One of these is socio-economic in origin
and the other literary. The socio—economic factor has a
two-pronged division which came about when the European
feudal system broke up. The first of these divisions is
based on the agricultural revolution that took place when
the English lords turned their farms into sheep combines
to meet the demand for wool that made England the trade
center of the world.

The consequence was a social upheaval throughout
the country. Countless thousands of castle workers and
farmers took to the highways and roads to London in the
hOpes of getting work to keep from starving to death.
Estimates vary of the numbers of these dislocated persons,
but they were considerable for that period of time. One

1

estimate has 13,000 beggars and vagabonds living in
London in 15691 and another has 12,000 in 1594.2 To be
noted also is that thousands of soldiers, let loose from
their lords, looted the countryside as they did during
war and now without homes offered their services free
to the lords merely to have a place to hide their stolen
goods.

About the same time as this migration took place,
Henry VII dissolved the monasteries. This royal decree
further aggravated the over—expansion problem of London.
Now, along with countless bands of roaming beggars,
strollers, and soldiers, another group descended upon
the city--monks, priests, valets, bakers, brewers, laun—
dry workers, gardeners, and so forth.4 The city soon
doubled in population from 100,000 to 200,000 and the

medieval walls could no longer hold the people who spread

 

lFrank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues, app. A I,
as quoted in Arthur V. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld
(London: George Routledge & Sons, 1950), p. xv.

2Ibid., Strype, Annals (1824), I, ii, 346.

3Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vaga-

bonds, Oxford Historical and Literary Studies (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1913), I, 15.

4Judges, op. cit., p. xxiii.

out into the countryside.5 Without adequate poor laws
to provide for them, these human drift crowded into the
streets to form ghettos of criminals, including gamblers
who preyed off the rich and innocent.

The second or literary factor that provides a
necessary background for the sentimental American gambler
story has two aspects or attitudes, one of which points
backward and the other forward. The backward-looking or
older attitude is represented in the medieval works of

Robert Copland's The Hye Way to the Spyttel Hous (1535),

 

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1400), and William
Langland's Piers Plowman (1399). They have the tradi-

tional view of the gambler sui generis as a social menace

 

and threat to the community as was the Opinion of Aris-
totle, the Greek philOSOpher.

This has been the Opinion of most countries since
the dawn of civilization. According to the gambler-
historian, Ashton, gamesters or aleators in Imperial Rome
were unable to recover their losses in court, and in the
Jewish court or Sanhedrin, gambling was looked upon as a

form of theft. It passed a double restitution law which

 

5G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History, as

quoted in George Richard Hibbard, Three Elizabethan Pam—
phlets (London: Harrap, 1951), p. 14.

refused gamblers the right to testify in trials or to hold
positions of trust in society. In the Koran, Mohammedans
are warned to avoid all games of chance, except chess,
for "surely," the religious book says, "wine and lots,
and images, and divining arrows are an abomination of the
works of Satan" to be avoided in order for one to prosper.
Tacitus the historian says the loser in a game in Old
England during the Teutonic occupation "submits to servi-
tude, though younger and stronger than his antagonist and
patiently submits himself to be bound, and sold in the
market; and thus sadness they dignify by the name of
honour." Gamblers became so offensive to the crusading
kings, Richard of England and Philip of France, that they
placed a limit of twenty shillings a soldier could wager
in their combined army over a twenty—four hour period.
Violators forfeited their money to the state, paid a one
hundred shillings fine to the archbishOp, and marched
naked through the ranks to be whipped for three days'
duration.

In London in the Middle Ages, gamblers were

treated harshly in court. In the letter books of 1311

 

6John Ashton, The History of Gambling_in England
(London: Duckworth & Co., 1898), pp. 5-14.

of the Corporation of the City, Elmer Multone, for ex-
ample, was fined for luring strangers into a Chepe Ward
tavern and of cheating them there with crooked dice.
This same Multone was later indicted for taking other
men against their will into a Tower Ward tavern where he
played his dice tricks. More punitive a form of action
was taken against Messrs. Outlawe and Prestone who during
the Christmas season of 1376 lured John and William Atte
Hill into a tavern where they cast loaded dice on a false
checker board. Sentenced by a jury, Outlawe and Prestone
were exposed in a public pillory an hour a day as their
checker board burned beneath their noses. Later they were
cast into prison to hOpe for mercy from the mayor and
aldermen.7

Gambling during the Puritan inter-regnum in Eng-
land was suppressed but after the crowning of Charles II
in 1660, a reign of gambling took place that made England
"one vast casino," according to the historian Trevelyan.

By the eighteenth century, the island had reached the

 

7Ibid., p. 13.

8The Early History of Charles Fox (1880), as
quoted in Kathleen Campbell, Beau Brummel, A Biographical
Study (London: Hammond, Hammond & Co., 1948), p. 99.

heyday of the worship of the Goddess of Chance. Almost
everyone gambled in this period, says Ralph Neville,
especially the members Of the upper class among whom
horse-racing, cock-fighting, cards, and dice became a
fashionable form Of dissipation.9 Horace Walpole, re-
flecting the Opinion of many Englishmen Of the time, com-
plains in a 1770 letter:

The gambling is worthy the decline of our

empire. The young men lose five, ten, fif-

teen thousand pounds in an evening. Lord

Stoverdale, not one-and-twenty, lost eleven

thousand last Tuesday but recovered it by one

great hand at hazard. He swore a great oath.

"Now, if I had been playing deep I might have
won millions."1

This attitude Of disapproval Of the gambler mani-
fested in England, however, does not apply to American
gamblers before the coming Of the white man. Indeed,
among the Indians, gamblers were thought to have divine
powers, and they represented the tribe in games Of skill
against other tribes. But the Puritans in the Massachu-
setts Commonwealth did not share this exalted Opinion of
their gamblers. Although many Of the saints as well as

sinners played in their private block houses and in forest

 

9Ralph Nevill, The Man Of Pleasure (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1912), pp. 61-62.

10Campbell, p. 99.

retreats, the ministers imposed heavy fines on those
caught,11 including students at Harvard College.

The second, a more modern and humane attitude
toward the gambler, grew out of the aforementioned social
movement in England that sent countrymen to London when
the sheep ranches displaced them from their farms and
the Royal edict dissolved the monasteries. While these
rogues, vagabonds, and beggars prowled about London,
writers recorded their street activities. As these real-
istic writings are mentioned, one should be aware that
beneath the hard surface Of their accounts is a latent
sympathy for the poor who tried to obtain by theft what
society had deprived them Of legitimately.

The first Of these "expose" writings was the
German Liber Vagatorum (1509), which became a model rogue-
tract or Beggar Book. It develOped from the records Of
the trials in Basel, Switzerland, in 1475, when thousands
Of migrants and common cheats were arrested. One Of the
most pertinent anecdotes in Martin Luther's 1528 edition

Of Liber Vagatorum concerns a "joner" [gambler] who cheats

 

llHenry Chafetz, Play the Devil (New York:
Bonanza Books, 1960), pp. 8—9, 14—15.

 

with cards and dice and passes Off L9§_M§§§ and Lpg
Stettingers (bad coins and florins). True to type, the—
gambler robs the landlord before leaving his inn.

Of the English Beggar Books, the best on gamblers

are John Awdeley's Fraternitye Of Vacabones (1579) and

 

Thomas Harman's A Caveat or Warening for Commen Cursetors
(1567). Awdeley's Fraternitye consists of two parts.

The second and most interesting part minutely describes
three cheats. The second of the trio, the "fingerer,"
dressed like a fOp in gorgeous attire and attended by a
servant, goes to St. Paul's Churchyard in London, Christ's
Hospital, and the Royal Exchange. Here he selects from
the crowd a wealthy young countryman and lures him to a
tavern where another member Of his group comes stumbling
in pretending to be drunk and half—blind. After some dis-
arming conversation, a card game begins and everyone wins
from the "Old karle." Finally, the fingerer convinces

the stranger to make some easy money, tOO. As each
gambler wins from the gull, the gambler swears a mighty

oath and leaves the table under some pretext or other and,

 

12The Book Of Vagabonds and Beggars (London: John

Camden Hotten, 1860), p. 48.

 

reaching the door, dashes away into the crowd to rendezvous

with the other gamblers to divide the spoils.13

Harman's Caveat or Warening for Commen Cursetors,

 

like Awdeley's Fraternitye, attempts to alarm honest cit-
izens against those who would prey on them and is the
standard book on ”those rowsey, ragged, rabblement Of
rakeshells.” A kind of sixteenth century source book done
in the Spirit of modern inquiry, Caveat dissects thieves——

their dress, food, origin, training, and sexual

relations. The different departments of a

highly Specialized profession are explained.

Their complicated frauds are fully investigated,

and we catch glimpses Of the dark shallows Of

their private life.14

The fingerer's "game” in Awdeley's Fraternitye

 

goes under various names but most Often as "Barnard's law"
or “Coney—catching law." Two to five gamblers play the
game with a "cozen” (cousin) or gull designated as the
prey or victim. The best Elizabethan picture of this

cozen appears in Thomas Dekker's Gul's Horne-Booke (1609).

 

This gull struts in new clothes in St. Paul's, sits on the

 

l3Edward Viles and F. J. Furnivall, eds., Early

English Text Society, N. Trubner (1869), IX, pp. 7-9.

 

14Harold VQ Routh, "The Progress Of Social Liter—
ature in Tudor Times," in Cambridge History of English
Literature (1909), III, 103.

 

10

stage at the theatre, and, pipe in hand, brouses in book
shOps to make an impression. Aydelotte has a further
description of Dekker's fOp:

The gull pretends to wit, fashion, or wealth

in the ordinary, lets a sonnet drOp from his

glove, or inquires who has need of help to

Obtain a suit at court; he feasts in a tavern

on a tapster's credit, and directs his link

boy, hired for one night, to call him 'Sir'

as they pass the watch going home.15

His money comes from his father, a "worme-eaten

farmer" who died leaving him five hundred pounds a year
and a farm. Bent on being a gallant, he goes to fashion-
able haunts with gamblers and, in need of money at rent
time, borrows at exorbitant rates Of interest from a
lender. He ends up dead-broke and duped of his farm.
His gay career over, he then works as a fingerer or taker
for a gambler and preys on other countrymen. "This was
the typical 'rake's progress,'" says Aydelotte, "from the
state of gallant, gaily feathered gull to that of poor
and needy cozener, who lived from hand to mouth by the

. . . 6
practice of the various cheating 'laws."'l

 

15(London: 1609), Temple ed., p. 13, as quoted

in Aydelotte, Oxford, p. 78.

16Ibid., p. 79.

11

Several classes of houses catered to London's
gamblers, high and low. The foppish takers preferred
the better licensed resorts such as George Whetstone
describes in Toughstone for the Time (1584). In this
ordinarie, gentlemen of wealth and fashion, soldiers,
and wits held high talk before a grand suppor and cards
or dice. Of the lower—class places, almost every tavern,
bowling alley, or inn in the city was equipped for
gambling. Whetstone describes one of the lower-class
London dives:

The dayle guests Of these priuie houses, are
masterless men, needy shifters, theeues, cut-
purses, unthriftie seruants, both seruing men,
and prentises. Here a man may pick out mates
for all purposes, saue such as are good . . . .
the most of these idle persons haue neither
landes nor credits, now will liue by an honest
occupation: forsooth they haue yet handes to
filch, heades to deceive, and friendes to re-
ceiue: and by these helpes, Shift meetely
badly well.17

Although London had "Open season" on connies, the
best time for the sport Occurred during court sessions in
St. Paul's walk, a common meeting ground for rich and poor

seeking pleasure or business. In The Dead Tearme (1608)

17Addition to A Mirrour for Magestrates of Cytes,

leaf 33, verso, Aydelotte, ibid.

12

Thomas Dekker describes St. Paul's as a tower Of Babel
what with all the "halking" and "humming." Here all
classes mingle in a state of confusion:

the Knight, the Gull, the Gallant, the Upstart,

the Gentleman, the Clowne, the Captaine, the

Appelsquire, the Lawyer, the Usurer, the Cit—

tizen, the Bankerout, the Schooler, the Begger,

the Doctor, the Ideot, the Ruffian, the

Cheater, the Puritan, the Cut—throat, the Hye-

men, the Low-men, the True-man and the Thief:

of all trades and professions some, Of all

Countryes some . . . .18

Another group Of Renaissance writings which pro-

vide an incipient sentimental attitude toward the real-
istic gambler is the Coney-catcher tracts. More literary
than the authors of the Beggar Books, Elizabethan writers
like Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Lodge,
nevertheless, COpy from the Older writings of Awdeley
and Harman. Perhaps names and other specific details
differ in Barnard's Law, but the basic pattern is iden-
tical to that described in Awdeley's Fraternitye.
Greene's version in A Notable Discovery Of Coosnage

(1591), contains a taker or Setter who snares a cousen

and then, armed with information about this gull's home

 

18Sig. D‘4, Verso E, ed. Grosart, IV, 30-2,
Aydelotte, ibid., p. 85.

13

town, tells the details to the Verser. This worthy claims
intimacy with the countryman and his friends and cele-
brates their new—found friendship by escorting him to a
tavern for a drink. Here the Barnard or card sharp,
pretending to be drunk, traps the gull into a card game.
An added detail Of Barnard's Law is found in sev-

eral rogue-tracts. In Walker's A Manifest Detection, a

 

Rubber stands watch at the tavern door while his fellow-
gamblers swindle a gull. When the victim finally cries
for help, this Rubber flutters his arms about and starts
shadow-fencing with himself. In Thomas Dekker's Tpg_
Belman Of London, he picks an idle quarrel either in the
room or at the street door while his companions take
flight through the crowds. In another innovation of the
Law, Mihil Mumchance in His Discoverie of the Art of
Cheating (1597) describes the popular guided tour device.
Here, as customary, the taker-up drOpS into a tavern at
the point the tour started and, joined soon by a "fygge
boy," fleeces the gull who is "forced to trip on his ten
toes homeward for the lack Of a hackey to ride on, and

begge for his charges by the wayoul9

 

19[Robert Greene] (London: n.d.), p. 5.

14

A further refinement Of this adaptable Barnard's

Law occurs in the anonymous The Countrinentleman's Vade

 

Mecum (1699) and in Greene's pamphlets. According to the
Vade Mecum, the trick is best played in Lincoln's Inn
Fields, Covent Garden, or any public area between West-
minister Hall and Temple Bar. To play this "perfect
occupation" three "masters" are needed—-a merchant, a
tradesman, and a country gentleman, known reSpectively as
the front man or Spark, the rear man or mouth, and the
gull or cully. Dressed in appropriate clothing, the Spark
starts the game by drOpping a coin near the gull. The
mouth then steps up gingerly to claim it the same time as
the gull. To avoid argument, the Spark says the correct
thing to do under the circumstances is to drink together
in a tavern to make the coin divisible into three parts.
Once inside the tavern, the young heir is either cheated
at cards or is knocked down and has his pockets picked.2
In Greene's account Of Coney—catching Law, the
moment the coin strikes the ground the Verser cries, "half
part" and then quotes the proverb: "Tis ill luck to keep

found money." The outcome here coincides with that in

 

20(London: J. Harris, 1699), pp. 97-100.

15

Vade Mecum-—a card game follows in a tavern where the
stranger is shorn clean of his money by a band of gambler-
thieves.2

To conclude this brief survey Of Elizabethan
sharpsters, we shall cursorily treat a miscellaneous group
Of gambler writings which contain a variety of incidents
which later appear in one form or another in sentimental
dramas and fiction.

The first Of these important gambler-type tracts
is Dekker's The Belman of London (1608). Although this
book is said to qualify Dekker as "the first great lit-
erary artist of London street life,"22 it is a work Of
plagiarism in that it COpieS from Mihil Mumchance's Dip:
coverie, Greene's Discovery and Second Part of Conny—
catchinq, and Harman's Caveat.

In The Belman, Dekker, as in his Gul's Horne-

 

Booke, describes a gallant-gambler type. In rustling
silks and stuffed purse, he rides in a rich coach and has

the "prowdest Curtizan" at his command as he is whorryed

 

21A Notable Discovery Of Coosnage (1591), Grosart,
X, 15—29, Aydelotte, pp. 86-88.

22Harold V. Routh, "London and the DevelOpment of
Popular Literature," in Cambridge History of English Lit—
erature (1932), IV, 401.

16

through the streets Of London on his way to his gambling
sessions at the best ordinaries where merchants and
wealthy citizens meet and gamble for high stakes. "It
is now growne to a fashion," Dekker sourly notes, "to
have some one or other to take up the Cheaters weapons,
and (without all reSpect Of honesty, friendship, or so-
cietie) to beate all commers."

Gilbert Walker's A Manifest Detection of the Most

 

Vyle and Detestable Use Of Dice Play (c. 1532) contains

an authoritative dialog on "cheating laws" between M,

an Old gamester and g, a raw young gull. M_explains a
host Of devices used by professional gamblers in card and
dice games, including pinching and marking cards, "cutting
by a bum card," stealing the discarded cards, using mir—
rors behind the cousin, songs given by lookers-on, stitch-
dropping by women confederates at the table, loading dice
with quicksilver or lead, and setting one face of a die
with a hair SO that when cast that face will not fall flat
on the table. These devices, and palming, slurring, and

shifting dice were all taught to apprentices by a "master"

 

23(London: Nathaniel Butler), Grosart, ed., Huth
Library. The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (1885),
III, 118.

17

gambler24 who may have worked with a city—wide syndicate
Of gamesters.
In a TheOphrastian character Sketch of "A Dis-

honest Gamester" in Wits Miserie and The Worlds Madnesse;

 

Discovering the Devils Incarnat of this Age (1596), Thomas
Lodge tells of a French gambler, a "Sonn of Mammon,” who
would gamble though "wife, children, all shall want . . .
lands, goods, and all must go, but fortune must be fol—
lowed; hell, will be had, if this be not considered."
After this drunkard-gambler leaves his wife and two
children to starve, she stabs the children and the hus-
band in his Sleep and then accepts her execution. The
moral: "In reading therefore this history, be provident
to avoid and Shun the Devill" (the gambler).25

The last of the foursome to be mentioned in this

section is Richard Head's The English Rogue Described in

 

the Life of Meriton Latroon (1665). A criminal biography
that qualifies as a forbidden book, it treats the infamous
career of an Oxford graduate whose claim to distinction

concerns whoring, gambling, and drinking. After working

 

24ed. J. C. Halliwell, The Percy Society (London:
Richards, 1850), XXIX, 27—33.

25(London: Adam Islip), pp. 40-44,

18

as a coney-catcher fleecing gallants in a tavern in
Chapter XVI, he marries and deserts a "thing" in London,
turns "Knight Of the Road," and ends up in Newgate prison
where gamblers take him into their confidence. Armed
with their cheating secrets and money, he takes to play-
ing Barnard's Law in Christ's churchyard but soon aban-
dons cards for whores and returns to prison, only to
escape and start a new series Of roguiSh adventures.

The sentimental attitude toward the gamester that
is latent in the Beggar Books and Coney-catching pamphlets
emerges distinctly in gamester and "abused-wife" plays.
Some Of the earliest of these are French: for example,
the anonymous La Moralite de l' Enfant Prodigue (1535)
in which a father forgives his wayward son as the brother
grumbles about the loss Of a patrimony in gambling.27
La Moralite de 1' Enfant de Perdition (1540) varies this
basic plot by having the son turn robber, and unaware,

kill his own parents in a highway stick-up, after which

the boy undergoes remorse and dies insane.

 

26(London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1928).

7Ernest Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility, Har—
vard Studies in English (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith,
1958), III, 27-28.

28Ibid., 31.

 

19

The play The Prodigal Son (1593-4), contained in

 

a German collection of English plays, is thought to have
been acted by ShakeSpeare'S Company on tour Of Germany
and to be composed by ShakeSpeare. The action takes place
in Italy and Germany and features a wastrel who sows his
wild oats in Italy. At the end of his dissipated career,
he is robbed by an inn—keeper and his whorish daughter
and sent home in a manner reminiscent of the tip-toer in

Mihil Mumchance's Discoverie. TO prove that the play

 

belongs to the morality genre, HOpe and Despair end it

. . 29
by carrying on a dialog.

When the dramatists focused their attention on
the domestic Scene, they blended their comedies and tra-
gedies with ingredients of the prodigal son plays to
create a heightened sentimental mood. Of this fusion,
Professor Schelling states,

the tyrannical and neglectful husband is com-
monly presented in the more general and at—
tractive terms Of the prodigal son . . .
[which] combine with the various effect the

motive Of the faithful wife with that Of the
young Spendthrift.3O

 

29ed. Richard Simpson, The School Of Shakespeare

(New York: J. W. Bouton, 1878), I, 122-123.

3OFelix E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642
(New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1959), I, 351.

20

Along with Renaissance plays featuring

gamblers, the abused-wife play develOped using Griselda
as its ideal model. To Thorp there is a direct line Of
influence from the pOpular medieval story Of the patient
and forgiving wife to the abused—wife play. For example,
he states that between 1470 and 1527, Griselda appears
twelve times in German writings as well as in Chaucer's
tales, ShakeSpeare'S Othellg and Much Ado About Nothing,
John Philip's Commodye Of Pacient and Meeke Grissil (ca.
1565), and Italian novels of calumniated wives.31 Two
plays of this abused-wife type are The London Prodigal

(1603) and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608). In The London

 

 

Prodigal a wife saves her philandering husband from life
imprisonment by means of a strategem,32 and the wife in
A Yorkshire Tragedy forgives her gambler husband in a
tearful prison scene: "Dearer than all is my poore hus—
bands life," she laments, "I will kneele, sue for his

life . . . ."33

 

31Willard Thorp, The Triumph of Realism in Eliza-

bethan Drama, 1558-1612 (Princeton University Press,
1928), p. 87.

 

32Bernbaum, p. 45.

33[William Shakespeare] (London: Thomas Pauier,
1608).

21

Although English gamester plays combined the sen-
timental elements of the prodigal son and abused—wife
plays, they avoided the “anatomies” approach Of the Beggar
Books and Coney-catcher tracts by concentrating, not on a
detailed analysis of gambling as Joyce Tompkins noted in
the pOpular novel in England in the eighteenth century,
but on the effects of gaming on the domestic circle.
DeSpite being one of the earliest gamester plays in Eng—
land, Shirley's The Gamester (1635) does not qualify as
a full-blown sentimental play for no pity is extended
toward the distressed wife, gambling is not a motivating
factor in it, and the repentance scene is hurried over.

With the production Of Colley Cibber's Love's Last
§hi§p (1696), however, sentimental plays in England became
very pOpular. Here Cibber uses the commonplace but
pathetic theme of a wife's discovery of her husband's
unfaithfulness. Amanda, the deserted wife, forgives the
prodigal Loveless Of his dissipations and by a strategem
brings him back to the path of virtue. Reformed in the
final scene Of the play, Loveless thanks Amanda's “con-

quering virtue" which subdued him, and on bended knee,

 

34The ngular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (Lin-

coln: University Of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 80.

22

he says, "here will I fix, thus prostrate, Sigh my shame,
. . . . 35

and wash my crimes in never ceaSIng tears Of penitence."
By the first decade Of the eighteenth century sev—

eral more gamester plays appeared. In Mrs. Centlivre's

The Gamester (l705),which has Regnard's Le Joueur as its

 

 

source, the protagonist Valere reforms, keeps his wife,
and vows never tO gamble again, whereas in Regnard's ver-
sion Valere loses his wife and ends up a slave to his
passion of gambling.

What sentiment Mrs. Centlivre missed in The Game-

ster and her female—gambler play The Basset Table (1705)

 

was abundantly furnished by Colley Cibber in The Lady's

 

Last Stake (1707), which had a Spasm of popularity as late
as 1786. A twofold plot in the play involves the recon-
ciliation Of a husband and wife and an attack upon
gambling. When the gambler-wife piles up a debt she
cannot pay, friends arrive in the nick Of time with money
to satisfy her debt which keeps her from losing her virtue
to her debtor.

The best English gamester plays between 1721 and

1753 are Aaron Hill's The Fatal Extravagance (1721) and

 

35Bernbaum, pp. 72-76.

23

Edward Moore's The Gamester (1753). Although said by

 

Bernbaum to be written "in a manner wholly new," The

Fatal Extravagance borrows from A Yorkshire Tragedy. In

 

Hill's play, Bellmour, a "fine, frank spirit," turns into
a gambling addict and seeks the help of a willing friend
but cannot return the same favor when his turn comes.
Bellmour murders the creditor and attempts to poison his
wife and children but only succeeds in taking his own
life.

Better known than The Fatal Extravagance, Edward

Moore's The Gamester (1753) has three characters to form

 

the chief dramatis personae——Beverley, Mrs. Beverley, his
wife, and Stukely, a villain-gambler. To attempt to se-
duce Mrs. Beverley, Stukely plots to bankrupt Beverley,
who loses his wife's jewelry and his sister's inheritance,
and, unable to pay Off these gambling debts, is thrown
into prison. Now deSpondent, he takes poison as Mrs.
Beverley, unaware Of his action, informs him that he has
inherited a fortune from his uncle and that all will turn

out well, but it is too late. He dies in her arms.36

 

36John Homer Caskey, The Life and Works Of Edward

Moore, Yale Studies in English (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1927), LXXV, 103-105.

24

The reform motif in domestic tragedies featuring
gamblers takes on a lighter aspect in Thomas Holcroft's
Duplicity (1781). When one of a pair of upper-class
gamblers swindles the other in order to reclaim him to
virtue, the play serves as an object lesson in what would
happen if the loser had fallen into the hands Of a
villain-gambler rather than in those of a future brother-
in-law.37

Although sentimental elements in English plays
form a strong strain in the gambler story, the genre of
fiction also shows a potent influence on it. Of the many
impulses and writings-~philosophic, religious, social,
and economic-—we shall mention the writings of only three
eighteenth-century authors, Samuel Richardson, Laurence
Sterne, and Henry Fielding.

Richardson's contribution to American gambler
fiction comes slantwise through his two seduction novels
Pamela (1741) and Clarissa (1747) which feature maidens
in distress. In Pamela, a middle-class heroine in an

exchange Of letters with her parents tells of her

struggles to preserve her chastity against the assaults

 

37Ibid., 117.

25

Of a wealthy libertine named Mr. B-—— in whose household
she works as a servant girl. Her marriage to the nobleman
proves the sub-title of the book that virtue has its own
reward in this life. In Clarissa, the same theme is
worked out with an upper-class lady who is drugged and
raped by a profligate named Richard Lovelace who dies
remorseful in a duel with the heroine's cousin in which

he only half-heartedly defends himself.

The impact Of Laurence Sterne on American gambler
fiction is owing to his style. In Tristram Shandy and
The Sentimental Journey (1767), his ornate and delicately
constructed sentences and melancholy tone become a pattern
for countless histories and domestic tales of grief in
real and make-believe life in the period.38 This arch-
priest of the tender mood, says Edith Birkhead, "taught
the men and women Of the eighteenth century what an ex-
quisite pleasure might be derived from feeling the pulse

Of their emotions."3

 

38Lillie Deming Loshe, Thefigarly American Novel
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1907), p. 5.

9"Sentiment and Sensibility in the Eighteenth
Century Novel," Essays and Studies by Members Of the
English Association (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), XI,
106.

26

More directly related to the theme of the gambler
story is Henry Fielding's Amelia (1741). Like a host Of
sentimental plays of the time, this story has a model
wife who, although abused by her husband Booth, forgives
him his treSpasses. The entire two volumes do not con—
cern us, only chapters V-IX of the second part Of the
second volume. Here appears a small-scale gambler story
replete with all the staple ingredients Of the full-blown
type pOpular up to the Civil War in American Short stories.
It features a coney-catcher named Mr. Trent, Amelia, her
impetuous and negligent husband, Captain Booth, and a
few minor characters. The plot begins when Colonel Bath
and Trent meet Booth in the park and take a friendly drink
together in a tavern where Booth loses everything in a
card game with Trent and writes him several I.O.U.'s for
which Trent promises not to press for payment.

We later discover that Trent pimps for Lord --—
and that the lord has designs on Mrs. Booth. When Trent
fails to convince Booth that to submit to let Mrs. Booth
gO to Lord --- is a good idea, they part company. Soon,
Trent circulates gossip about Mrs. Booth and duns her
husband for the money owed him. Mrs. Booth, aware now

Of Trent's dastardly plot to have her deflowered by

27

Lord ---, pawns her jewelry to repay Trent and gives the
money to the maid to deliver, but the wench steals it.
Booth is then sent to debtor's jail where providence in—
tervenes in the affair. The crooked lawyer who has been
hired by Amelia's sister to defraud Amelia is exposed
and.Amelia inherits her rightful fortune. The segment
ends with Trent slinking Off to Obscurity and the Booths
taking up residence in the country where the dutiful
Amelia is happy about her husband's reformation of char-
acter and his promise to be less neglectful Of her in
the future.40

TO summarize, the gambler story belongs to a sen—
timental tradition that began in the period Of the Renais-
sance. Then two related movements in England, the break-
up Of the feudal system and the dissolution Of the mon-
asteries created a social upheaval which sent thousands
Of peOple to London unprepared for jobs in an industrial
economy. Many turned to thievery and gambling rackets
in order to survive. In London at the time gifted writers
recorded the activities Of these swindlers in Beggar Books

and Coney-catching pamphlets, the best Of which are by

 

4O(Boston: Colonial Press, n.d.), II, 208-341.

28

John Awdeley, Thomas Herman, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Lodge,
and Robert Greene. Although faithfully reporting the
criminal scene, these writers expressed a muted sympathy
for the downtrodden whose habits formed the core Of their
exposes. The most interesting Of their descriptions is
that involving Barnard's Law which consists of two or more
players, a rOper—in and a dealer who work out of a tavern,
preferably near a hub of activity so that when challenged
they can escape in the crowd.

The theatrical aSpect of the sentimental tradition
to which the gambler genre belongs includes the medieval
prodigal son play and later the abused—wife, gamester,
and full-blown sentimental domestic tragedies. From the
point of view of fictional influences, the "big three"
of the eighteenth century novel produced the chief impact
on the American gambler genre. Samuel Richardson con-
tributed the seduction theme and a prototype rake in
Richard Lovelace; Laurence Sterne, a suitable tearful
style, and Fielding's Amelia, which served as a model
gambler story in having a confidence man, negligent hus-

-band, abused wife, and the theme of virtue in distress.

CHAPTER II

EARLY AMERICAN GAMBLER TALES

The chief theme in American magazines in the
eighteenth century is virtue in distress. In them the
Richardsonian element Of seduction predominates as it

does in William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy_(l789),

 

America's first published novel. In The Massachusetts, a
typical sensibility magazine of the period, Herbert R.
Brown notes, "0f eleven true, moral, and pathetic tales
in the first volume, nine are accounts Of seduction and
resultant misery."1 A few examples are "The Story of
Edward and Louisa" (Aug.-Sept., 1789), "Amelia, a Moral
Tale" (Jan., 1789), and "The Sorrows of Amelia" (Jan.,
1789). Betrayed innocence figures also in earlier tales,
"The History Of SOphia M" in The Gentleman and Ladies'
Town and Country Magazine (May, 1789), "The Fatal Effects

of Seduction," in The New York Magazine (Jan., 1790), and

 

1"Elements of Sensibility in The Massachusetts
Magazine," American Literature, I (1930), 289.

29

30

"A Confession" in The General Magazine and Historical
Chronicle (May, 1741).

Competing in pOpularity with the seduction tale
is Fielding's Amelia which has echoes in "Charles and
Amelia" in The Gentleman and Ladies' Town and Country
Magazine (May, 1791), "Henry and Charlotte, an Affecting

History," in The American Magazine (Nov., 1786), "The

 

History of Mrs. Hortense Melmoth" in The Nightingale
(July 7, 1796), and "Pathetic Letters from a Deserted
Wife to a Faithless Husband" in The American Universal
Magazine (Feb. 6, 1797).

The fascination of the subject Of gambling for
these early American magazine writers is articulated by
the anonymous author of An American Bee anecdote (1794).
Although gaming never fails to end in "shame, poverty,
and distress," she says, "Few vices are more prevalent
in our days than gaming."2 In agreement, the author of
"The Gamester" in The Weekly Visitor; or, Ladies' Mis-
cellany (1806) notes,

As the subject [gambling] is so interesting to

the welfare of society, I shall frequently
devote my pen to the theme; and as example is

 

2"The Fatal Effects of Gaming," pp. 93—94.

31

allowed to be more impressive than precept, I
Shall describe a few instances Of the effect
Of this destructive passion, which I have
either gggg or pggp.

Despite its use by men, gambling is a woman's
subject in eighteenth century magazines. In that period,
unless titled, the heroine was entirely dependent upon
the bounty Of her husband-gambler. Then, too, the age
abounded in female gamesters against whom even Steele
in his Tatler papers expresses concern.4 One gets some
notion Of the hold the vice had on the fair sex in a re—
printed article titled "Gambling" from a London paper in
The Visitor or Ladies' Miscellany (1805). Here a lady
of title is said to have lost almost half a million
pounds sterling playing faro in the house Of another
high ranking lady.5 Indeed, "lady books" on the variety

Of Godey's are the chief depositories for early gambler

tales. In the already mentioned Massachusetts Magazine

 

(1794), the table of contents Of the first four volumes

indicates sentimental "female" titles: "parental

 

3IV (May 3), 209.

4The Guardian, NO. 120 (London: J. Tonson,
July 29, 1713).

 

5pp. 278—279.

32

affection," "compassion,” "The Fatal Effects Of Love."
In addition several gambler writings appear: "The Game-
sters" (II), an apologue, "On Gaming: A Fragment" (IV),
an essay, and "Disquisition on Gaming" (IV), a poem.

Also included among a plethora of other suitable
matter for the "fair reader" are a fragment titled "The
Reformers" in which an honest mechanic is ruined by a
lottery6 and "The Gambler: An Anecdote," a brief narra—
tive concerning a newlywed who is taught a lesson when
he returns from one Of his late gambling sessions to find
a monstrous black hog in his bed instead of his wife.7

Although ”The Gambler: An Anecdote" is one Of
our early gambling tales, its humor, reminiscent Of the
Second Shepherd's Play, is not characteristic Of the sen-
timental gambler genre. More representative of the sugar—
coated and tearful species are two sketches in The Amer—
ican Bee (1797). In "The Fatal Effects of Gaming" a pair
of gambling brothers turn highwaymen and accidentally
kill their own father in a hold—up, after which, in des-

pair, they commit suicide.8 Even closer to the generic

 

6II, 231.

7VI, 458-459. 8pp. 93-99.

33

sentimental type in the same magazine is "Matrimonial
Infidelity Detected” (1797). Here a young officer marries
for money to pay Off his gambling debts, but when his
generous wife catches him in the embrace of one of his
many mistresses, she cuts him adrift. When last heard of,
he was a commissioned Officer in General Clinton's army
in America during the war.

At this stage of "British-American" magazines,
one cannot distinguish an English from an American gambler
story. The period, of course, was one of literary laissez-
faire and English publishers capitalized on the market
created in America during a period of expanding prOSperity
following the Revolutionary War. One should not be
alarmed, therefore, to find "The Gamester" in the 1806
The Weekly Visitor10 almost identically reproduced in
Edward Maturin's "Original. The Gamester. A Tale" in
the 1838 The Ladies' Companion.11 SO far as settings are
concerned, the tales may as well take place in London or

Brighton as in New York or Boston.
9
pp. 238-243.

10
IV (May 3, May 10), 209-10, 217-218.

1
11x (Aug.), 165-173.

34

The characters share the same vagueness as do the
locales and even the prefix "Lord" appended to a name
Offers no help in identifying the story-figures as Of
American or English persuasion. Titles are Often descrip-
tive Of the contents of the stories and follow the Rakes-
progress pattern as in "Leaf NO. II . . . The Errors--—
The Consequences--—The Remorse."12 Lengths vary from one
to fifteen pages and ordinarily conclude with a moral tag
and the author's signature or a pseudonym such as "The
Rover" or "A Friend of Virtue.“

Two or three characters are featured in the plot--
a man, single or married, and a woman, single or married.
If a third person is necessary, he is either another
gambler or a friend or relative of either the wife or
husband. The gambler as a third person in the plot func-
tions as a conflict agent and usually appears in tales
with a romantic sub-plot in which the unwed heroine has
a choice to make between two fiancés.

The focus of attention invariably falls on the
woman and the standardized plot has two sections. The

first centers on the maiden life of a happy lady during

 

2
l Godey}s Lady's Book, XXXIX (Sept., 1849), 207-

214.

35

which she falls in love with a gentleman, perhaps a
stranger to her; and the second part treats of her woeful
married life to him. Since the purpose Of the tale is
to extract tears from the reader, this second part comes
in for the greater Share Of attention. When the husband
becomes bored, which customarily occurs after about five
years Of married bliss, he drifts to gambling houses.
Meantime his wife suffers in silence, a portrait Of
sorrow, praying and hoping for her spouse's reformation.
Justice is hard in these tales of grief and re-
sultant woe, and the wife gets a measure of revenge for
the neglect and abuse at the hands Of her husband. His
fate usually sends him to a madhouse, a jail, or the
bottom Of a river. Inexorably, the gambler receives the
just deserts of the traditional villain. As a Christian
he has disobeyed the laws of God, church, and community
by abandoning his home, wife, and children tO pursue the
fickle goddess Of chance. SO rigid is this element of
retribution in the tales that any deviation from the pat-
tern comprises an act of charity beyond the expectations
Of the reader. Indeed, the creation of the man as a foil
for the woman constitutes the chief defect Of the gambler

story as a genre. The gambler is drawn as a puppet on a

36

string, stripped of free will, and totally at the whim of
a moral-minded author or her persona in the story. In a
word, the gambler becomes an abstraction as in the Old
Morality plays and is destined for great suffering both
in this and the other world.

A vessel of virtue, the gambler—wife plays a pas-
sive role in the tradition of patient Griselda and courts
the tearful moment. Like her counterpart in eighteenth
century English plays, She frequently dissolves in tears
and reaches a state of complete inertia. It is then that
the authors bring in one of their favorite deus ex machina,
a providential agent to answer her prayers. The heroine
in "Gambling, or Rain and Sunshine," for example, is
helped out Of a gloomy situation when a grandfather tricks
his gambler son and, having reformed him, takes him and
his family home to take care Of them.13 In Sylvanus S.
Cobb's "The Card Table," an unrecognized Mississippi

riverboat gambler bankrupts his brother-in—law as a way

of reforming him,14 and in Blunderbuss's "The Duel by

 

13The Ladies' Garland, IV (June 30, 1827), 25.

 

l4Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, X

(Jan. 12, 1856), 27.

37

Candlelight" another Southerner insists on a shotgun
wedding to help clear up his family's name.15 The
intercessor-device backfires, however, in Rover's "The
Gambler" in which the son of a hypocrite gambler is saved
from suicide by a stranger who robs him but with whom he
ends up a parricide in an argument over cards.

The staple approach in tales featuring unwed
girls echoes the strategem devices of the sentimental
dramas. For the most part, married women stay home rather
than check on the nocturnal habits of their husbands.

The only exception is "Matrimonial Infidelity Detected"
(1797) in which an upper-class English lady finds her
young husband in the arms Of one Of his mistresses. A
standard tale which uses a bachelorette to Spy on her
fiancé is “The Gamblers" in Godey's for 1840. Here the
heroine is escorted by her former flame to a gambling
house where, concealed behind draperies, she overhears
her deceiver, "a handsome gentleman with large black

whiskersg'disclose his dastardly plot to marry her for

__

15Golden Era, VI (Aug. 7, 1859), 1.

 

16The Ladies' Companion, VIII (April, 1838),
277-278.

 

38

money and then abandon her.17 The most plucky Of this
Single girl type in gambler fiction is Flora in H. J.
Plomteaux's "The Outcast Reclaimed; or, Strength Of Pure
Love" who practices shuffling cards for months in order
to disguise herself as a professional gambler and thereby
bankrupt her boyfriend as a means Of bringing him to the
altar.18

In conjunction with the pervasive theme Of virtue
in distress are the themes of corruption abroad and re-
form. The first appealed to British and American writers
whose readers probably still had events of the Revolution-
ary War fresh in their memories. From the point Of view
of English authors, America is pictured as a dumping
ground for Britain's ne'er-do-wells and incorrigibles.
In The Gambler; or, Memoirs of a British Officer (1802),19
an Englishman returns from the American battlefield tO
continue his gambling habit and lead his family and him—

self to ruin. Before his suicide, he works as a trans-

lator of French books, a fate perhaps as low as the author

 

17xx (May). 225-229.,

18Golden Era, VIII (May 13, 1860), 1-2.

 

19(Washington: W. Duane & Son).

39

can devise for a British gentleman. Perhaps less subtle
in its denunciation Of Revolutionary America is "Matri-
monial Infidelity Detected" in which a lady cuts Off her
allowance to her young philandering husband and sends him
tO his brothers who ease his distress by buying him a
commission in a foreign land.

As part Of a literary tradition, a few early lady-
bOOk tales treat the theme of corruption abroad with an
Italian setting as in the seventeenth century essays Of
Roger Ascham and Francis Bacon. Dated 1806, "The Gamester"
features two rich English youths on the Grand Tour who
accidentally meet in Italy. Clifford, the innocent Of
the pair, victimized by Lord Dorset at the gaming tables,
returns home to marry and once more fall prey to his
nemesis Dorset. Finally, they engage in a duel in which
Clifford is injured and reduced to dependency upon his
Amelia—like wife.

A companion piece to "The Gamester" is Edward
Maturin's "Original. The Gamester. A Tale," which al—
though bearing the date 1838 was probably written much
earlier. In Maturin's version, young Mortimer haunts a
dazzling Roman gambling den where Alessandro gains revenge

for being jilted by Mortimer's wife Isabel. Reduced to

4O

beggary and deSpair, Mortimer dies in a duel with Ales-
sandro and merits the author's final comment--"Mortimer
was an idiot!”

As noted previously, the vague settings and
"homes" of the characters in lady-book tales make it
difficult to determine whether the tales are pro- or
anti-British or American in this period of the War.
This ambivalent attitude shows up in Sarah Wood's Dorval;
or, the Speculator, By a Lady (1801) in which the titular
villain, an English bastard, is pressed into service in
the English Navy and after an honorable discharge works
as a hand on a Massachusetts farm. Fired from this job
because Of cruelty to animals, he goes to the West Indies,
marries a woman he tries to murder, does succeed in mur-
dering two plantation workers, and returns to America
as a member of a gambling syndicate with headquarters
on the Eastern Seaboard. While floating bonds to swindle
George Washington's veterans out of Georgia land, he
murders a woman he married in America and tries to seduce
the heroine of the tale. When he is finally captured

in the West Indies, he accidentally dies in jail from

41

his own hand as he tries to murder the heroine who out
Of pity has visited him there.20

Even more indefinite in locale is "The Fatal
Effects of Gaming." Here a Western gentleman gives his
twin sons a "polite education" at "a distant university"
where an insinuating gamester lures them into gambling
and bankrupts them. Temporarily Spared want, a rich
relative gives one brOther a commission in a foreign
regiment and the other a place in an eminent London mer-
chant's house. These Offers spurned, they fall into the
gaming habit once again in London, turn to highway robbery
when broke, and die suicides as they accidentally shoot
their father in a stick—up.

The distant university mentioned in the tale may
be American rather than English, for American Colleges in
gambler stories are portrayed as corrupters of youth and
citadels of infidelism. This aSpect of the gambler story
will be explored more in detail later in this study. At
present it needs only to be noted that story writers felt
that colleges were mere meeting places for wealthy and

Spirited young men rather than institutions Of higher

 

20(Portsmouth, New Hampshire, n.d.).

42

learning. The supervisors of the schools were particu-
larly remiss in duty by failing to supervise the activ-
ities Of their charges.

Despite its early date, Caroline Mattilda Thayer's
The Gamesters (1805) may serve as a model for college-
gambler tales which had a steady appeal up to the Civil
War. The plot of The Gamesters involves Leander Ander-
son's fall from innocence to that of wicked gambler
through the evil deeds of his Harvard friend, Edward
Somerton. After Anderson commits suicide, Somerton de-
velOps a guilty conscience and roams the earth a despised
beggar until he dies and is unmourned at the grave.21

The second Of the themes to be discussed in early
American gambler stories in lady books is that Of the re-
formed rake, a theme pOpular in several species Of
eighteenth-century drama as well as in the fiction of
that period. In the previously mentioned ”Matrimonial
Infidelity Detected," a wealthy and mature widow mis-
takenly places her trust in a young ensign who betrays

her for a Spate Of mistresses. Another type tale Of

this kind is "The Reformed Rake. A Tale." Here a good

2
1(Boston: Thomas & Andrews).

43

woman marries a gambler hoping to reform him while he
pretends to love her only to get her money. This fortune
seeker dies a debauched man and the wife is reduced to
poverty and dependence. In moral indignation the author
cries out, "May those Of my fair readers whose matrimonial
prize still continues afloat within the wheel Of fate, be
careful how far they trust to the Specious appearance Of
a refopmed rake."22

The reformed rake theme relates to three other
sentimental elements in gambler stories--the cult of
filial Obedience, and a concomitant aspect, seduction,
and total dissolution. In tale after tale, the moral
shines through: once a woman has made her choice, right
or wrong, she is committed to her lot, miserable though
it may be. From the point of view of parents, therefore,
a long period Of courtship is the ideal so that a daughter
and her family can get acquainted with her fiancé. Girls
are poor judges Of the characters Of their fiancés because

girls in love are giddy and trust to the specious appear-

ances Of gentlemen who may be wolves in sheep's clothing.

 

22Ladies Visitor, I (Jan. 19, 1820), 151.

44

A composite type formed from several Of these
early lady-book tales reveals a rich, handsome gentleman
of intelligence, charm, and talent. One of the chief
characteristics that stand out in relief in the outline
is his reckless defiance of social convention. This con-
tempt for conformity shows up in his proud curl of the
lip, an indefinable Sign of insolence toward others.
Although dressing in the height of fashion, he prefers
black suits, complemented by flashing rings and cuff
links. The most gifted of the breed are Fitzhenry in
"The Gambler's Fate" whose resonant voice can even make
an Old lady in her rocking chair weep at his melancholy
notes23 and DeValcour in "The Gamester," a French
atheist with many "projects."24

Traditionally, the gambler has a roving eye for
the turn of a lady's ankle. This manner, Of course, only
reinforces the parental argument that rakes bear watching

and that their pasts need reviewing. Lucy Sumner in

Hanna Foster's The Coquette (1797) notes that the wife

 

23Mary E. MacMichael, Godey's Lady}s Book, XI

(July, 1836), 41-55.
24 .
The Ladies' Garland, I (Sept. 25, 1824), 129-
131.

45

Of profligate Peter Sanford was "a stranger to his
[Peter's] manner Of life; and doubtless allured . . .

by flattery, deceit, and external appearance, to trust
to his honor, little thinking him wholly devoid of that
sacred tie:"25 The rake himself acknowledges his own
villainy. TO his friend Charles Deighton he says,

"She [Mrs. Sanford] must blame herself if she suffers
hereafter; for she was visibly captivated by my external
appearance" (p. 171). Everyone should be alerted to the
habit of rakes to treat their female victims shabbily
after seducing them. The titular heroine in EmgTy_
Hamilton Offers up her woeful experience at the hands

of a seducer as a warning to girls to distrust the man
who seeks to conceal his intentions from her parents.
The unhappy fate of the heroine in Susanna Rowson's
CharTgtte gives poignancy to the warning of the author,
"Oh my dear girls, for to such only am I writing, listen
not to the voice of love, unless sanctioned by parental

approbation."27

 

25(Boston: E. Larkin), pp. 200-201.
26Eliza Vicery (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas,
Jr., 1803), p: 47.

27(Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1794), p. 53.

46

Those favoring the argument that children Should
decide for themselves what choice to make in marriage call
the disciplinary tactics of their parents in this matter a
form Of tyranny. Young ladies, they argue, whether in or
out Of love, are mature enough to control their emotions
and possess the will to resist the machinations Of male
seducers. To treat children in a high-minded fashion
leads only to family problems and is frequently the means
to a child's misery and seldom to his happiness.

As said before, the theme Of seduction that links
with the filial Obedience argument derived from Richard-
son's Pamela and Clarissa. Correctly Speaking, however,
it is not seduction per se but rather the threat Of seduc-
tion that appeared as a pOpular element in the gambler
tales. Indeed in only a few lady-book stories before
Bret Harte and the Beadle novelists in the 1870's does
seduction receive more than passing reference. Appar-
ently, lady-book writers sincerely Observed the eighteenth-

century code Of conduct regarding decorum and prOpriety.

 

28"The Nymph Of the Grove--A Sentimental Histor-

iette," The Massachusetts Magazine (1792), IV, 157, as
quoted in Herbert R. Brown, "Richardson and Sterne in
The Massachusetts Magazine," The New England Quarterly,
V (1932), 73.

 

47

The only short fiction to come under the present writer's
Observance in which seduction is emphasized to any extent
is Blunderbuss's "The Duel By Candlelight” in which a
Southerner impregnates a lady and then forces her to work
as his helper in a gambling house. In most magazine
stories the seducer decides against seduction when con-
fronted with a lady Of Spotless virtue, a strategy not
unlike that in the rake-dramas of the eighteenth century.
The earliest examples of villain—seducers in the
lady-book story are usually enlisted from the professional
ranks Of gamblers Of English nationality. These stories,
therefore, merge with the corruption—abroad theme. The
best of the tales Of this type are the 1806 "The Gamester"
and "Original. The Gamester," which has the date of 1838,
although it was probably circulated three decades before
then. In most respects, these tales are alike. In both
of them a young upper-class Englishman falls into the
clutches of a gambler in Italy who has been jilted by the
wife Of his victim. In "The Gamester," Lord Dorset, the
better Of the two in terms Of the seduction factor, duns
Clifford for payment of his gambling debts and, as in

Amelia, the Lord Offers Clifford's wife Louisa the

 

proposition to be her banker for the return of certain

48

forbidden pleasures. This virtuous lady responds, “Leave,
me, sir; and never wound my feelings by your presence;

for your friendsth, and your favours, I equally despise"
(p. 217). When Clifford uneXpectedly arrives home on this
occasion, he finds Lord Dorset on his bended knee before
Louisa, and a hot exchange Of words follow during which
the Lord is forced into the street where a few days later
the two men accidentally meet and agree to a duel.

The jilt motif that motivates revenge in "The
Gamester" and "Original" is reserved for true villain—
gamblers. AS applied to a love affair between a man and
woman it becomes a matter of hurt pride. The device in
gambler fiction probably owes much to Richardson's QTgp—
T§§g_in which, one recalls, the class-conscious Lovelace
says he would consider it a personal triumph to marry
Clarissa and thereby hurt the Harlowes, a family inferior
to his own. The very thought that he should be considered
a rival Of the wretched Roger Solmes chagrins Lovelace.
Unable to reconcile himself to defeat in his purpose,
Lovelace seeks revenge on all womankind. "I have boasted
I was once in love before," he says "It was in my early

manhood—-with that quality jilt, whose infidelity I have

49

vowed to revenge upon as many of the sex as shall come
into my power."2

The theme of seduction as it follows a man-tO-man
pattern shows connection with Barnard's Law in the Coney-
catching pamphlets. Although changing times meant that
the modern rOper in the lady-book tales should use more
sophisticated methods to catch his gulls, the same pattern
existed in them as in the Old Renaissance tracts. Perhaps
the chief noticeable difference, however, is that the Old-
time rOper seemed to be more of a transit than the newer
ones with fixed abodes in which to practice their decep-
tive arts. In lady—book stories, the confidence men had
attachments to gaming houses perhaps as regular employees
with a set percentage agreement. None of the lady writers
in this early period, however, go into detail about these
matters, Show any curiosity about the interiors or exter-
iors Of gambling establishments, or even to the seduction
methods employed in these houses. Such details, natur-

ally, would have enlivened the tales but the purpose Of

 

zgngTT§§g_in Novels of Samuel Richardson, 20

vols. (London, 1902), III, 112, as quoted in H. G. Ward,
"Richardson's Character Of Lovelace," Modern Language
Review, VII (1912), 496-497.

 

50

lady books, as said before, is to concentrate on the suf-
ferings Of the gambler's wife and not on gambling per se.

Two approaches or "pitches" are used to get the
gull tO alight in order to be plucked. The first of these
is included in the corruption-abroad stories mentioned
before. In "The Gamester" it is to be recalled that a
rich gentleman named Clifford accidentally meets Lord
Dorset, a Villain who insinuates himself into the graces
Of Clifford as a way of seducing Clifford's wife. This
Amelia-like situation likewise Obtains in "Original. The
Gamester" in which Alessandro, an Italian living in Rome,
shows up in London to attempt to seduce his gambling
victim's wife. Another Of this type Of seduction plot
appears in "The Outcast Reclaimed" with a silver mining
camp in California as its 1860 setting. Here the Hon.
M.B.T. lures an honest young businessman into a gambling
house so as to discredit him in the eyes Of a woman the
villain hOpes to marry.

Attempted seduction is responsible for another
motif in these early gambler tales--dueling. In the Oft—
mentioned "Original. The Gamester,“ Mortimer challenges
Alessandro to a duel when he realizes that the Italian

has tried to seduce his wife, a Situation which is

51

paralleled in ”The Gamester" in which Clifford demands
satisfaction from Lord Dorset for threatening his wife's
virtue. The outcome Of the duel affords the author ample
Opportunity to moralize about the evils of dueling which,
along with gambling and drunkenness, comprises a chief
vice under attack in gambler fiction. When Clifford is
injured in the duel and his income reduced as a conse-
quence, his family live in great deprivation. On his
deathbed, Clifford admonishes his wife to watch over his
children to see that they dO not take up gambling: "Every
man, at first, may resist its allurements," he says, "but
it is a vice which, when once they are engaged in it, it
is most difficult to overcome." He continues, "I, alas!
I am a wretched instance of the truth Of this assertion,
and I implore you to impress an abhorrence Of the practice
upon my injured children's minds" (p. 218).

The primary reason for gamblers resorting to a
duel, however, does not arise over the possession of a
woman but rather over arguments in card games. Since
this factor will be treated later in our Southern tales,
only two tales need to be briefly mentioned, "The Gambler's
Fate" and Rover's ”The Gambler." The first tale, laid in

London,features two Englishmen, Russel and Melville,who

52

play dice at St. James's in London. When Russel detects
Hawkes' cheating, he accuses him of the fact and they end
up in a duel the next morning. Hawkes, bleeding to death
on the ground, claims he only cheated to be able to buy
things for his wife Blanche, with whom we belatedly dis-

cover Melville haS had an affaire de coeur in the past.30

 

In Rover's tale the substance betrays its 1838 date and
seems to have an English rather than an American setting.
In it Augustus Cleaveland, a hyprocrite gambler, advises
his son to "avoid cards as you would a noxious reptile."
But the message falls on empty ears, and the son turns
gambler. As time passes, the father and son lose sight
of each other for a long period of time until one day
they meet as strangers and play cards. When they quarrel,
a duel takes place in the back of the house where the

old man is stabbed and killed. As young Cleaveland un-
looses the dead man's coat, he notices a miniature pic-
ture Of himself hanging from his father's neck and com-

mits suicide as the police rush to the scene.3

 

30Spirit of the Times, VII (July 8, 1837), 163.

31The Ladies' Companion, VIII (April, 1838),
277-278.

 

53

A third aspect Of the lady—book tales that grows
out Of the general theme of the reformed rake is total
dissolution. This theme joins the main artery Of the
sentimental tradition through the abused—wife plays noted
in our previous chapter. The term applies only to women
and Specifically to wives Of negligent or abusive hus-
bands. A gambler's wife, unsuccessful in reforming her
spouse, usually dissolves in tears and surrenders her
will to live, a process which cannot be gradually de-
scribed in magazine fiction and therefore seems to happen
Of a sudden. This is the customary procedure in gambler
stories, for large spans of time are passed over in the
writer's haste to get to the point Of the story--a depic-
tion of resultant woe. It does not matter that the lady
arrives at her pitiable condition by quick or slow means
so long as She grieves when there. Having fulfilled her
mission in life as a dutiful wife chained to a philander-
ing gambler, she chooses to die rather than live a lonely
and neglected existence in a house without his affection.
Two Of the better stories illustrating the principle are
"Leaf NO. II . . .The Errors——-The Consequences---The
Remorse" and Mary MacMichael's "The Gambler's Fate." In

"Leaf No. II” a young lady in a Halifax hospital bed

54

listens to her gambler-husband whose final words come tOO
late to save both of them from death. MacMichael's "The
Gambler's Fate" adds a death—by-childbirth factor but

the wife's dissolution follows the conventional pattern
in other respects. She iS forsaken after a period Of a
few_years Of married bliss as her husband carouses with
his evil companions. Unable to convince him to change
his ways, She grows morose, gives up the life principle,
and dies.

In summary, at the Opening Of the nineteenth cen-
tury, American gambler stories contain rigidly defined
sentimental elements that persisted with slight variation
to the Civil War. In both novels and magazine tales, the
chief theme is corruption abroad, which is a carry-over
of attitudes emerging from the Revolutionary War still
fresh in the memories of English and American readers.

By the 1820's, the ravages Of war had disappeared and the
tales reflect an expanding economy focused on the prosper-
ing middle classes rather than on the hated gentlemen—
class as is true in stories at the turn of the century.

Since no evidence exists Of a genuine native
gambler short story, no gradual development Of the genre

takes place. If any tendency occurs in the fiction, it

55

is the use of full-fledged gamblers as villains rather
than as rogues. Nevertheless, rogue-gamblers seem the
most probable descendant of the Beggar Books and Coney-
catcher tracts Of the Renaissance. What happened, there-
fore, is that a full-blown English gambler stereotype
was transplanted from the English magazines and other
literary genre into American magazines and novels. Into
the 1820's, no indigenous American gambler type exists,
although the Southern gambler's heyday was not far Off.
One Of several static sentimental elements in the
gambler story in the first half of the century is that of
dissolution of the abused wife, which was taken over from
eighteenth-century plays of penitent rakes, prodigal sons,
and gamesters. Counterparts Of Fielding's Amelia appear
in almost every kind of gambler short story in that
authors merely abstracted from her personality one or two
traits and concentrated on them. In Fielding's story,
She has sufficient variety Of responses-—resignation, re-
sourcefulness, tenderness, gratefulness, and magnanimity--
to provide at least one virtue to an author capable of a
one-dimensional treatment of character. Unlike Amelia,

however, the gambler tales usually end unhappily with

56

the wife accepting her direful marriage condition while
her spouse ends up either dead or maimed for life.

Embracing all lady-book tales of this type is a
Puritanic code that conforms to a stern Old Testament
ethic of revenge for injury received. In general, this
insistence upon punitive action appears more in tales
that pggm American rather than English, although, here,
as in other matters connected with this "British-American"
period Of literature, one has difficulty pin-pointing
peOple and places in the stories.

Gulls as prey for gamblers were eschewed in the
lady-book tales from 1798 to 1850, although a few gallants,
prodigals, or youthful scapegraces turn up. Apparently,
English writers found the situation sterile for the suc-
cessful Operations Of fOps. Times had changed and the
fOp'S world was limited in hard-working America during a
period Of economic expansion. The common man had come
into his own as a tradesman, businessman, and merchant.
These figures had center stage, and writers and readers
wanted tO cry over a domestic scene featuring a misunder-
Stood and virtuous woman clinging to her family all the
more resolutely as her gambler-husband forsook her, his

marriage vows, and a business built up by frugality, hard

57

work, and prudence. Gentlemen of the leisure classes
were suspect and reminded Americans Of a rigid class

system against which they felt justified their assertion

of independence.

CHAPTER III

BIG CITY NOVELS

Sentiment finds expression in all places and sit-
uations and a city is no exception to the rule. In the
novels set in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and
Boston in the 1820 to 1870 period, the innocent from the
country coming to the large metropolises are doomed to
break their hearts. A city, said the author Of MetrOpOl-
itan Life Unveiled, "is not unlike a mighty octopus sit-
ting in an inky lair, thrusting its tentacles into every
home and feasting Off the victims thus secured."1 Authors
like T. S. Arthur, Mrs. Emma D.E.N. Southworth, Osgood
Bradbury, and J. H. Ingraham strike an alarming note and
warn countrymen about the perils Of city life in which
gamblers and their parasites wait to lure them from virtue,
rob them, and send them to insane asylums, prisons, houses
of prostitution, thieves' dens, slums, and a thousand

other wicked places.

 

1James William Buel (St. Louis: Anchor Publishing
Co., 1882), p. 125.

58

59

One Of the favorite sentimental themes of these
novels is seduction. Girls without family guidance are
prey for gambler-seducers who "practice all kinds Of de-
ception to lure young and beautiful girls into the vortex
Of moral death and destruction,"2 says the author Of Alice
Barber. The theme, Of course, forms a direct link with
novels and short stories already mentioned in this study--
Charlotte, The Coquette, The Gamesters, Dorval, and a
spate of tales around the turn Of the century. The
Simplest seduction story found in big city novels with
gamblers is Joseph Hertford's Personals; or, PerTTs of
the Period published in 1870, the same year as Bret

Harte's "Luck Of Roaring Camp" volume. In Personals, a

 

hackneyed plot unfolds in which a young lady in a Fifth
Avenue New York finishing school succumbs to the flat-
teries Of a Southern gambler who sets her up in a New
Orleans apartment and then deserts her for another woman,
unaware that his first mistress had drowned herself in

the Mississippi.

 

2Osgood Bradbury (New York: Samuel French, 1853),

3(New_York: Joseph Hertford, 1870).

60

This streamlined approach to the theme of seduc-

tion in Personals is not standard, however, in the novels.

 

The customary method is to overload the plot with seduc-
tion suprots and criss-crossing sub—subplOts. At times
SO many of these abbreviated Sketches-within-Sketches
appear in the novels that the reader has difficulty hOld—
ing to the main narrative line. The absurd lengths to
which writers go to include seduction in their novels in
the 'forties and 'fifties is Shown in Edward Z. C. Jud-
son's The B'Hoys Of New York, a Species Of dime novels
patterned after the story papers circulated in the
'thirties.

The B'Hoys features Chris Barton, a gambler who
heads a gang Of blackmailers, thieves, and counterfeiters
with headquarters in a New York dive. On a sylvan Spot
of ground on the banks Of the Hudson, Barton persuades a
bereaved young lady to forget her dead father and come
with him to New York City and marry him. Once there, he
sets her up in a love nest, robs her Of a fortune, and
then deserts her.

Two other sentimental ingredients interwoven in
this crazy-quilt plot should be emphasized. The first

of these is the author's use of the confession technique

61

which goes back to Richard Head's The EngTish Rogue and
Dorvaly the SpecuTgpor, Like Dorval, Chris Barton in
B'Hoys confesses to his butler that he was born a bastard,
abandoned on a rich man's doorstep, taken in, and then
bundled Off to live with a poor washerwoman until he was
fourteen years of age. After this, he was taken to his
patron's house to be displayed as an Object of the gen—
tleman's charity.

As the only boy among four spoiled girls, he was
sent to a private academy where a boy competing for the
prize as the outstanding student in the graduating class
called him "charity boy." This insult was repaid With a
solid threshing which resulted in a law suit which Barton
lost. Imprisoned and released, he fell in love with and
was about to marry a young heiress when his Old nemesis
turned up again to disclose to the lady's father that
Barton had a prison record. Now branded an outcast, like
the villain Tiger Dick in Philip warne's dime novel Tppgg
Of a Kind, Barton vows revenge on society and turns

gambler.4

 

4E. Z. C. Judson (Ned Buntline), 2 vols. (New
York: W. F. Burgess, 1850).

62

In another of his stories Judson in The Mysteries
and Miseries of New Orleans focuses attention on an un—
usual twist in the conventional seduction plot. Here the
seduced wife Of a gambler wreaks revenge on her husband
for killing her seducer by hiring an assassin in Havana
to stretch her neglectful husband on a wheel. Earlier
this same seducer paid a guardian to drug a young girl
preparatory to his ravishing her in a scene echoing that
in Richardson's Clarissa.S

Satisfactory as is this depiction of a gambler-
'seducer in Judson's Mysteries and Miserigg, he plays his
most villainous role in Osgood Bradbury's EmilyI The
Beautifu; Seamstress and the recently discussed Judson's
B'Hoys. In The Beautiful Seamstress a gambler disguised
as a Methodist minister persuades a young lady at her
mother's deathbed to be the "adopted daughter" of a
lecherous Old man.6 In B'Hoys, the heartless libertine
Chris Barton takes an assignment from a Jesuit priest to
hire a young man to seduce a girl to keep her from bear-

ing a legitimate child to be the rightful heir Of a

 

v V_,

5(New York: Akarman & Ormsby Co., 1851).

6(Boston: George H. Williams, 1853).

63

fortune the church hOpes to inherit in terms Of a will
made out by the girl's uncle.

In their most expansive moods, gambler-story
writers using the seduction theme, as well as other
themes, deplore the squandered talents of gamblers.

They think the nimble-fingered gentry have greater
potential than persecuting maidens or flipping paste—
boards. De Valcour, for example, in the anonymous “The
Gamester" (Ladies Garland, 1824) has a lofty nature,
"strong passions, warm imagination, and ever-wakeful
energies" (p. 129). Aubrey Fitzhenry in "The Gambler's
Fate" deserved to be called a precocious genius and
Colonel Carpenter in Alice Barbgp, a graceful gentleman
of forty-five, Would do better tO stick to his trout
fishing than pursuing innocent girls. For a while this
worthy held the position of stage director and manager
of theatres in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, but
soon, he is reduced to wearing an elegant ring and gold
chain about his neck as a heartless gambler and a seducer
of women.

Closely related to the theme Of seduction in the
big city novels is that Of the neglected wife. For models

these stories had the English domestic tragedies of the

64

eighteenth century, Fielding's sentimental Amelia, and
the tales in lady—book magazines. Along with novels
featuring seduction, intemperance, and confidence men,
these narratives Of abused wives form the largest
single cluster in the gambler genre in the nineteenth
century.

Three of the best stories in this category are
all by T. S. Arthur, a militant temperance reformer of
the'forties and'fifties--The Ruined Gamester (1842), "The
Hasty Marriage" (1853), and The Martyr Wife (1849). In
The Martyr Wife, a gambler reforms upon viewing the wreck
he made Of his life and that Of his now dead wife.7 "The
Hasty Marriage," a short story, features a kindhearted
wife who accepts her gambler-husband back time and again
under the promise of reformation, but he repays her by
driving her to an early grave and sending her ragged
children to be wards Of relatives.8 The Ruined Gamester
has a two-part structure as in the lady-book gambler tales

of domestic woe, a fact which the subtitle indicates-—

 

7(Philadelphia: Henry F. Anners, 1849), pp.

8Leaves from the Book of Human Life (Philadel-
phia: J. W. Bradley Co., 1853), pp. 263-286.

65

Or, two Eras in my Life, an Autobiographical Romance.
After a prefatory remark that he hOpes his brief sketches
serve as "beacon-lights to my fellow-men, warning them
from a dangerous coast," Mr. Arthur relates incidents in
his hero's innocent childhood that Show the hero, George
Fuller, to be a gentleman Of fine sensibilities with a
fondness for games of chance, SSpecially marbles. In
Part Two, Fuller's successful business and married life
is treated.

One New Year's day, Fuller drOps into a local
tavern for a holiday drink where, half-tipsy, he reveals
his financial state to his old marble-playing friend who
is now a confidence man. This, Of course, starts George's
undoing. As George gambles, he withholds his secret from
his distraught wife who is only made privy to his actions
when it is almost too late to do anything about them. She
tries, nevertheless, to reclaim him and frequently cries
her eyes out hOping he will refrain from gambling. In
time, he discloses to her his losses in the amount of
$10,000 in a three-day period, but he continues to gamble.
Home early one night from the gambling house, he finds
his wife in a posture resembling death and is shocked

back to his senses. Soon thereafter he discovers that

66

his friend is a stool pigeon and by an unusual turn Of
events recovers part of his losses, providing a happy
ending to a genre unaccustomed to happy endings.

Two overlapping sub-groups Of this abused-wife
theme in big city novels can be conveniently treated
at this time--fortune hunters and drunkards, types Of
gamblers who also appear in several other categories.

Fortune hunters are some Of the most charming
villains in the gambler genre. High kickers in their
heyday, these young bucks are always short of cash
and being dunned for their debts Of honor. Fearing
the outcast brand, they prowl on rich widows and heir-
esses. This gentleman type, pointed out in several
lady-book short stories, appeared in the early "Matri-
monial Infidelity Detected" in Tpg_American Bee (1797).
Often these wolves in sheep's clothing have two or more
woves as in Dorval and perhaps several mistresses.
Naturally, the more women added to his list, the more
trouble a gambler invites for himself, for women pose
a threat Of exposure. The favorite approach Of

this class Of gambler-libertine is the easiest and

 

9(Philadelphia: Henry F. Anners, 1842).

67

time-honored one Of merely flattering a wealthy lady into
marriage, Of living with her a short while to gain her
confidence, Of having her sign over her securities or
real prOperty to him, and then finally of absconding.
Although these tricksters make a successful getaway in
the stories, fate catches up with them in the end and
they get their just reward--a tortured conscience and
death in a great many agonizing ways.

The most satisfying in this cluster of novels
featuring fortune hunters is A. L.'s The Tenant-House;
or. Embers from Poverty's Hearthstone (1857) and T. S.
Arthur's The Martyr Wife (1849). In The Tenant-House,
an artful scamp deserts his wife for a rich Jewess; and,
when his plans go awry, he hires a gunman to kill the
heiress's uncle but is double—crossed and shot by the
assassin he hired.10 The Martyr Wife reveals a bigamist's
cruel treatment of his former wife who commits suicide
after telling the gambler's second wife the truth about
the vile fortune hunter. Seized by despair, the new wife
dies of a broken heart as the gambler begs God for help

lest he be lost forever.

 

10(New York: Robert M. Dewitt, 1857).

68

Even more detestable than the fortune hunter on
the abused-wife theme is the drunkard. Although the
drunkard-gambler novel reached a high point in the
'forties and 'fifties, an organized movement to control
the consumption of hard liquor in the United States began
much earlier. New York State had a Temperance Society in
1808 and Massachusetts one in 1813. In 1826, three years
before James Kirke Paulding's "The Drunkard" in Tales of
the Good Woman,11 the American Society for the Promotion
of Temperance was founded in Boston; by 1833 more than a
million members belonged to over 6,000 local societies
in several states. In the same year, according to George
Arthur Dunlap, New York's Temperance Society included
1158 auxiliary societies with 161,721 members. But no
state law stOpped the manufacture and sale of intoxicating
liquors until Maine did so in 1851.12

Like gambling, temperance is a lady's subject,

but not invariably so. Some novels feature bachelor-

drunks in a gambler's progress sort of Situation from the

 

11(New York: G & C. Carvill, 1829), pp. 141-188.

12The Cityyin the American Novel, 1789-1900 (Phil-

adelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 1934), p. 50.

69

gaming house to the grave, but most of them combine hus-
bands and wives for additional sentiment. As husbands
abandon and neglect them for gambling houses and taverns,
their wives suffer in silence, dissolve in tears, and
surrender their will to live. Often the distinction
therefore between a debauched gambler and drunkard becomes
blurred. The wife in Emily Mansfield (1845) tells her
husband that drinking is a "dreadful habit" and that
"Gambling itself is hardly worse.”13 Mason Long, an au-
thority on gambling and reformed gamblers, says,

Gambling and drinking gO together . . . and

lead to one another; that the gambler is almost

invariably a drinker, and the drinker very

frequently a gambler. A man who is addicted to

drinking is almost certain to get to playing,

and he who gambles will, sooner or later, be-

come a drunkard.
And, according to Charles Sutton, "Gambling leads to in—
temperance. The intoxicating cup is the natural refuge

of the gamesters."15

 

13[Osgood Bradbury], Emily Mansfield in Miscel—
lany, ed. Josiah A. Fraetas, (n.p., 1845), II, 31.

14LTTg_(ChicagO: Donnelley & Loyd, 1878), p. 159.

15The New York Tombs, eds. James B. Mix and
Samuel A. MacKeever (San Francisco: A. Roman & Co.,
1874), p. 59.

70

Although husbands as occasional gamblers drink,
professional gamblers avoid liquor, at least when on
duty. A prOprietor who mixes drink and cards soon is
destined for bankruptcy. The successful among the
gambler-breed, the bloods or thoroughbreds (Of which
there were none in the stories), practice abstinence in
their Official capacity as heads of houses. The idea is
that a clear-headed player has an advantage over a
drunken one in which the fumes Of liquor Spread a destruc-
tive effect. Once his victim enters his "hells," the
proprietor or capper turns him over to the dealer, a
bland, cool and cunning worker who makes quick work of
fleecing the victim or of setting him up for bigger pots
in the future. A rOper for a gambler in a swanky New
York club Speaks for a whole race Of tricksters in the
novels: ”If I can make him drink," he says, "I can make
him play. If he plays I win his money!"16 The elegant
suppers, expensive wines, Havana cigars, and congenial
talk all lead to one grand finale——a card game. The

purpose of the whole Operation is to suck the customer

 

16Joseph H. Ingraham, Edward Austin (Boston:
Gleason's Publishing Hall, 1845), p. 25.

71

in and then swindle him Of his money, one way or another,
through liquor, drugs, card tricks, or perhaps a combina-
tion Of all of these devices and more.

Among a Spate of gambler—drunkard novels, a highly
selective list includes J. H. Ingraham's Edward Austin
(1845), Osgood Bradbury's Emily Mansfield in Miscellany
(1845), a Sixty-four page novelette, the same author's
Jane Clark (1855), and Charles Burdett's The Gambler; or,
the Policeman's Story (1848). These stories do not merit
detailed consideration here inasmuch as other novels have
already revealed their gloomy contents, but perhaps it
is worth mentioning that Charles Burdett's The Gambler
and Bradbury's Jane Clark can be singled out among the
group as the best counterparts to the standard sentimental
short story in the lady-book magazines on the theme Of the
abused wife.

A blending Of the plot elements Of these two
novels shows the old-fashioned story of the gambler in
a tear-jerking sequence Of scenes. Initially, he takes
up with evil companions, loses his business or job in
gambling, incurs debts, borrows, begs, and steals to keep
up his high style of living, and finally ends up a hideous

and cruel brute. The patient wife, aware of the situation,

72

pleads with him but to no avail. Either out Of the vain
hope Of reforming him or out of physical fear of him, she
mortgages her prOperty, sells her jewels (and maybe even
her Bible), works as a seamstress, and endures cold,
hunger, sickness, sorrow, humility and dies, if necessary,
for his sake. Her neglected children meanwhile beg in
rags; the boys run wild and steal, and the girls follow
prostitution, both bidding fair to end up in lunatic
asylums as do their parents.

People gamble for a variety Of reasons—-avarice,
excitement, enchantment—-and city novelists deplore the
waste Of time, energy, and power at gaming tables. Of
course, the blame comes to rest on the gambler's loss of
faith in God, on parents who had neglected or imprOperly
trained their charges in childhood, evil companions, the
surrender Of the will to the pleasures of the senses, a
sordid environment, and above all, a misguided education.
Perhaps what city novelists wanted was what most early
American fictionists wanted--"practical" schools. Al-
though these early writers had faith in the perfectibility
Of man, their Optimism fell short of revolutionary beliefs
imported from France or from what we may imagine to be the

tutorial plan Of England. The gambler-story writers never

73

detailed their utOpian school system but most, while
paying deference to the classics, viewed these studies
as useless in the New Republic. Perhaps classical works
had a purpose in a static society but America after the
Revolution and during its period of economic eXpansion
really needed trade and business schools. Enos Hitch-
cock eXpresses this materialistic ethos in The Memoirs
Of the Bloomsgrove FamiTy: "industry must constitute
its wealth, and business must form its pleasures."l7
Hence, a stock practice in gambler stories is to
feature successful clerks, merchants, tradesmen, mechanics,
and architects. AS expected, these frugal, hard-working,
Bible-reading sons of Benjamin Franklin in the city novels
provide suitable contrast figures to the rich members Of
the gentleman class whose wealth and leisure lead them to
gambling and other evil doings. If both middle— and
upper-class students appear in the same stories, we shall
concentrate on the Operations of one Of the pair, either
the gentleman or the poor but ambitious boy.

The practical peOple featured in this success—or-

failure theme, centering on the hard worker from the

 

17Letter LXXXVI (Boston: Thomas & Andrews Co.,

1790), II, 263.

74

middle class, fall into two broad groups: first, school
boys who take up mechanics and architecture, and second,
clerks who work as apprentices in shOps and merchant
houses. The best of the schoolboy tales are J. H. Ingra-
ham's Harry HarefootL or, the Three Temptations (1845)
and Frederick Jackson's Riches and Honor. A New England
Story. Founded on Fact (1847).

In Ingraham's novel, while the titular anti-hero
falls victim to liquor, gambling, and "the grosser plea-
sures Of sense,“ his friend, Pierce Wentworth, apprentices
himself to a Boston housewright or carpenter-architect
and attends night school to learn French, mathematics,
and Greek, In his enthusiasm for his trade, Pierce says
to a chagrined Harry: "Builders have risen to great men,
and I can name, besides many EurOpeans, our own country-
men, Strickland, Haveland, Davis, and others, who are men
Of the highest respectability, and their names do honor
to the genius Of their country."18 At these words, the
two friends part enemies. In defense of Wentworth's
choice Of a trade school and apprentice training, the

author states that the position Of apprentices in the

 

18(Boston: H. L. Williams, 1845), p. 27.

75

social system is infinitely superior in every way to that
Of clerks, although each condition has its peculiar temp-
tations. "Nevertheless, mechanics live an evener life,"
he concludes, for "the mechanic's actions or style are
temperate and sensible as he neither aspires to great
houses, nor apes the costly glitter of fashion." He does
not yearn for things beyond his means and learns to be
prudent and thrifty. Furthermore, "his amusements may be
boisterous and unfashionable perhaps, but they are rarely
ruinous to his character; cards and wine, billiards and
driving, rioting and harlotry, are very seldom his pur-
suits" (pp. 47-48). With this phiIOSOphy Of industry,
Pierce rises in society, marries well, and is commissioned
to build a royal residence in EurOpe. Hoping the moral
Of his story will not fail its mark, the author concludes
it with the words, "We write this story for the improve-
ment--if we may aim so high--Of the youth of New England,
who enter life either over the mechanic's bench or the 1
counter" and to him "who seeks to enter life through the
untried paths Of the city" (pp. 60-61).

Frederick Jackson in his preface to Riches and

Honor. A New England Story. Founded in Fact would make

 

the moral Of his story Of practical use:

76

The points aimed at, have been, to show in

their true colors, the baneful effects Of

idleness, and the consequent waste Of time

and property; the danger Of trusting to mere

wealth as a security for the future; the

necessity Of virtue and industry as the

foundation of all permanent prOSperity; and

the certainty Of happiness and success which

the possession of these always affords.
TO prove this belief, the author then contrasts the
careers Of two small town friends, one Of whom goes away
to college in Boston while the other, William Wheelwright,
attends the local school while working in his father's
shOp learning a trade. There Williams's father, "a gen-
tleman in the more acceptable sense," gives his son moral
lessons based on Franklin's principles, to wit, "educa-
tion proceeds from the use we make Of time, and not from

. u19 .
lessons first learned and then forgotten. As his
friend receives the better part of his education at the
gaming tables in Boston, William develOps the skills Of
an honorable mechanic, an OCCUpation which demands "real
talent, learning, taste, and genius" (p. 84).
The second subgroup of big city novels that

stresses a useful education includes clerks in mercantile

houses, and a further refinement here embraces honest and

 

19(New York: Josiah Adams, 1847), p. 27.

77

dishonest clerks. Among the clerk class more are dis-
honest than honest, but the gambler genre is Slanted
toward proving the evils of the city and this tendency
to concentrate on crooked clerks is to be anticipated.
Fools Of fortune, these clerks support their gay routine
by forgery, robbery, pimping, murder, or even slave-
trading. Two clear-cut examples Of this sentimental
strain in which clerks fall into evil ways in the big
city are Timothy S. Arthur's "The Hasty Marriage“ in
Leaves from the Book of Life, a novelette, and the pre-
viously discussed J. H. Ingraham's Harry Harefoot.

"The Hasty Marriage" concerns the downward plunge
to grief Of Mr. Fells, the son of a respectable merchant
who dies, leaving his son a modest fortune but a poor
moral character. With this Slender means, Fells gets a
job as clerk in a Charleston hardware. By insinuating
himself into the confidence of his employer, he becomes
a limited partner and marries the boss's daughter. After
a few years, he puts into Operation his long thought-out
plan to take over the business. The first step is to
work as head salesman of the firm and thereby entertain
young Western and Southern merchants. This activity en-

tails escorting them tO the theater and other places of

78

amusement and debauchery to which their loose morals lead
them. Unfortunately for Fells, these customers cheat him
and now, Short in his accounts, he manipulates the ledgers,
a mistake which, along with his irregular attendance at
the store, makes his father-in—law suspicious that Fells
is engaging in improper business behavior. In fact, Fells
has gambling debts to the extent Of $10,000. His ruinous
career terminates when he forges notes that bring bank-
ruptcy to the house. After a period with a noted gambler,
Fells becomes ill and returns home to be forgiven. With
the past over, Mrs. Fells sells her prOperty and lets her
husband invest the money in a grocery which in a short
time deteriorates into a grog Shop with Mrs. Fells as
bartender; Fells, now a drunkard, consummates his ambi-
tions in the poor house.

In ngry Harefoot, the titular villain graduates
from a private academy in Augusta and then joins a firm
as a clerk in that city. Here he meets two other clerks
and together they rob a bank during which one Of them,
Gambler-Moseley, a profligate and seducer, kills the night
watchman. Now cast into the sloughs Of despair over his
part in the robbery and his wasted life, Barefoot develOps

a guilty conscience and dies of a raging fever. When his

79

body is discovered, it is side by Side with that of his
faithful mistress who, distressed by her lover's death,
took poison in order to join him.

The second class Of schoolboys depicted in the
novels major in classical studies. Rich, proud, and
insolent, they attend the big Eastern colleges Of Colum-
bia, Harvard, and Pennsylvania and many, as in H. M.
Huet's Silver and Pewter, take a grand EurOpean trip tO
round out their education as "masters of all arts Of
fashionable dissipation."20 Blame for their debauches
in sin does not lie with the classics per se--the authors
pay deference to them in an Oblique sort of way--but with
the system, administrators, and parents. These private
schools, the authors claim, teach the evils Of a gentleman
class with all its sensual habits. Authorities, lax in
their duties, even admit card and dice playing on campus.
The parents contribute to this process of student corrup-
tion by supplying over generous allowances which their
spoiled sons play away, assured that their "debts of
honor" accrued at the altars of the Goddess Chance will

be paid Off when their parents die. Educated fools, most

 

2
0(New York: H. Long & BrO., 1852).

80

Of these boys would be better off having gone to school
to learn a trade, as the irate author Of Jane Clark notes.
Here Mr. Hamblin, at wit's end listening to his nagging
wife complain about his lack of ability to earn his live-
lihood in a commercial world, says,"Businessl My father
never taught me anything like business. He left me money
and nothing else, and now that is all gone. Would to God
he had taught me some trade instead of leaving me money,
and then I should be a better man" (p. 16).

Three of the more illustrative of the novels in
which students Of the classics appear are the anonymous
The Life and Adventures Of Charles Anderson Chester
(1850), H. M. Huet's Silver and Pewter (1852), and Fred-
erick Jackson's Riches and Hongr (1847). In Tire, Charles
Anderson Chester, the son of a wealthy merchant and banker,
at eighteen years Of age is sent from the mansion Of his
stepfather to the University of Pennsylvania. But rather
than attend classes regularly there, he spends his time at
the Hunting Park Race Course, the theater, the brothel,
and a Chestnut Street gambling house. His brief and
brilliant career at the school includes flogging his
tutor, attempting to set fire to several college build-

ings, and nearly succeeding in abducting the only

81

daughter Of the president of the institution. When ex-
pelled from school, he gets disowned by his stepfather
and goes Off with a "gallant gentleman, with a pale
mouse—coloured moustache and aristocratic air." AS the
title Of the story indicates, Chester crowns his career
as leader of a band of Philadelphia criminals and dies
trying to destroy the California House in San Francisco.
Another son of the "mushroom aristocracy," Fred-
erick Carter in H. M. Huet's Silver and Pewter, attends
Columbia University and like Charles Anderson Chester
majors in classical studies. His mother, hOping to see
her son a successful lawyer and married to a wealthy girl,
rounds out his education with a tour Of EurOpe from which
he returns home "a slave of sensuality." Soon in league
with rich New Yorkers and a friend Of a group Of young
bloods, he hangs around a brown stone-front gambling club
called Washington Hall where he receives finishing lessons
in the fine art Of how to become a male gourmand and a
perfect roué. Thieves, pick pockets, burglars, murderers,

and an expensive mistress comprise the circle Of Carter's

 

21(Philadelphia: Yates & Smith, 1850).

82

friends. He finally tries abducting a lady which involves
him in a duel under the Oaks outside Hoboken, New Jersey.

Now a fugitive from justice, and with hOpes Of
escaping Slander, Carter accompanies his parents to London
where he continues the wild life he interrupted in New
York. At London's famous Crockford's gambling house, he
meets his father's former clerk who was discharged for
some irregular practice while a regular member of the New
York firm. During an argument with this clerk, Carter
receives a blow from a loaded cane and, close to death,
lies in a French hOSpital for six years. Well again and
his former bad conduct overlooked in New York, he returns
to that city to become a hopeless alcoholic. His family
is about to send him to a lunatic asylum, when Carter
dies from a fall one night on a slippery street in a row
with a once virtuous girl he knew in better times, that
is, before she was reduced to soliciting customers in the
Park Theater.

The third Of the trio of college boys with a
classical education appearing in city novels is Elbridge
Bond, the one-time hero of Frederick Jackson's Riches and
Honor (1847). In what constitutes a forthright denuncia-

tion Of Harvard's liberal arts program, Jackson states

83.

that after graduation from Harvard, Elbridge becomes a
gentleman, meaning he attends a gaming house as a regular
patron and leads the life of a man—about—town. He "laid
aside his studies," says the author, "when he received
his diploma and became.more interested in the pedigree
of horses and hounds than in the classics." Soon the
gambling gentry hear of this liberal and foolish youth
and, like fowl birds Of prey, they wait "to pick his
bones, and then leave them to bleach in the sun and
storms that alternately blow." In time, the inevitable
happens. Elbridge goes to Boston with several haut ton
who rent a magnificent house which they convert into a
gambling den. By the end of four years, Elbridge, unable
to pay his rent, commits robbery and ends up in jail.
Bailed out by a friend, he begs on the streets and con-
templates drowning when a tender-hearted lady takes him
in and nurses him back to health, and then teaches him
the true path to happiness through Bible reading. Now
a sincere penitent, Elbridge studies law and builds up
a successful law practice as a true gentleman.

The rOper belongs to a ubiquitous clan. He can
be found anywhere a sucker exists, but he thrives best

in places Of heavy traffic--on city street corners, in

84

hotel lobbies, bowling alleys, pool halls, taverns, rail—
road and bus stations, county fairs, farmers' markets,
and so forth. He will perform any service for pay and

as a parasite draws other parasites within his circle of
Operations. His friends come from all walks of life,
from the most reSpectable merchants to pawnbrokers,

dOpe peddlers, forgers, counterfeiters, thieves, mur-
derers, and countless other criminals.

As will be made clear in the stories to be
plotted out, the rOper'S chief assets include a fast
tongue, great knowledge of human nature, self-confidence,
physical dexterity, coolness, and some animal courage.
Although usually enlisted from the gutter, he may come
from the upper-classes, too; in fact, it is from the
wealthy ranks that the most successful gambler-proprietors
hire their cappers. A few amateurs actually volunteer
as cappers to get some practical experience inasmuch as
no apprenticeship system or trade schools exist to teach
a gambler the tricks of the trade. He must learn the
hard way--from another gambler. Nevertheless, whatever
his motive, the capper is portrayed in the novels as a
member Of a scurvy lot Of hustlers who gladly slit a

throat, pimp for a seducer, or pluck a pigeon for a

85

price. From a prolific breed, he darts in and out of the
stories, but on occasion remains stationary long enough
to be the chief figure in them.

The novels feature two broad types Of ropers:
those who work for a proprietor and those who work alone
as a solitary confidence man or with one or more confed-
erates. The first of these types is associated with nu-
merous classes of gambling houses, from the most plush
club on Broadway to the vilest den on the Point. None-
theless, in general, they seem to have connections with
three kinds of establishments more than with others:
first rate ones on Broadway and cross streets leading
into it which are near the fashionable uptown hotels;
second class houses also lying near Broadway; and third
class houses or "clubs" found in the upper floors Of
downtown business buildings.

Most important of the clientele in these houses
are the proprietors who own and Often manage the Opera-
tions in the house, including dealers and rOpers. These
proprietors belong to an elite group Of the world's
greatest confidence men. Cool, charming, methodical,
and of steel nerves, they run the most outrageous skin-

games. Although reformed gamblers Speak Of a high class

86

Of gamblers as thoroughbreds or "bloods," meaning honest
aristocrats of the profession, the term honest gambler

in the novels is a contradiction in terms. Once the
amateur gambler enters into the chambers of a gambler,

he is like a fly in a Spider's web. William F. Howe says,
"When the unwary stranger is in a fit condition for the
sacrifice, he is led to the gaming-table with as much in-
difference and sang-froid as butchers drive sheep to the

shambles."22

 

Two classes Of peOple frequent the "hells"--occa-
sional and professional gamblers. Those in the first
group are attracted there by curiosity or "roped“ there
by intermediaries. The second group is composed Of Older
gamesters hOping to retrieve losses sustained in their
youth. They do not concern us here; it is only the first
group, the young gamblers, that have our attention.

The ropers Of these young, curious amateur
gamblers who seek excitement and escape from boring rou-
tines come in two varieties: upper and lower, in terms
of their education, manners, dress, and associates.

These upper-class ropers may again be divided into two

 

2In Danger; or, Life in New York (New York:
Butler Bros., Inc., 1888), p. 213.

87

groups--those who work as agents for mercantile houses
and those who work for first- or second-class gambling
houses. Often the Same rOper will work for a businessman
and for a proprietor at the same time, perhaps unknown to
the merchant. What the rOper does with his Spare time is
of no concern to the prOprietor. There seem to be no
fixed hours to the rOper'S job, and he works on a commis-
sion basis, getting a percentage of the winnings Of the
customer he brings to the house.

Whether working full or part-time as an agent for
the business house, the rOper dresses in a flashy style,
spends money freely, and laughs gayly as he circulates
about the lobby Of good hotels. Once having Spotted a
greenhorn-clerk, businessman, or pleasure seeker, he
tries his "wheedling tricks," as Richard Head calls them
in Proteus Redivivus. As a representative of a business
firm, he becomes a combination master of ceremonies and
guide of the city. His job is to make actual or potential
customers feel at home and thereby disposed in favor Of
the merchant's house for whom he works rather than that
Of a one of the merchant's competitors.

In a gambler story the first rOper mentioned usu-

ally turns Out to be its chief villain. The excuse this

88

rOper uses to corrupt the hero, flimsy as it may be-—
jealousy, revenge, greed-—seems incredible in retrospect
but plausible in context. One never worries about such
technical stuff in a gambler story. The conflict never
assumes truly tragic proportions. All gambler stories,
the reader undoubtedly has concluded by now, are melo-
drama of the most flagrant order. The "hero" or anti-
hero, protagonist, or whatever, Offers no convincing
struggle to extricate himself from the passion Of gambling
that overpowers him.

Regardless of the rOper'S total part in the story,
only his "approach" concerns us here. The foremost point
to bear in mind is that the rOper must secure the "green
'un's" confidence before he can fleece him. The standard
approach is given in James Buel's Metropolitan Liern-
veiled, an expose—type book. On almost every busy street
corner in New York, sharpsters rush back and forth as
though on some important business errand. All the time
they are searching among the crowd for a yokel from the
provinces whom they feel'has a well-filled purse. Once
he is found, the game starts. A well-dressed but gawkish
fellow bumps into a dapper young rascal of very gentle

and sociable appearance and a dialog takes place. It

89

goes something like this: "Hello, Smith," the dude ex-
claims, "how are you, and how are all the folks out at
Chicago?" The small-town boy is taken by surprise and
explains that his name is not Smith but simply Jim Brown
and that he hails from Oshkosh and not from Chicago.
"Well," the rOper continues,

"I was never so surprised in all my life.
Why, you are the very image of John Smith, Of
Chicago, who is one of the richest men Of
that place. Well, I'll declare, I've Often
heard it said that there are no two persons
alike, but I don't believe in the saying. I
used to know some peOple Of Oshkosh, but
it's been a long time since I was there. By
the way, who runs the biggest bank in Oshkosh
nOW? Tom Parker, did you say? Why, that's
so, I remember now; he's got a nephew up here,
in Chatham Square, and he is at the head of a
business, too; some of the finest paintings
in New York are in his establishment. You
ought to go up and see him, for I am sure he
would be glad to learn directly from you all
about his uncle" (pp. 129-130).

Before the end Of his fast monolog, the debonair
young man has the name of many rich peOple Of Oshkosh,
and the bunko-steerer parts with Brown giving him a cor-
dial handshake and an invitation to call at the Office
before leaving town. For a few blocks, Brown meditates
upon this singular meeting until he runs into another

fellow who fairly rushes into his arms, exclaiming:

90

"Why, Mr. Brown, God bless you, I am so glad
to see you; when did you leave Oshkosh? How
are all the boys: How is Tom Parker, the
rich Old banker? And how iS--every other
person mentioned by Brown during his conver-
sation with the first confidence man" (pp.
130-131).

Brown, understandably so, becomes bewildered by
it all but assured that his suSpicions are unfounded, he
joins his new acquaintance to visit Tom Parker's nephew.
That these two con-artists are in collusion need not be
mentioned. When the first one obtains the facts about
Oshkosh and Tom Parker, he passes around the block to
communicate the information to his confederate. Hooked,
Brown follows Tom Parker's friend and nephew to a policy
ShOp, bunkO-den, mock auction store, or some lottery
Office where he is robbed and perhaps even beat up.

The same pattern used by the Upper-class rOpers
on the streets and in the taverns is used in the hotels.
Two stories suffice to reveal the strategy Of this cunning
_hotel-roper. The stock rendition is given in William D.
Ritner's The Rivals Revenge! (c. 1854). Here a stranger
who likes all "jolly good-natured fellers" at his hotel
asks them to take him for a tour of the city—-to the

theater, the circus, or other places where there is ac-

tion. First the boys take their "greenie" to buy a new

91

suit of clothes and then make the rounds of town which is
capped Off by a day's-end visit to a gambling hall where
the blacklegs join their accomplices to fleece their happy
traveler.23

Benauly's Matthew Caraby (1859) resembles Tpe.
Rival's Revenge! in exposing the deceptive practices Of
the rOper, many of whom had fortunes pass through their
hands during their nefarious careers. George Devol, the
river sharp, boasted that he could have retired a million-
aire save his addiction to faro. As a confidence man par,
excellence, he proved Barnum's dictum that a sucker is
born every minute. One of his progeny, a Mr. Arent in
Matthew Caraby, saunters up to the register in a New York
hotel about half an hour before dinner time. He is stout,
well-built, "glossily dressed," and wears a black beard.
Hired to entertain customers for a reSpectable dry-goods
firm, he specializes in people with an "immodest curiosity
and appetite." At the store he Officiates as a Salesman,
counting-room clerk, or partner in the firm. Outside the
store, he works as a congenial companion, escorting out—

Of-towners to dinner, the theater, or other places. In

 

23(Philadelphia: M. L. Barclay, c. 1854).

92

the evenings, on his own, he still has access to the fine
places he visited during the day and finds welcome in the
best restaurants and revel halls but can also be found
loitering in the cheapest stews and vice dens in Five
Points or Orange Street, the last retreats of crime.

We have already had some acquaintance with his
sort in Old London, playing Barnard's Law, but his pitch
should not be overlooked at this time. When Greenhorn—'
Caraby, a Hartford clerk on a business trip for his boss,
meets Arent at the main desk Of a hotel lobby, Arent
listens as Caraby asks the clerk if there is a line of
stages that goes up to Hudson Street. When the clerk
gives him directions, Arent, bowing and smiling at Caraby,
asks the clerk if Caraby is a stranger to the city, to
which the clerk replies that he believes so. Caraby,
impressed by the rich dress, shaggy beard, clipped English
voice, and grand manner of the elegant gentleman next him,
bows as if happy to have the Opportunity to converse with
so respectful a citizen of New York. Because paraphrasing
misses the cleverness of the dialog, let us give it ver-
batim:

"In that case," said the stranger [Arent],
turning slightly towards Matthew, Speaking

93

with another bow and smile while directly
addressing the clerk:

"I hOpe he will pardon the interest which
I express when I suggest that he runs some
risk in going out in search of a boarding
place in a strange street, and without gui-
dance Or direction. It would be well for
him to take some acquaintance with him in
exploring for such a purpose."

"Undoubtedly, sir," replied Matthew,
"but to me the peOple are all strangers in
the streets. What would you do, sire, in
that case?"

"I am making very free upon Short ac-
quaintance," said the stranger, addressing
himself now at least nine-tenths to Matthew,
"but if I were you I would stay here until
after dinner, and then if you will accept
my company for a walk up Broadway and across,
I will put you in the way Of seeing Hudson
Street to advantage, and post you up a
little as the New York boarding houses, on
the way. You can't be tOO careful in the
matter Of choosing a home. Many a young
man who came to New York with good prospects
owes his failure and ruin to the counsels Of
bad companions at his boarding place; and
there are a great many tricks and traps for
strangers in the boarding house business."

"Of all things what I should like the
best," cried Matthew, "is to be as free as
yourself on short acquaintance. I like your
ideas. I would like to take a walk with you
up Broadway very much.

"I can show you more in two hours than
you could learn by yourself in a month," said
the stranger, with the air of an expert.

The second class Of rOpers, the lower-class, are

more like scavengers than the agent-ropers. A member Of

 

24(New York: Mason Bros., 1859).

94

this parasite class, as diagnosed by C. G. Foster in Ngy_
York by Gaslight (1850), roams the streets picking up what
he can in the same manner as did his English antecedents
hundreds of years before in the vicinity of St. Paul's
Churchyard. Off his beat, this modern wheedler carouses
in the oyster saloons in the cellars Of the Old Bowery
district Of New York. Here with other street denizens-
sailors, drunks, streetwalkers, and vagabonds of all
stripe--he drinks, cavorts, and connives. When a "fresh
'un'" enters the bar, he quickly gives his accomplices a
wink, and they start a mock quarrel which he asks the
greenie to referee. Soon the cards come forth, and these
conspirators throw down large bets, Often consisting of
counterfeit or worthless bills. If the greenhorn fails
to fall for this trick, as a last resource the gamblers
start a Sham fight, pluck the pigeon and dump him bleed-
ing in the street.

One Of the slickest Of this low type of rOper goes
disguised as a rustic. The unknown author Of an 1868
article in The Golden Era marks the habit Of the type:

"Alfavorite device, and generally a successful one, with

 

2
5(New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1850).

95

a certain class Of rOpers-in is to assume the appearance
and garb, the wandering look, and the homeSpun attire Of
. 26 .

a rustic." Canada Bill Jones, the greatest monte player
on the Mississippi in the 'fifties, had the reputation as
the worst dressed gambler on the river; he looked more
like a hayseed than a gambler. Mason Long, who capped
for Canada Bill in Utica, New York, during the harness
races there in 1876 describes Bill as a disguised hog-
drover. He was "a rustic looking creature . . . munching
a huge piece of pie . . . a large man dressed in coarse
clothes, with a sun-burned countenance, a nose highly
illuminated by the joint action of whiskey and heat, and
an expression of indescribable greenness and freshness
about him" (pp. 117-118). George Devol, the famous author
of Fortyrgears a Gambler on the Mississippi, a partner of
Canada Bill's for many years, saw Bill as

a medium-sized, chicken—headed, towhhaired sort

Of man with mild blue eyes, and a mouth nearly

from ear to ear who walked with a shuffling,

half-apologetic sort of gait, and who, when his

countenance was in repose, resembled an idiot.

For hours he would sit in his chair, twisting
his hair in little ringlets.

 

2
6"New York Gamblers," Golden Era, XVI (May 16.

1868), n.p.

 

96

But make no mistake, said Devol, this "Rankest kind of
sucker--the greatest sort Of a country jake" belonged
among the great confidence men in the business.

DeSpite the publicity attached to the rustic-
roper, he appears only once in the big city gambler
novels. In James Kirke Paulding's "The Drunkard," a rich
Southern schoolboy meets a raw-boned Staten Islander, "a
half and half squire," disguised as a country fellow in
homespun. The student thinks the yokel is the dupe Of
the "Sages Of the Pandemoniumfl'and together they wager on
cockfights in an "infernal shrine" in an underground
dungeon somewhere in the city (pp. 146-147). Little did
our hero realize that the yokel had an evil heart and
plotted his destruction.

W. H. Willet's Charles Vincent does not contain a

 

rustic-rOper but must be listed here in that the victim
is a rustic. This verdant one meets a pair Of confidence
men posing as hitch hikers on the road outside the city.
Before the farmer becomes aware, he has divulged all the

secrets the gamblers need to fleece him of his horse and

 

27As quoted in ASbury, p. 240.

97

one hundred and fifty dollars in a dice game in a woods

2
on the way to Westchester. 8

Basically sentimental, Charles Vincent also con-

 

tains an element Of humor. The story told by the rustic
to his lawyer back home reveals the rustic's own cupidity.
After failing to catch on to the gambler's treachery until
he has lost everything, the hick picks a quarrel with the
gambler and is knocked unconscious. Now, if the farmer is
paired Off with only one of these gamblers and taken as a
willing victim to the woods where he out—tricks the trick-
sters using their cheating methods, the tables are turned
and the laugh is on the gambler. This type Of situation
forms a direct link with a species of humor story called
Southern yarns. To discuss these yarns in great detail
does not serve our purpose, but since they relate, even
indirectly, to the sentimental tales Of city villainy, it
seems incumbent upon us to say a few words about them,
after which we shall return to another kind of big city
fiction--the Southern gambler story in a milieu of deca-

dence.

 

28(New York: Harper & Bros., 1839).

98

Before we cite a few of these gambler yarns, let
us say that these sketches or anecdotes, Often fragmentary
and brief as letters, belong to a regional type of tale
popular in the Old Southwest from the 'thirties until the
Civil War. Composed by amateurs amused by the boisterous
and crude antics of the rascals, rogues, and rapscallions
in the plantation environs, the narratives appeared as
contributions to the New York Spirit of the Times and the

New Orleans Times Picayune. The writers come from two

 

classes: gentlemen planters, including lawyers and doc-
tors who had association with the planter-class, and
Sports-minded journalists. A few have the following
pseudonyms: "The Old 'Un'" (Francis A. Durivage of
Boston), "The Young 'Un'" (George P. Burnham Of Roxbury),
and "The Little 'Un'" (Coddington C. Jackson Of Louisiana).
The chief motif in the yarns is the trickster-out-
tricked. In some, the gambler fleeces his victim success-
fully, and in others he does not. Who wins or loses is
unimportant, however, for the ideal situation is to catch
a thief red-handed, to make him disgorge his winnings,
to embarrass him before a crowd, Or to punish him phys-
ically for his blunders. In this amoral atmosphere,

honesty has no advantage. Everybody gambled in the

99

territory, said George W. Featherstonhaugh in Excursion
Through the Slave States--judges, senators, and members

Of the legislature; "In fact, the greater part Of these
men get elected to the legislature [of Arkansas], not to
assist in transacting public business, but to get the
wages they are entitled to per diem, and to gratify their
passion for gambling."29 He had the misfortune to be
lumped with ten notorious swindlers and gamblers on a
Mississippi steamer who had a "veritable orgy from morn-
ing to late at night." In all his travels in almost every
part of the world, he complains, he never saw such a col—
lection of low scoundrels. At Vicksburg, he was astonished
to see eight respectable planters join the degraded gam-
blers in faro and in the course of a short period of time
resort to "gambling, drinking, smoking, and blaSpheming,
just as deSperately as the worst of them!"30 The prevail-
ing ethic of the time is summed up in the dictum of Simon
Suggs, "It is a good thing to be shifty in a new country."
And to prove his ability to live by "shykeen'ry," this

hog-drover and J. G. Baldwin's Simon Suggs, Jr. taught a

 

29II (London: John Murray, 1844), 60.

30Ibid., 247.

100

race Of other frontier rogues how to swindle in real
estate and make it rain money by confidence rackets and
card playing.

Four Of many Of these gambler yarns in the tradi—
tion of Simon Suggs suffice to give the contents Of all
of them. The formula is rather rigid, although some var-
iations exist within it. Jonathan H. Green, the reformed
gambler to whom we have been introduced to before, recalls
an experience he had on a Natchez-tO-Princeton steamer
when two blacklegs disguised as planters awaken him. As
he dresses, Greene overhears their plan to swindle him
by means of a set Of signals in the form Of kicks under
the table. In the game, Green exchanges foot-taps with
the blacklegs and wins a considerable sum of money. Back
in his stateroom, he overhears the pair argue over their
mixed-up signals,and he wryly comments that they woke up
the wrong passenger.31

"Sloped for Texas" has a green one losing heavily

in a Rackinsack, Arkansas, card game with blacklegs who

 

31"They'woke up the Wrong Passenger," Gambling

Unmaskedirgr the Personal EXperiences Oryg} H. Green, the
Reformed Gambler (Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber & Co., 1847),
pp. 189-193 in A Treasuryyof Mississippi River Folklore

ed. Benjamin A. Botkin (New York: Crown, 1955), pp. 236-
238.

101

discover that their victim uses counterfeit money. As
they deliberate what to do, the culprit seizes the money
on the table, leaps through a window, and heads for Texas
on his horse. The gamblers laugh to think that he has
taken his own counterfeit currency until they realize that
their good bills were included in the swag.32 In "The
Way 'Ligé'Shaddock 'Scared Up a Jack,'" a riverboat gam-
bler bets a judge he can turn up a jack from a face-down
pack on the table. When he quickly dumps over the entire
pack, he thinks he has won the bet until the judge, unim-
pressed by it all, says, ”If there's a Jack in rpgr_pack,
I'll be d---—d."33 In "A Stranger Game than Thimbles" a
bumpkin takes a tour of a city with a gambler and ends'
up on a lonely bluff on the outskirts Of town where the
gambler spreads a red bandana handkerchief and plays
thimble rig on it. When a pile Of cash is bet, the pa-
tient backwoodsman rolls up the edge of the kerchief and

with one motion snatches it up and rolls down the side

Of the hill. At the bottom he cries up to the

 

32ngpngs New Monthly Magazine, II (Jan., 1851),
187-188.

33"The Way 'Lige' Shaddock 'Scared up a Jack,'"
The Biquear of Arkansas, ed. William T. Porter (Phila—

delphia: Carey & Hart, 1845), pp. 175-177.

102

disappointed thimbler-rigger that this Kentuckian is no
Chump, that he has spent his entire life on the Missis—
Sippi.34

In these Sketches, the point Of view is detached
and realistic. To find potentially sentimental elements
in them, we must contrive a category. This occurs when
the humor turns sour or the practical joke loses its
punch. Nothing changes in this pattern; the same motif
Of the biter-bit obtains. Five of a cluster can be
pointed out for our purpose. In the first one, "A Strong
Hand at Poker," a planter with four kings and an ace meets
a riverboat gambler's raise by having his Negro servant
place an axe on the card table.35 In "A Note from the
Little 'Un,'" the Arkansas Toothpick shoots Off the
fingers Of a cheater who used them to itemize his hand
to a partner.36 "A Gambler's Punishment" exposes a

gambler accused of cheating and a hastily impaneled jury

returns the verdict that the cheater either forfeit his

 

34New Orleans Times Picayune, III (July 21, 1839),

2.

35P.V.T., Spirit Of the Times, XVII (Oct. 30,
1847). 422.

36COddington C. Jackson, Spirit of the Times, XXII
(1852), 43.

103

winnings or walk an hour in rhythm to the giant piston on
the steamer with a rOpe about his neck.37 "Putting a Man
Ashore" loses some of its romantic appeal when a yankee
cheese merchant taunts a gambler hip-high in the canebrake
when the captain puts him Off the boat for cheating.38
Some sympathy can be extended toward gamblers
paired with wiseacres or sharp traders. An example Of
each is "The Game of Thimbles; or, the Best Two in Three"
and "The Thimble Game." In the first yarn, Dr. B--, a
specialist in thimble rig, complies with the request Of
a group of passengers in the social room of a steamer to
show how the game should be played. A young down—
Easterner, seeing the feeble and half—blind old man
clumsily shifting the Shells and exposing a wad of cloth
under the shell, bets the professor. Dr. B-- lets him
win two games on which small bets are laid but wins the
big pot. As he gathers in the money, he smirks that the

, boy not only has piercing‘eyes but also that he is a good

 

37"A Gambler's Punishment," from Life and Adven-

tures of Henry Edward Hugunin (Oswego, New York: B. G.
Oliphant, 1879) in A Treasury of Mississrppi River Folk-
lore, ed. B. A. Botkin (New York: Crown, Inc., 1955),
p. 242.

38New Orleans Times Picayune, V (May 4, 1841), 2.

104

player, for had he not won two games out Of three.39 In

"The Thimble Game," a young cotton seller tries to out-
smart an Augusta agent but ends up losers in a game of
thimbles on the waterfront. Home, he tells his irate
father his story and the father rushes to fall prey to
the tricks of the same gambler.4O

A yarn which does not fall into a convenient cate-
gory but which must be mentioned at this juncture is
Rekrap's "A Gambling Incident." Here the reader's sym-
pathies drift toward a greenhorn-clerk who out-thinks a
cheating gambler on a Mississippi riverboat. Trapped by
this blackleg in a poker game, the clerk has already lost
$1,000 Of the bank's money and faces a $1,000 raise on
the table. When the clerk hesitates to cover the bet,
the gambler gives him five minutes to raise the cash be-
fore he rakes down. With one minute left of the five,
the clerk empties a bag of currency on the table and
raising the bet $98,000 gives the astonished gambler five

mdnutes to cover the bet.41

 

39Spirit of the Times, XV (Jan. 3, 1846), 528.

40T. W. Lane, Polly Peablossom's Wedding and Other
Tales, ed. T. A. Burke (Philadelphia: Peterson & Bros.,
1851). pp. 28-40.

41XVII, Spirit of the Times (Aug. 28, 1847), 314.

105

In summary, the persistence of the sentimental
tradition with a big city setting appears in two broad
types Of gambler stories, those featuring distressed
heroines and those featuring greenhorns. The first Of
these, focusing on the single woman, stresses the element
of seduction. Although the standard lady-book situation
occurs, the tendency here is to exploit the violent ele-
ments of the scene as in Dorval. The effect on the gam-
bler character is to make him work for the privilege Of
harrassing the heroine; his minor vices cannot be excused
on the basis of his membership in the nobleman class. In
stories with married ladies, the petrified, abused-wife
motif Shows conformity with the lady-book formula in that
the gambler-husband apprOpriateS the lady's prOperty and
then either abandons or subjects her to the traumas Of
existence in a drunkard's house.

The rOper—greenhorn type of gambler story con-
tinues the pOpularity it enjoyed since the days of the
Tudor monarchs in England. These modern-day rOpers use
the same confidence games as their nimble-fingered an-
cestors but alter their approach to suit contemporary
social conditions. Instead of loitering about in one

area, as in St. Paul's Churchyard, upper—class rOpers

106

lounge about in the lobbies of hotels near the busy finan-
cial districts of the city. The lower-class rOperS, on
the other hand, gravitate to the waterfront wolf traps

and other foul dens Of iniquity that cater to human scum.
Once the pigeon has lighted, the Old tour trick is played
as in Barnard's law. The rOper escorts his victim around
town and finally to a gambling house to be swindled by
crooked card dealers or dice coggers.

Gambler yarns portraying life in the Old South
and Southwest in the 'thirties, although linking more
strongly with the realistic, humor, and adventure tradi-
tions, rather than with the sentimental tradition of the
gambler genre, nevertheless, contain a muted sympathy
for the gambler who is created to be the Object of ridi—
cule and embarrassment in a practical joke situation that

Often turns sour.

CHAPTER IV

SOUTHERN GAMBLERS ASHORE

Many of the original Cavaliers brought with them
their own gambling habits. In the colonies, these rich
refugees wagered on horses, wrestling, cockfights, and
nine-pins, not to mention cards and dice. In time gentle-
men left the cruder amusement of card playing tO their
inferiors and clung to the custom Of betting on horse
races. In the eighteenth century gambling among the
aristocracy continued as a pOpular foible. Carl Briden-
baugh notes, "We cannot overlook the predilection Of many
gentlemen for gambling, which became a fashionable vice
and a part of the extravagance that characterized the
aristocracy."1 Robert Crichton in the Virginia Gazette
states, "I am no enemy to Recreation, but it should not

be made a trade."2

 

1Myths and Realities. Societies Of the Colonial
South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1952)! p. 27.

2 . . . .
Ibid., as quoted from Virginia Gazette (Sept. 5,

1751).
107

108

When the elder Landon Carter thinks of the reck-
less gaming of his son John, the third William Byrd of
Virginia, and Parson Isaac Giberne, he Says, "They play
away and play it all away . . . I hate such vulgarity."3
Josiah Quincy is more precise in his censure: "Cards,
dice, the bottle and horses engross prodigious portions
of time and attention: the gentlemen [planters and mer—
chants] are mostly men of the turf and gamesters."
Margery Distaff complains of men wasting their time,
money, and health in pleasure parties: "There is not one
night in the week," she eXplains, "in which they are not
engaged in some club or other at the tavern where they
injure their fortunes by GAMING in various ways, and 1E?
pgTrptheir health by the intemperate use Of Spiritous
liquors, and keeping late hours, or rather Spending whole
nights, sometimes in these disgraceful and ruinous prac-

tices."5

 

3Ibid., as quoted from Virginia Magazine, XX
(1912), 413.

4Ibid., 84, as quoted from Journal, 455, ed.
Uhlendorf, Siege Of Charleston, 327.

5Ibid., 83, as quoted from the NeWport Mercury
(Oct. 23, 1769),quoting South Carolina Gazette (Oct. 5,

1769).

109

In the romances Of plantation life, gambling is
seen as one of a gentleman's "genial little vices," as
Francis Pendleton Gaines expresses it in his study Of the
Southern plantation tradition, "the redeeming vices, as
it were, Of an order of feudal lords."6 Actually, he con—
tinues, "in the real plantation society they were per-
sonal, even social, iniquities of distressing magnitude."7
The gambler novels set in a plantation milieu reflect this
realistic rather than romantic attitude toward gambling.
AS members of a family, the fathers themselves do not
gamble nor do they countenance gambling by their sons.
Some Of this abhorrence of gambling has a moral basis but
also an economic one. In fact, the planter can ill-afford
to lose money. The Slave economy over which he rules
seems on the verge of collapse. One imagines something
grows on the land--cotton, tobacco, or sugar—-but he can-
not be sure. Such matters are never Spoken Of in the

stories until a flood, a poor stock investment, or a

mortgage problem brings out the tottering financial

 

6The Southern Plantation. A Study of the DevelOp-
ment and the Accuracy Of a Tradition (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1925), p. 161.

7Ibid.

110

structure Of the plantation. If things are going sorely
for the planter, one knows where to place the b1ame-—on
the planter himself. As a businessman he leaves much to
be desired and appears a dynast presiding over a decaying
feudal order, his sons parasites, his daughters spoiled,
and his wife ineffectual in keeping the family from fall—
ing apart.

In general, this portrayal of the planter
aristocracy coincides with that in the earlier and more
legitimate novels of the mid-eighteenth century. Although
feudal Virginia was in its heyday when these novels were
written,not one of them treats of the plantation prosper—
ity of this period.8 George Tucker's The Valley Of Shen-
andoah, despite the glow of glamour cast about the plan-
tation, has as its theme "the ruin of a once prosperous
and respected family."9 It begins at the time Of death
Of Colonel Grayson when the family, heavily in debt,
leaves its plantation in Virginia in the hands Of an

overseer and moves to cheaper land in the West. George

 

8'William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee. The Old
South and American National Character (New York: G.
Braziller, 1961). p. 155.

9Ibid., p. 153.

111

Balggmbe portrays the manorial lord as a spendthrift and
an irreSponsible businessman.10 In Westward-Ho, Colonel
Cuthbert Dangerfield lives beyond his means and sells his
slaves and plantation before moving to Kentucky. When his
wife suggests they try to save money, he cries, "Save!
Impossible; I never heard Of such a thing in the whole
course Of my life. How the deuce shall I go about it?"11
White STave, a gambler novel in our period, gives the same
general impression Of the breakup” of the region. Here a
young wastrel returns to the plantation after a European
trip to find his father dead and the plantation insolvent,
the slaves covered by heavy mortgages, and many children
destitute.12 In several novels, French gamblers take up
temporary housing in the South and migrate North or return
to Paris, the traditional home Of sinful dissipation.
Several reasons are suggested for this ante-bellum
portrayal Of the South. Plantation novels, written by

peOple unfamiliar with the more glamorous days Of Virginia,

only described the depressed regions they grew up in

 

loIbid., p. 154.

11Quoted in ibid., p. 243.

12Richard Hildreth (Boston: Tappan & Whittemore,
1852) .

112

during the 1800 to 1830 period. When a recession occurred
there, the families migrated westward to the interior and
less desirable parts Of the area. Second, invading armies
passing through the South during the Revolutionary War de-
stroyed many plantations and razed the lands, helping to
bring about a sag in the agricultural economy. Related

to this war, many pro—British planters broke up their
estates and sold them after the War to help pay Off their
debts. A third factor responsible for the decay Of the
plantation region in Virginia is simply the bad business
management Of the planters who encouraged inefficient
slave labor and poor farming practices.13 Indolent and
unpractical people, these planters let their plantations
gO to wrack and ruin and then moved out as a new and in-
ferior group Of farmers Of mixed origins moved in tO fill
the void. There are a couple Of other reasons Offered to
explain this deterioration of the region, which need only

to be mentioned in a few words: the disestablishment of

 

l3Jay B. Hubbell, The South in Americanyritera-
rpre, 1607-1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1954),
pp. 89-92; Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern PTgp-
tation. A Study in the Development and the.Accuraeyrgr
a Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925),
pp. 149-150.

113

the Anglican Church and the abolition of laws of primo-
geniture and entail, which stimulated many Tidewater
gentry to go to Kentucky and Alabama to start life all
over again.

More important than the planters, however, in the
gambler novels in our period of study are their sons.
These sons fall roughly into two categories: Hamlet and
HotSpur types who have a common bond between them, a pas-
sion for gambling, the flesh pots, and self-torment.

Shakespeare's Hamlet appealed to Southern writers,
says William Gilmore Simms, because Southern society fos-
tered rank, wealth, and social codes Of conduct. Aware
that action was necessary but unable tO act decisively
himself, Hamlet turned his mind inward for escape and
courted madness and suicide. He suits a doomed static
social order and represents, says Taylor, "a kind Of
parable for the South" and "an apotheosis of the Southern
planter."14 He corresponds to the pre-Civil War gener—
ation of grandsons of the Revolutionary War left to brood
over the dying South. Among Hamlet's progeny are Poe's

Roderick Usher, Faulkner's Quentin Compson III, and

 

l4Taylor, p. 292.

114

characters in William Gilmore Simms' and Harriet Beecher
Stowe's novels.

In gambler fiction the planters' sons do not brood
over the fortunes Of a declining Southern aristocracy.
They are too egocentric to be concerned with great causes
or regional problems. The spirit of public service that
characterized Robert Beverly's and William Byrd's careers
in Virginia find no expression in these stories. The mem-
bers of the collapsing order survive mainly on their pride,
and the number Of contested wills and feuds over prOperty
lines are, on a diminished scale, equivalent to Scott's
border warfare. The planters apparently had lost a sense
of community identification and all hold the wolf by the
ears.

The Hamlet-type readily fits several other gambler
types, but two have the greatest sentimental potentiality,
which we shall treat now: frustrated lovers and sensu-
alists.

One popular approach in Southern gambler novels is
to have a gentleman fall in love with a married Parisian
woman. One Of the more pitiable young planter's sons to
make the fatal mistake of falling prey to one of these rggpe

fatale Occurs in Household Mysteries. Here Noble St. John,

115

a dark, handsome Cavalier with the premature look of
Southern youth, "like the early luscious ripening of
fruit, too Often containing within itself the seeds of
decay," becomes mesmerized by the seductive charms Of
Madame D'Allure, the wife of a notorious Chevalier d'
industrie. Her part in the plan to bankrupt Noble is
to soften the youth up one way or another and either
pick his pocket or send him in to Monsieur D'Allure to be
fleeced at his faro table. The plot goes awry, however,
when Madame D'Allure falls deeply in love with Noble
whose soft singing and guitar playing has her enthralled.
Meanwhile Monsieur D'Allure makes Noble an habitué of
faro and gets him in debt. Before their romance can be
consummated, Madame and Noble have to part company. The
D'Allures suddenly move to Richmond where a report soon
circulates that Madame D'Allure dies, one supposes of a
broken heart, and Monsieur returns to EurOpe to pursue
his nefarious profession.15

The romantic story, The Planter's Daughter (1857),
likewise contains a love affair, this time between Victor

Harrington "a glass of fashion," home from a Northern

 

15Lizzie [Petit] Cutler (New York: D. Appleton
& Co., 1856).

116

school and Louise Rankin, his half sister, the Spoiled
daughter Of an aristocratic cotton agent. After a crooked
speculator discovers a defect in the Harringtons' planta-
tion deed, the fortunes of the Harrington family decline.
Louise's mother, aware of this situation, insists that
Victor learn a trade in order to support Louise in case

he marries Louise. Besides she has suspicions that Victor
gambles at the racecourse. Frankly admitting he has no
ability in the business world, Victor accepts help from
his father and joins a New Orleans merchant house as a
clerk. Now comes Mr. Nevin, a wealthy gentleman of in-
dependent fortune, who Louise's mother feels is a better
catch than Victor. Jealous, deSpondent, and desperate

at this turn of events, Victor leaves his job and goes

on a gambling spree in New Orleans, which brings him fur-
ther in debt.

In a gloomy frame Of mind, Victor avoids Sports
and spends his time on the plantation smoking cigars and
bemoaning his sad fate. As a final means of getting the
woman, he takes a job as a music man in New Orleans. He
lives in the French Quarter Of town in the disguise of
an aristocratic young Englishman, and once again frequents

the gaming houses, ending up, as always, a heavy loser.

117

In disguise, he visits Louise to tell her he has developed
an infallible system and is certain to win a fortune at
the gaming tables. But, alas, as all systems do, it fails
and Victor contemplates suicide. But in a room, he over-
hears a conversation between two gentlemen about the death
of Nevin's aunt, a wealthy woman from whom Nevin expects
to inherit a fortune. The eccentric Old woman requested
to be buried in her diamonds. Now clutching at straws,
Victor robs the grave and takes the jewels to Louise who,
when she learns the origin of the neckpiece, faints.
Nevin then comes in and a struggle follows during which
the mad Victor gets killed. An ironic twist concludes
the story. Nevin, apparently having surfeit Of Louise,
drops out Of sight and Louise, having married a young man
as frivolous as herself, lives dependent on his salary
as a clerk in a large mercantile establishment.16

AS stated before, both Hamlet- and HotSpur-type
gamblers have a streak of cruelty in them and may turn
from a Hamlet to a HotSpur in the same story. This

technique corresponds to the enigmatic character of

Hamlet who shows tinges of undisciplined passion and

 

16A. E. Dupuy (New York: W. P. Fetridge & Co.,

1857).

118

cruelty in his treatment Of Polonious, his mother, and
Ophelia. But the cruel actions of the Hamlet—gamblers
best serve an antislavery rather than a personal purpose
for the story-character. Even the villanies in the dime
novel kind of stories Of George Lippard and E. Z. C.
Judson do not possess the element of perversion shown

in these Southern-laid novels.

Undoubtedly, the pictures are exaggerated, al-
though exceptions probably occurred in the gentleman's
code in the ante-bellum South which wanted all slaves
treated humanely. But the novels do not follow this
suggestion. In The Planter's Victim, for example, Slaves
receive monstrous treatment at the hands of a dissipated
gambler. Unable to make a mistress Of one Of his Ne-
gresses, the sadistic planter lets her die of consumption
and kills her husband. After selling his plantation, he
takes his Negro servant with him and throws him in a
dungeon in his newly-bought gambling house where the boy
starves to death and rats eat his body;17

Frank Grafton, a "Fire-Eater" Of the HotSpur

variety, a proud, wild and moody character, stays up all

 

l7[Samuel Mosheim Schmucker] (Philadelphia: Wil-
liam White Smith, 1855).

119

night to nurse his Sick negro servant but he ignores the
pleas Of his wife by selling her handmaid to a New Orleans
trader with a reputation for sexually abusing slave girls.
The sale completed, his wife dies Of a broken heart and
Grafton, now with a guilty conscience, becomes a melan-
choly misanthrope and, unpredictable to the very time Of
his death, leaves the bulk of his property and Slaves to
his brother with instructions to make certain the Slaves
are comfortable and happy.18

Another element both Hamlet- and HotSpur-gamblers
have in common is the pursuit of sensual pleasures. The
cruel Richard Dudley in The Planter's Victim has an edu-
cation, the author states, usual with young gentlemen of
the South. It included training in all the fashionable
vices which he indulged in without restraint. As custo-
mary with plantation gamblers, he visits New Orleans and
engages in the "Penetralia" of life and dissipation there.
Soon he meets an agreeable, handsome, and pleasant com-
panion named Count de Clermont, a roper who has spent
most of his life in Paris, "that great centre of the pro-

fligate civilization of the world." NO luxury, indulgence,

 

18A. L., The Beauty Of Woman's Faith. A Tale of

Southern Life (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856).

 

120

or gratification is unfamiliar to the Count, for he
learned the debaucheries Of the most secret and select
arcana Of Parisian life. Together Richard and the Count
gamble in the most elegant houses on St. Charles Street
where the Southerner loses $20,000 and a span of horses.

The world—weary Frank Grafton in the previously
noted Beauty of a Woman's Faith visits New Orleans and
mingles in the midnight orgies there among maddened re-
vellers who are shunned by everyone except themselves.
In New Orleans, he says to himself, "no temple Spires
frown upon the gay votary of pleasure . . . I may pursue
pleasure in her hidden and most secret retreats." There
in a little cabaret looking out upon the place d' armes
near the majestic Mississippi, half a dozen Old Creoles
play dominoes. Across the street stands a palatial
coffee house of gaudy architecture. It is sumptuously
furnished with all to tempt a debauchee. Inside the
cabaret Grafton tastes champagne and has a choice to make
of a princely meal from the breasts of a canvas back duck
or from a haunch of venison.

Only one other Southern gambling establishment
has the luxurious appointments of Grafton's New Orleans

retreat. This is Madame Flamingo's satin and brocade

121

mansion. Her "house" consists of a massive four-story
building with bold Doric windows set Off by brown-fluted
freestones. The curtains, red and faded, that can be
seen during the daytime, have lace overlay between the
folds Of which mysterious eyes peer out.

The front door, of black walnut, fluted and
carved, has curious designs on it, reminiscent Of the
style in some fashionable Italian church pews. Inside,
one luxuriates in barbaric splendor. Here the voluptuary
finds cloud-like canopies and gorgeously carved furni-
ture: lounges, recliners, patrician chairs, and Ottomans
are richly inlaid with pearl and mosaic, and jetting
lights form a great sparkling chandelier.

At night a bal masqpe takes place with music--

 

marches, quadrilles, waltzes, schottisches--furnished by
eight Negro musicians. Along the walls chivalrous and

grave planters can be seen giving their sons their first
lessons in dissipation while a little Off in the distance
a gambler converses with a judge, and lawyers, merchants,

doctors, and politicians sit about on Ottomans.19

 

19 . .
F. Colburn Adams, Justice in the By—ways. A

Tale Of Life (New York: Livermore & Rudd, 1856), pp.
18-23.

122

In his search for sensual pleasures, Grafton in
The Beauty Of has several rivals but none surpasses the
Southerner, Colonel Moses Montrose, in "The Quadroon
Sisters; a Gambling Scene" (1857). Although missing
Grafton's Hamlet-like abstraction, this Virginia-born
gentleman has about him a nameless air of infinite sorrow.
His handsome face shows the ravages Of dissipation but
traces of crimson here and there reveal that he is of
vigorous health. A combination Of physical force and
nervous energy, he returns to a small Southwestern town
to participate in a slave auction. Before the bidding
begins, he leads a mad procession through the streets
and throws his money freely to the crowds who follow him
all day. When night draws near, this wild epicurean con-
tinues his revels in the taverns by drinking rounds Of
brandy and toasting the town. His business finished at
the auction block, the gay, tormented, and reckless gen-
tleman terminates his Bacchanal by executing manumission
papers for the slaves he bought and departs with them

for the free state of California.20

 

20Golden Era, V (June 21, 1857), 7.

123

DeSpite the similarity between the Hamlet- and
HotSpur—types regarding their addiction to gambling and
riotous living, the HotSpur-gambler has the distinction
Of being a hot—headed duelist. The Hamlet-gambler may
duel but there is not the emphasis placed on revenge in
his conformity to the code Of honor.

Although sword play was known in the colony Of
Louisiana from its beginning, it was not until the 1830's
that it became a fashion among the Creoles. These hand-
some, rich fellows, educated in EurOpe and acquainted
with all the delights Of that place, returned to New
Orleans and their plantations to find life boring. A
tempestuous set Of young men, they quickly got into
scrapes that demanded a vindication of honor. Laws pro-
hibiting duels existed in the city but this forbidden
pleasure encouraged rather than deterred the participants
in the Sport. These oversensitive Creoles took Offense
against the slightest breach Of etiquette, an improper
introduction, a slur on the family name, an insult to a
lady, a hint Of cheating or awkwardness in a card game
and a duel was called for under the Oaks. Since a knowl-
edge Of dueling was an essential part of a Creole's edu-

cation, some of the finest fencing establishments in the

124

world did a thriving business along Exchange Alley in New
Orleans, where great masters of French and Italian coun-
terpoint conducted their illegal exercises.

Duelist-gamblers appear in a host Of novels and
short stories laid in both the North and South before the
Civil War, but Frank Grafton and Lapere, the Creole, form
the best combination. A good duel takes place also in
Osborn Laughton's Sixty Years Of the Life Of Jeremy Levis
but the novel has an English rather than an American set-
ting and must be passed over here.

Grafton's duel in The Beauty Of centers about his
quarrel over cards with Lapere, the last of a Creole
family in Louisiana. Grafton, paired Off at random with
Lapere, constantly taunts him for wanting skill in the
game, but the carefree Creole only laughs Off his mistakes
and plays in a nonchalant manner. Finally stunned by
Grafton's bitter remark that Lapere plays like a stool
pigeon, Lapere Offers to pay for the losses of both Of
them in the game and Grafton flings a glass of wine in

Lapere's face. His blood now raging, Lapere picks out

 

21Lyle Saxon, Fabulous New Orleans (New York:
The Century Co., 1928), pp. 187-201; Harold Sinclair,
The Port of New Orleans (Garden City, New York: Double-
day, Doran & Co., 1942), pp. 135-136.

125

his second and challenges Grafton. Grafton, now in con-
trol Of his emotions, says he sees little chance Of harm
at Sword's end from Lapere because if the Creole is as
careless in the use Of his weapon as he is with his cards,
all Grafton has to fear is a random pass of the small
sword.

Next day, in accordance with the code rules,
Lapere's second, Mr. Girod, calls upon Grafton and pre-
sents Lapere's card. Grafton, calm and polite, places
the card on a table, and pouring Girod a glass of wine,
laughingly says he hOpes their acquaintance will not end
with Grafton's meeting on the field in the morning.

That evening Grafton's second, Colonel Clarke,
calls upon Grafton to settle the details of the forth-
coming duel, but Grafton will talk only Of New Orleans,
Of its delightful society, of the charming party he
attended the evening before, and of the future of Louis-
iana. The night passes and Colonel Clarke retires early
only to awaken before daybreak. Grafton has already
dressed and has coffee ready for the Colonel. On the
street below a horse and carriage wait to bear the duel-
ists to the outskirts of town. When they arrive, Lapere

is already there and seeing Grafton salutes him in a

126

dignified manner. The instructions given and their places
taken, the overexcited Lapere, before the signal is
given, shoots a ball that only tears up the grass at
Grafton's feet without doing injury to the man. Grafton,
reserving his fire until a large bird passes overhead,
shoots the fowl which falls dead at Lapere's feet. Girod
then rushes to the center of the field to call an end to
the affair, but Lapere wants another round. He feels
Grafton's last shot was intended as an insult. This time,
Grafton aims carefully and kills Lapere in what may have
been a premature shot. As the Creole lies dying, Grafton
hurries to his side and,casting a last look of mingled
pity and contempt at him, solemnly walks to his carriage
and drives back to the city. Meanwhile, Lapere's friends
bear the noble Creole home to his mother to be grieved
over.

The affair does not end there, however, for La—
pere's family vows revenge on Grafton. The Opportunity
finally comes when Grafton, on a course of unchecked
depravity in New Orleans, accidentally meets a stranger
named Lavasseur, one of Lapere's cousins. He invites
Grafton to a card game in a hotel room where Grafton,

half-drunk, gets constantly embroiled in petty quarrels.

127

At the pitch Of the excitement, Lavasseur, testy beyond
endurance, passes a snide comment about Grafton's dead
wife, commonly known to have died Of a broken heart when
Grafton sold her slave. Aroused, Grafton leaps at La-
vasseur's throat, but the Creole, ready for him, draws

a dagger from his shirt front and runs it through Grafton
who dies in the arms Of one of the players. Lavasseur
then cries in triumph, "Perish, murderer of my cousin!
Lapere, you are at last revenged!" ‘With almost indecent
haste and in silence, they bury the dead gambler in
Potter's Field where there are no sorrowing friends and
no one sheds a tear.

One of the most distinctive incidents in gambler
stories is that in which Slaves are used as stakes. The
sadness inherent in the situation can be noted in the
remark Of an Old Negro to a Southern gentleman who asks
to whom the Negro belongs: "When I went to sleep las'
night, I 'longed to Massa Carr; but he bin gamblin' all
night, an' I don't know who I 'longs to dis morning."2

Additional sentiments Obtain when-women are

subject tO the same treatment. Actually women were sold

 

22William‘Wells Brown, ngteTTe; or, the Colored
Heroine. A Tale Of the Southern States (Boston: Lee &
Shepard, 1867): P. 14.

128

to others along with entire plantations but a kind Massa
only disposed of his slaves when he had to, when he had
debts brought about by crOp or stock failures or by some
natural calamity such as a flood. "His people are the
last property a true Southerner will part with," says the
author of Theyrpfty and the Lowly (1852), "but misfortune
may leave him no choice."23

Perhaps the most famous modern story in which a
woman has been sold by her husband is Thomas Hardy's Tpg_
Mayor Of Casterbridge. In a cheap version Of Hardy's in-
cident, "Original. The Gamester's Fortune" (1842) tells
Of a sick gambler who wagers his wife in a card game.
When the stranger comes to collect his winnings, the wife
commits suicide.

The most romantic and sentimental aspect Of sell-
ing girls or wagering them in card games is to separate
them from friends, family, or sweethearts and have them
carried Off by strangers. A philosophical blackleg gives

up slave trading in White Slave (1852) because he cannot

 

23Maria Jane McIntosh (New York: D. Appleton &
Co., 1852), II, 56.

24E. F. Ellet, The Ladies' Companion, XIII (July,
1840), 104-110.

129

stand the wailing Of the women separated from their loved

ones: "As to the men," he confesses,

I Should have gone quite well enough with them;
but the women, Old and young, were always get-
ting up such scenes, and were always full of
complaints about being separated from their
daughters, and their mothers, and their babies,
and their husbands, that to a man who had the
least Of a tender spot in his heart, it was
perfectly intolerable (p. 341).

The gambler writers took full advantage of this

separation factor and added another sentimental dimension

by making the slave girl, not a rough field hand but a

quadroon

or octoroon lovely enough tO be desired by white

men either as mistresses or wives. The ancestral home Of

these light—colored Negresses is Africa, but they probably

came to America from the West Indies where they lived as

"free persons of color"in a society composed Of neither

white nor black peOple.

Her blood line is examined further by Joseph H.

Ingraham
Of these
child is
girl. A
called a

hair but

in "The Quadroon of Orleans" (1839). When one
African women cohabit with a white man, their
called a mulatto if a boy and a mulatress if a
child born of a mulatress and a white father is
mustaze. This child may have blue eyes and light

ordinarily has dark skin. Since it has only one

130

part black and four parts white, the African part has
almost become extinct and the child, therefore, looks
European. As long as some trace Of African blood remains,
though, even in the fifth or sixth removed cases, the
black woman is known as aguadroon.25

TO be sure, the fictionists took liberties with
this strict definition. In Beauty of, for example, a
slave girl is said to be of Indian descent, although her
clear Olive complexion, her erect and handsome figure and
graceful movements seem to show Spanish origins (p. 52).
A quadroon Of the fifth descent may resemble lovely Ital-
ian women, but one knows she is African because Of an
indescribable expression in the center of the pupils of
her eyes.

Although as reSpectable as other ladies of New
Orleans, a quadroon is destined to be the mistress Of a

rich young gentleman. When she reaches maturity, her

mother takes her to the Orleans Ballroom where in an upper

 

SJoseph Holt Ingraham, The American Lounger; or,
Talesy Sketches, and Legends Gathered in Sundry Journey-
ings (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard Co., 1839), pp. 261-
262.

26Ibid.

131

room or balcony an interview is held with male applicants.
When completed, the bargain included a fashionable little
house on Rampart Street and a fixed income.

SO many fictional accounts exist of quadroons and
octaroons that only a few can be mentioned here. Dion
Boucicault's The Octaroon; or, Life in Louisiana (1859),
a play, has Zoe unable to marry a white man because Of
society's laws against blacks marrying whites. Earlier
stories Of the type are Lydia M. Child's "The Quadroon"
in Fact and Fiction (1846) and J. H. Ingraham's "The Qua-
droon of Orleans" (1839). In Mrs. Child's "Quadroon"
when Xarifa's lover abandons her to further his political
career in Europe, Xarifa dashes her brains out against a
wall rather than submit to the sexual advances of her
cruel master.27 Ingraham's rendition includes a pair of
star—crossed lovers. When Baron Championet abandons
Emile, to go to France, fate takes a hand in the affair
and the Baron's son, whom Emile bore, grows up in France
wanting to marry the Baron's French daughter from another
marriage. Two of many post-Civil War romances in which

quadroons figure are Albion Tourgee's Toinette (1874) and

 

27(New York: C. S. Francis & Co., 1846).

132

his Hot Plowshares (1883). In the first novel, a Southern
gentleman refuses to marry a slave girl who was his chat-
tel before the War, despite her protestations Of deep love
for him.

Although we are speaking about gamblers ashore in
this section, a gambler afloat story best shows the
writers' romantic adaptations Of this versatile quadroon
motif. In Sylvanus S. Cobb, Jr.'s "An Incident on the
Mississippi," a hunter, having returned from the woods
with money to buy his beloved Ianthe, learns that her
master died and that she has been sold to a trader. On
the boat back to the woods, he plays cards with a losing
gambler who Offers the overjoyed Ianthe as a stake.28

The most depraved of the quadroon-as-stakes stories
is "The Quadroon Sisters" in which a craven gambler named
Jack Weller, with one quadroon in his possession, plays
cards with Colonel Thomas Moses of Richmond for her twin.
When Moses wins and the girls are reunited, we are given

the unexpected news that the quadroons had the same father

as the Colonel but not the same "servile mother."

 

28Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, IX
(Aug. 18, 1855). 106.

133

Two stories harken back to the old-fashioned
formula Of the lady-book writers:, Mrs. H. F. Lee's "A
Tale Of New Orleans" (1845) and E. Z. C. Judson's Tpe
Mysteries Of New Orleans, a dime-novel type story. Mrs.
Lee's exploitation of the quadroon device includes a re-
formed Southern gambler in a precieuse Situation, a quad—
roon like Pamela who states that virtue has its own re-
ward, a paternal gambler, and an ending reflecting that
in QLarissa. The plot involves Gambler-Leonetz who wins
all the possessions Of another gambler, including, as we
discover late in the tale, a daughter named Julia, a
quadroon. Now a complicating factor turns up in the
person of Julia's fiancé, Morley, who has recently re-
turned from a EurOpean vacation to claim her. Fair—minded
about the dilemma of who deserves the woman, Leonetz lets
her make up her own mind about the choice Of him or Morley
for a husband. Unable to live with one or without the
other, she sends each of them a note stating that her
answer will be given in her apartment that night. When
they arrive on the scene, she is lying dead in a casket

with tapers burning at each end.29

 

29Godey's Lady}s Book, XXXI (Oct., 1845), 160-168.

134

y» E. Z. C. Judson's The Mysteries and Miseries of
New Orleans (1851) joins the mainstream of sentimental
gambler stories in having a seduction plot that echoes

The Coquette and Charlotte. In The Mysteries, Adalie de

 

Bouligny's mock-mother accepts bribes from the wealthy
and lecherous Mr. Molpin to drug Adalie so that he can
ravish the girl.

By way Of summary, the prejudicial portrayals Of
the South in gambler stories includes two types of youth-
ful gamblers: Hamlet and HotSpur. Both types reflect a
stereotyped picture Of the plantation and chivalric South
as a region of decadent aristocrats whose social code
fosters self-pity, hollow pride, and worship of the flesh
pots. The Hamlet—type, moody and sensual, appears in two
clusters Of tales: frustrated lovers and sensualists.

In these tales, planters' sons exhibit many Of the char-
acteristics of psychologically disturbed individuals.

For the most part, they want to rebel against their en-
vironment but lack the fortitude to do so. That they
accept their fate while trying to escape from it shows

up in their hedonistic adventures in the pleasure palaces
Of New Orleans, a city pictured as rivaling Paris as a

center of profligacy. HotSpur—gamblers resemble

135

Hamlet—gamblers but Show more of a propensity to duel to
defend their injured pride. This activity likewise im-
presses one as a degenerative tendency of Southern youth,
the ultimate instance being their sexual mOlestation of
their slave girls.

The quadroon-as-stakes gambler stories lie in the
mainstream of the sentimental tradition in that the
authors normally view slaves as the Object of great pity,
especially when they are beautiful and liable to abuse
by cruel masters. What makes these stories seem outside
the sentimental story, as we have develOped it, is their
distinctive quality rather than any factors inherent in
the tales themselves that would make them different from

the generic type.

CHAPTER V

THE GOLD RUSH GAMBLER STORY

Thou shalt not go prospecting before thy
claim gives out. Neither shalt thou take thy
money, nor thy gold dust, nor thy good name
to the gaming-table in vain; for monte,
twenty-one, roulette, farO, lasquenet and
poker will prove to thee that the more thou
puttest down the less thou shalt take up.

--The Miners' Ten Commandments

Gold rush gambling was the third phase of gambling

in the United States. The first phase began with the
Texas Republic, became intensified during the Gold Rush.
and further develOped as the Pacific Coast and Southwest
settled.1

Sam Brannan's cry of "Gold" in the mill wash at
Coloma in 1848 began a stampede that reached 100,000 men
in '49. Adventurers came from all over the world, the
Americans taking three main routes, one by land, across

the Great Desert, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas, a

trip Of about five months; and two by sea, one by way Of

 

1ASbury, p. 310.
136

137

Cape Horn, which took one hundred to two hundred days and
the other across the Isthmus of Panama or through Nica-
ragua.

Despite the bad food and crowded conditions, most
Americans from the Eastern seaboard, and especially
gamblers from New York, Washington, and New Orleans pre—
ferred sea routes. Gamblers, naturally, preferred the
luxury Of the long trip which gave them a chance to relax
as well as gamble. Gamblers are a sedentary tribe and
do not savor hardship, fighting Indians, having watch
duty, and putting up with all the inconveniences of moun-
tain and desert travel. Then, too, many land groups had
provisions in their constitutions that forbade gambling.
and violators were punished with extra labor or expulsion
from the company.3 In addition, it is not unlikely that
the pioneers had little money to spend for gambling what
with the ever pressing need for provisions and essentials

for their wives and families.

 

2Ernest A. Wiltsee, Gold Rush Steamers Of the
Pacific (San Francisco: The Grabhorn Press, 1938), pp.
2-3.

3Vincent Eply Geiger, The Overland Journal of
Vincent Geiger and Wakeman Bryarly, ed. David Morris
Potter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945), p. 18.

138

Bored passengers who play cards are the favorite
targets Of the gold rush diarists. One writer observes
that they play from sunup to sundown, stopping only for
meals.4 Another is impressed not only by the hold gam-
bling has on the individuals but also with the tattered
condition of the cards, the denominations of which could
barely be made out. For stakes, these ocean-goers used
cash, clothing, jack knives, shoes, pistols, and so forth.
In his memoirs, Upham watches the passengers on the brig
Osceola,bound from Philadelphia to San Francisco, amuse
themselves not only with cards, dominoes, backgammon and
checkers, but also with a new game, pitching pennies on
the deck.5 In another diary note, he expresses chagrin
over the checks rattling on the table in a faro game tak-
ing place in the room over his cabin. By means of a
telltale exclamation mark, he gives his sense of relief
when it is over: "three days later the boys broke the

blacklegs' bank!" (p. 176). Bruff reports that at Chagres

 

4Oscar Lewis, Sea Routes to the Gold Fields. The
Migration by Water to California in 1849-1852 (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf & Co., 1949), p. 103.

5Samuel Curtis Upham, Notes Of a Voyage tO Cali-
fornia via Cape_Horn (Philadelphia: The Author, 1878),
p. 50.

139

in the Isthmus Of Panama, gambling tables are set up on
the street and gamblers play monte by candlelight.6
Bayard Taylor, a New York newspaper correspondent, Ob—
serves a gang of blacklegs who,having boarded the U.S.
Mail ship Falcon at New Orleans, set up a bank Of $500
in Chagres which closes the same night when a lucky padre
breaks it. After leaving Acapulco, these gentry play
monte on the quarter-deck Of the ship in hope of attracting
unwary passengers, but the Captain stops them. On the
Isthmus they Offend the natives by entering one Of their
churches with their hats pulled down over their eyes, and
march up the aisles to light their cigars at the four
tapers burning at the altar.7
J. D. Borthwick, noting that gambling on his Ship

bound from New York to San Francisco is peaceful, gives
the reason why:

Throughout the voyage nearly one half the pas-

sengers spent the whole day, and half the night,

in playing the favorite game of Poker, which is
something like Brag, and at which they cheated

 

6Joseph Goldsborough Bruff, Gold Rush, eds.
Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1944), p. 986.

 

7Eldorado; ory Adventures in the Path Of Empire
(New York: A. A. Knopf Co., 1949), p. 36.

140

each other in the most barefaced manner . . .
everyone wore his bowie-knife, the prospects
of getting his Opponent's knife between his
ribs deterred each man from drawin his own
or offering any violence whatever.

The argonauts gambled more on the ships going home
than they did California—bound,for now rich, they became
easy pickings for the sly professionals who made regular
runs between San Francisco and Panama. Many of these
regulars had working agreements with the ship's officers
to share the profits and captains themselves were known
to run private rackets to fleece their passengers.

In '49, gambling was the amusement in San Fran-
cisco, "the grand amusementfl'says the historian Soulé,

. ,lO .
"apparently the life and soul of the place.‘ In their
heyday, gamblers were some of the richest, most powerful
citizens in that lawless society. Their establishments
were so numerous that at night the entire town seemed

lighted up by them. Fascinated by the scene, Taylor re-

ports:

 

8"Three Years in California," Hutchings' Califor-
nia Magazine, II (Sept., 1857), 123.

9Lewis, p. 105.

10Frank Soulé, The Annals of San Francisco (New
York: D. Appleton & Co., 1854), p. 248.

141

The appearance of San Francisco at night,
from the water, is unlike anything I ever be-
held. The houses are mostly of canvas, which
is made transparent by the lamps within, and
transforms them, in the darkness, to dwellings
of solid light. Seated on the slopes of its
three hills, the tents pitched among the chap-
paral to the very summits, it gleams like an
amphitheater of fire. Here and there shine
out brilliant points, from the decoy-lamps of
the gaming-houses . . . . The picture has in
it something unreal and fantastic, and im-
presses one like the cities of the magic lan—
tern, which a motion of the hand can build or
annihilate (pp. 117-118).

By daylight the city is all confusiOn. "On every

side stood buildings of all kinds," continues Taylor,

"begun or half-finished, and the greater part of them mere

canvas sheds, Open in front, and covered with all kinds of

signs, in all languages. Great quantities of goods were

piled up in the Open air, for want of a place to store

them." In this crazy-quilt pattern the dregs of society

attracted Hinton Helper, who says:

Villains from all parts of the world
swarmed upon the new soil. Cunning sharpsters
from New England, desperate vagabonds from
Texas, bogus men from the Northwest, and reck—
less plunderers from the prairies hastened to
California like crows to a corn-field. Mexico
sent thither their secret assassins. The
penal colonies of Great Britain vomited their
refuse upon this unhappy land, and even savage
pirates from the Eastern Archipelago found
their way to El Dorado. The territory numbered
among her inhabitants, accomplished thieves,
burglars and cut-throats from every civilized

142

and barbarous country within reach, men who
had been familiar with courts and jails, and
all punishments short of death.11

General Vallejo, speaking as a Spanish-American,
deplores the wreckage of California:
Australia sent us swarms of bandits . . .
Peru . . . rascals, begotten in idleness and
schooled in vice, who debased themselves for
lucre. Mexico inundated us with a wave of
gamblers who had no occupation save that of

the card table, no motive but the spoilation
of the unwary.

A boatload of French whores gravitated to the gambling
houses and brothels and Chinese women spread syphilis
everywhere.

Gold and gold alone brought this human drift to
California. "Gold digging absorbed everything," says
M'Collum. The people had one idea and Mammon reigned,
"All were his votaries, and they were as absorbed, as
'set apart' for his service, as if bound by religious

vows."l3 The crew of a United States War vessel, unable

 

11The Land of Gold. Reality vs. Fiction (Balti-

more: H. Taylor, 1855), pp. 238-239.

12Myrtle Mason McKittrick, Vallejo, son of Cali-
fornia (Portland, Oregon: Binsford & Mort Co., 1944),
p. 287.

13William S. M'Collum, California as I saw it,
ed. Dale Morgan (Los Gatos, Calif.: The Talisman Press,
1960), p. 124.

143

to resist the lure of the precious ore, deserted ship
(Upham, p. 125), and the council members of San Francisco
abandoned their duties for two months to try their luck
in the mines (Soulé, p. 205).

The element of chance that tempted the argonauts
made inveterate gamesters of them. "Wherever you find
mining, you find gambling mistletoeing," says Thomas R.
Jones.14 But not merely the love of gold drove these
miners to the gambling houses. If one takes as his defi-
nition that gambling is an enchanting witchery between
idleness and avarice, two conditions must be met before
one qualifies as a votary of chance--time on one's hands
and greed. The miners, starved for entertainment and
lonely, passed their idle hours walking the streets of
San Francisco where only gambling houses offered amuse-
ments. Indeed, the gambling houses were the only decent
buildings in town to be set aside for recreation. To the
miners, they were like club houses. One could meet his
friends there, write letters home, get refreshments and

even a bunk for the night.

 

4Thomas R. Jones, You Bet; how the Californians
did it (Sacramento: News Publishing Co., 1930), p. 13.

144

Before we give a general description of these
houses, let us note that they sprung up during the boom
or second phase of California gambling. The phase that
preceded it had gambling taking place in large tents or
huts filled with smoking, noisy, and drunken men. In the
last phase, the Vigilance Committees, starting in 1852,
took matters into their own hands, and the reckless days
of gambling became a thing of the past.

In the boom phase, houses like the Eldorado and
Parker House on Portsmouth Square were decorated with
colored calico streamers that floated from gilt and
frescoed ceilings. On the walls hung paintings of nude
women in obscene postures,and at one end of the big room
a stand held brass bands, Ethiopian serenaders, banjo-
and-bones artists, solo violinists, accordionists, and
ballad singers. The Verandah, opposite the Eldorado,
boasted a musician who had a set of pandean pipes fastened
to his chin and a drum on his back which he beat with
sticks at his elbows and cymbals in his hands. In the
Diane Saloon, Coke describes a typical scene: "Picture
to yourself," the diarist says,

enormous rooms gaudily decorated, filled with
some 400 or 500 people of all classes, without

145

distinction of age, rank, or sex. "Monte,"

"faro," "rouge et noir," are the favourites

among a variety of games. The tables are

covered with money . . . . Everybody is

armed . . . . 5
In the more refined gambling saloons were two buffets,
the first dispensing wine and spirits; the other, choco-
late, coffee, tea, and sweetmeats and managed by a pretty
lady in a black silk gown.

During the boom, gambling establishments all had
city licenses costing fifty dollars a month; for an extra
twenty-five dollars, they could stay open on Sundays.

The Parker House rented for $110,000 yearly, at least
$60,000 of which came from the gamblers who had the second
floor (Taylor, p. 57), and the Eldorado brought $40,000.
Half of the keepers of tables paid not less than $1,000
per month for one table (M'Collum, p. 159). Actually,
these rents were reasonable considering that a bowling
alley in the basement of the Ward House cost $5,000 a
month, an apple or a boiled egg, one to five dollars;

whiskey, thirty dollars a bottle, and common tacks, $192

a pound.

 

15Henry John Coke, A Ride over the Rocky Moun-
tains (London: R. Bentley, 1852), pp. 355-356.

146

Gambling stakes ranged from fifty cents to five
or sixteen dollars, the cost of an ounce of gold dust.
No-limit games took place in private houses, but in public
ones the prOprietor obliged by raising the limit. If a
miner with a full poke staggered in and demanded a sky-
high game, the gamblers always stretched their rules to
accommodate him. The common practice, however, was to
play the percentage by taking a little from many, rather
than much from few. This practice paid off handsomely
in crowded houses where miners, ten to a dozen deep,
waited in line for a chance to play. Diarists disagree
about the hours these houses stayed open. Some claim all
night and day, others late afternoon to daylight, and
still others from approximately nine in the morning to
midnight.

Gamblers with a vested interest in the houses,
that is, the professionals, usually had a partner, a man
or a woman. One of the pair raked in the money, piled
it up, "weighed" the gold dust, priced pawns, conveyed
property deeds, and the like. Often this assistant served
as a roper to give signals and an oral pitch to hook
suckers jostling in the hot, whiskey-and-sweat smelling

gambling dens.

147

The following types of gamblers operated in the
period from 1849 to 1852: the legitimate kept a table,
paid his license fees, rent, and other eXpenses as did
other ordinary citizens of the city; the professional,

a migrant without a fixed abode dealt, capped, or bet
from the outside--a drifter, society treated him as an
outcast without ties to a civilized community. The third
or gentleman-gambler type dealt occasionally as an ama—
teur but played primarily for amusement, doubled in pol-
itics and proved pOpular at clubs because of his pleasing
personality.

Women as professional gamblers became fashionable
in San Francisco when the Bella Union in 1850 hired one
of three hundred Parisian prostitutes sent to California
at the expense of the French government who held a lottery
to pay their passage out of the country. Although no race
had a monOpoly on female gamblers, most of them mentioned
in the diaries are French, Spanish, or Mexican. Hinton
Helper gives a rare description of one of these ladies
working with a partner. The first three tables are occu-
pied solely by men, but at the fourth he sees

a Jew and Jewess . . . the fifth is under the
direction and management of a French gentleman

 

148

and lady; a young American girl and her para-

mour have charge of the sixth; while the

seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and so on,

are presided over by sundry sorts of wicked

spirits, unworthy of being named (PP. 72-73).
Friedrich Gerstacker just misses describing a love affair
between a little French gambler in a black silk dress and
a raw—boned Yankee. After losing four watches to her
without winning a hand, he sacrifices a ring which, loathe
to take at first, she finally sweeps in. In a whimsical
ending, the author comments that the Yankee must certainly

. 16

have been a traveling watchmaker.

On the roads to the Diggings, in the mountains,
and in the interior towns of Sacramento and Stockton,
gambling was as rife as in San Francisco. Near Stockton
Shaw watches a German barber bleed customers for five
dollars a visit while the other end of the tent shelters
gamblers. William G. Johnson says gamblers made fortunes

. . . . . l7
and occupied the finest buildings in Sacramento. In

one of the more amusing accounts of card playing in Sacra-

mento, Taylor describes a Mexican playing monte on a table

 

16Friedrich Gerstacker, California Gold Mines.

Foreword by Joseph A. Sullivan (Oakland, Calif.: Bio—
books, 1946), pp. 109—110.

l7Overland to California. Foreword by Joseph A.
Sullivan (Oakland, California: Biobooks, 1948), p. 184.

149

near a fire he started in the rain (p. 269), and here
also Letts finds a monte bank open under a tent, the
patrons standing up to their knees in mud.18

Let us turn our attention now to writings about
gold rush gambling. These writings are of two kinds:
realistic and fictional. Among the realistic accounts
are memoirs, journals, and diaries, including those by
Hinton Helper (Land of Gold), William Shaw (Golden
Dreams), Bayard Taylor (Eldorado), J. M. Letts (Cali-
fornia Illustrated), and a host of others. The fiction
falls into several categories, for our purposes only two
being important: "purely"sentimental and sensational.
Although we shall list them separately here, they will
be treated together in our discussion. Some significant

titles in the sentimental group are E. G. Frost's Gem

of the Mines (1866), Charles Washburn's Philip Thaxter

 

(1861), and John Ballou's Lady of the West (1855). Of
the dime-novel variety tales, the following contain

the best gambling elements: Gustave Aimard's Gold

 

18J. M. Letts, California Illustrated (New York:

R. T. Young, 1853).

 

150

Seekers (1860), Francis Johnson's Steel Arm (1862), and
W. G. Chester's George Denny (1856).19

These novels have no literary pretensions and
show all the crudities of shorter sentimental fiction
plus a few additional defects their longer length affords.
Among others, there are a groping for internal harmonies,
structural breakdowns, errors in spelling, punctuation,
poor sentence and paragraph structure, hackneyed expres-
sions, high—sounding diction, stilted dialog, especially
during parting and death-bed scenes, gory details, wooden
characters, and a plethora of melodramatic devices, such
as floods, fever-walks, and coincidental happenings.

Before beginning a survey of the chief themes and
motifs in these stories, we should make it clear that a
few gambler types are omitted because they do not appear
in sufficient numbers to merit separate consideration or

because they have been treated elsewhere, that is, in

stories of rOpers, duelists, and seducers.

 

19Additional novels in these categories are the

anonymous Adventures of a Gold—Finder (1860), Henry Viza-
telly's Four Months (1849), J. A. Benton's The California
Pilgrim (1853), Friedrich Gerstacker's Gold (1859), Alex—
ander Dumas's A Gil Blas (1852), Henry Sedley's Marion
Rooke (1865), and Edward Maitland's The Pilgrim and the
Shrine (1868).

 

 

151

The two chief themes in gambler writings using
the gold rush scene are violence and reform. Violence
in this setting has an omnipresence that makes it dif-
ferent, however, from that in big city novels where it
seems merely an appendage to the story, a bit of sensa—
tionalism added for its own sake. In gold rush writings
it grows naturally out of the disruptive milieu. In
sketch, short story, and novel, we read of miners shot
in the gambling palaces of San Francisco, Sacramento,
and Stockton or of their deaths by madness, brain fever,
and suicide.

The simplest type of anecdote on the theme of
violence is "Mr. Karl Joseph Krafft" in which a cultured
German adventurer falls from high to low degree and ends
up with delirium tremors in a gambling hall on Portsmouth
Square where he blows his brains out.20 In another anec-
dote, a youthful gambler who refuses to disgorge his
winnings in a San Francisco gambling den is promptly shot
by the dealer who calls for a coroner and a jury from

among the crowd. Soon acquitted by them, the dealer

 

20Putnam's Monthlngagazine, IX (March, 1857),

 

265-273.

152

starts a new round of cards while standing in the undried
gore of his victim.
Variations of this theme appear in Gerstacker's

Scenes of Life in California and "George Laustin." In

 

Scenes, during closing hours a Mexican absconds with a
dealer's pile of gold and is shot in the street, the
gamblers confident the police will be able to follow the
wounded man's trail of blood.22 ”George Laustin" de-
scribes an overjoyed gambler who returns home to announce
to his wife that he has broken a gambler's bank and in a
maniacal seizure falls to his death headlong down a flight
of stairs.23

In a region where the unusual is commonplace, a
happening has to be different to be noticed. Some of the
more Spectacular kinds of violence in gambler stories
occur in Letts' California Illustrated and Gus Wedel's

"The Gambler's Revenge." In Letts' scene a gambler named

Irish Dick is caught by a Placerville mob who tie a rOpe

 

lWilliam Kelly, An Excursion to California
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1851), p. 247.

2Trans. George Cosgrove (San Francisco: John
Howells, 1942), pp. 103-105.

23Wanderer, Golden Era, VIII (Jan. 22, 1860), l.

 

153

around his neck and give Dick the other end which he is
compelled to hold while he climbs out on a tree limb to
jump to his death. Equally as cruel is the treatment of
Blacksmith—Cane in "The Gambler's Revenge" who, for ad-
vising a camp to burn out Gambler-Johnson, is strangled
by a rOpe that passes around his neck and through holes
in the floor to Johnson standing in the room below.24

The second chief theme in gold rush stories is
reform. Here the familiar pattern is followed that de-
scribes the gambler's progress from gambling—~to drinking—-
to death. The standard tale is D'Alby's "The Gamester's
Doom" in which a young merchant falls under the charms of
a syren dealer, loses his money for a branch office in
San Francisco, turns to liquor for consolation, and blows
his brains out at her gaming table.

The reform tale grouping a husband and wife ap-
pears in its conventional form in "The Gambler's Wife,"
Washburn's Philip Thaxter, and Ballou's Lady of the West.

In the short story, a merchant goes to San Francisco with

a friend to meet his wife due to arrive by boat from the

 

24Gus Wedel, Golden Era, XIV (Sept. 16, 1866), 3.

25Golden Era, XII (Jan. 8, 1860), 3.

154

East the next day. That night the friends visit a gam-
bling house where the merchant loses everything. Ashamed,
the husband has his friend meet the wife to escort her to
his hotel room where he explains the situation. Forgiven,
he returns with her to the diggings, and, with a loan from
his friend, opens another store.

Washburn's Philip Thaxter is a gloomy story of an
adventurer from the Eastern seaboard who goes to San Fran-
cisco where he falls ill of a fever and, about to die, is
nursed back to health by a lady who pities him. With her
money, he rises in power and has a real estate and gam-
bling house business. When his fortune reverses, his
wife arrives from home unannounced and in hiding witnesses
his infamous career which concludes at a trial where he
faces a murder charge. Forsaken now by his fair-weather
friends, mistress, gambling associates, and partner, he
seems doomed until his wife, sure he has learned his
lesson, comes forth to save and reform him.27

John Ballou's Lady of the West, a rather insipid

story, features a virtuous lady from Cincinnati who, while

 

26William R. Thomas (Nov. 1, 1854), n.p.

27(New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1861).

155

seeking her fiance in the gold fields, works as a waitress
in a boarding house for gamblers. Here she converts
Gambler-Parker (temporarily) in a précieuse scene in which
he babbles about his past love life and his hOpe of escap-
ing his Oppressive but lucrative career. To show that he
has a tender heart and is a sincere convert, he rescues
her from a mob of harpies in front of a whore house to
which she has wandered in a state of fever. He also pays
for her hospital bills and her passage home where her
fiancé has already arrived. If up to now the reader
misses the point that virtue has its own reward, he gets
it when her fiancé, now with a fortune, becomes worthy
of her hand in marriage.

Another fiance in a reform context appears in
H. J. Plomteaux's "The Outcast Reclaimed; or Strength of
Pure Love." This tale, treated in an earlier section,
the truest example of a lady-book gambler tale with a
gold rush setting, features Flora who loves a young busi-
nessman of good reputation now fallen into the gambling

habit. A plucky heroine, she adopts a man's disguise,

__1

28(Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstich, Keys and Over-
end, 1855).

156

bankrupts her lover in a gambling house, and brings him
to his senses and the altar.

Several reform stories include the old-fashioned
motif of the abused wife popular in the lady books. A
trace of this motif appears in "The Gambler's Wife" with
stronger versions in Philip Thaxter and Blunderbuss's
"Duel by Candlelight." We can eliminate these now because
they have been treated before and instead say a few

words about Francis Johnson's Steel Arm, Anna M. Fitch's

 

Bound Down, J. A. Benton's The California Pilgrim (1853),

 

and Alice's short story titled "Mary Morton."

In Johnson's Steel Arm, a dime novel, a lady is

 

shackled in misery to a worthless gambler who lacks the
courage to confront the titular hero in a showdown for

. 2 .
her affections. 9 Anna M. Fitch's Bound Down concerns a

 

bigamist whose first wife resides in an insane asylum
while his second wife, in love with another man, feels

betrayed.30 A pigeon in J. A. Benton's The California

 

Pilgrim lights at a gambler's table and loses a pile of

silver and gold, turns to drinking, and offers his wife

 

29(New York: Dick & Fitderald, 1862).

30(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1870).

157

nothing but a future of penny pinching.31 The titular
heroine of "Mary Morton," a debilitating tale, plays a
violin in a gambling house and earns extra money as a
prostitute. When her husband, a drunkard and gambler,
turns up in her room as one of her customers, she drOps
dead of a heart attack.32

A special group of reform sketches includes
gamblers with consciences. They share oral confessions
with the reader and purge themselves of their guilt feel-
ings. A few with a gold rush setting are ”Old Forty-
nine," "Revelations of a Gambler,” and Poor Tom Cross
described in a series of sketches in Putnam's magazine
for 1857. Old Forty-nine, immediately after winning
$2,000 in a card game, has fears he will become a gam-
bling addict and lose his soul in the pursuit of money.
Soon his fears are allayed, however, when he loses every-

thing in a speculating scheme and ends up a day laborer.33

 

31(Sacramento: Soloman Alter, 1853), p. 247.

32Alice, Hutchings' California Magazine, II
(Feb., 1858), 354.

33Hutchings' California Magazine, I (Sept., 1856),

 

216.

158

The informative gambler in Sierra Citizen's
"Revelations of a Gambler" discloses that he was not
born corrupt; his soul rebelled against its destiny.
When an old man breaks his bank, he follows him to the
California gold diggings and with some confederates robs
and kills the man. With the mark of Cane now upon him,
he awaits his death at the end of a rope and is repen-
tant. He does not want his mother to know how he died
and will therefore hold no grudges if someone else pub-
lishes his story.

The epitome of sentiment appears in the sketch
of Poor Tom Cross. A gentleman's son from New Orleans,
well-educated, generous, and with a devil—may—care atti—
tude, he gets typhoid fever from digging in the mines
and dies in a clump of bushes. On him is found an old
worn-out ace of hearts with two lines written on it in
pencil: "Goodfby, mother! Pardon and love poor Tom,"
evidently prepared beforehand in case of accident.35

Most of the greenhorn—clerk tales have a reform

element as in the previously noted "Gambler's Wife" and

 

34Golden Era, IV (Jan. 6, 1856), 6.

 

3 .
5"The Green Cloth," Putnam's Monthly MaqaZine,

IX (May, 1857), 535.

159

"The Gamester's Doom." One in which he resists reform
appears in Bruff's Gold Mines. This anecdote, like many
in the period, involves the gaming tables—to-mines motif.
Here a clerk buys his boat ticket home to the East, drOps
into a gambling house in San Francisco, and loses every-
thing. He then tells a pitying sea captain his story

and is refunded half the price of his ticket, which he
promptly carries off and loses in the same gambling house.
Last heard of he had borrowed two ounces from a friend

to get back to the mines.

The much publicized magnanimity of the gold rush
gambler characterizes Gambler—Parker in Ballou's Lady of
the West, an anecdote in Letts' California Illustrated,

a sketch of Old Paul in a collection of anecdotes in
Putnam's (1857), and "'Lucky' Bill, the Thimble-rigger."
The generous monte-dealer in Lett's Sketch first bankrupts
his customers and with their money treats everybody to a
continuous round of drinks in a scene reminiscent of "The
Quadroon Sisters." The money gone, the gambler mounts

his horse and, like a Beadle novel gambler—hero, drifts
off to parts unknown.

Old Paul likewise makes a practice of breaking

banks in gambling houses. He then retires from activity

160

and in pipe and slippers reads his newspapers until when
pinched for cash he starts his routine all over again.
One day his course is interrupted when a group of citizens
call upon him to run for the office of comptroller of San
Francisco. He throws his entire fortune in the campaign
and made a good showing until his Opponent, a Texas
Ranger, dOes tricks on his horse in front of the polling
place at the Parker House ("The Green Cloth," p. 535).
Benevolent gamblers like the dealer in Letts'
sketch and Old Paul give proof to Mason Long's words that
gamblers are perhaps the world's greatest spenders.
"There is no luxury a gambler will not enjoy," says Long,
"if he has, or can get, the money to pay for it" (p. 143).
Of course, the code demands a gambler squander his money
recklessly to keep up appearances so as not to lose favor
with his confederates and the public. The code also in-
cludes a concomitant attitude of carpe diem--"Eat, drink,
and be merry, for to-morrow, ye die." One of the most
tender hearted gamblers in the gold rush gambler fiction
is the titular figure in Blunderbuss's "'Lucky' Bill, the
Thimble—rigger." In one anecdote, he wins a yoke of
cattle from a pioneer in Sacramento, sells it back to the

man for $60, and then donates the other pair when he hears

161

the man cannot get his wagon over the mountains without
both pairs. In another anecdote, Bill wins $300 from an
old man going home to his dead wife and three homeless
children. Seeing the look of despair on the man's face
as he turns away, Bill gives him back his $300 and another
$200, along with a few words to the wise to stay away from
the likes of Lucky Bill, the gambler.36

Lest one leave the gold rush scene with the gen—
eral impression that the writers looked upon the profes-
sional gambler with kindness, the concensus among them
is that he is a deep-dyed villain. Indeed, the gold rush
gambler is a parasite. "Where the miner goes," says
Alonzo Delano, "no matter how difficult the transit, the
gambler follows to tempt him to part with his hard—earned
gains in a game of chance, and they too often fall victim
to their nefarious practices."37 Without offering an
extended list, let us merely mention the Opinions of a
few realistic writers whose words are echoed in the sen-

timental novels. To Kelly, the gambler is a bloodstained

 

36Golden Era, III (July 1, 1855), 1.

37Life on the Plains (Buffalo: Orlon and Mulli—

96111, 1854): P. 340.

162

villain; to the Reverend Daniel B. Woods, a sink of evil
and the enemy of souls;38 to Hinton Helper, a "deadly
contagion"; and to Friedrich Gerstacker, "carrion birds."
As a social type, he occupies a position somewhere betWeen
the infamous Sydney Hounds and other derelicts and that

of the reSpectable citizens of the gold regions.

For a final word, we should say that the gold rush
gambler has two well-defined stereotypes. One fits the
picture of him in Hubert Bancroft's inter_pocu1a as a
"lank, cadaverous" type who dresses in black and seems
tottering to the grave. Hinton Helper, William Shaw, and

John Ballou in Bound Down also employ the type as do a

 

few Southern yarnSpinners. A more romantic type is the
Southerner George Denny in the novel of the same name.

He stands a little above medium height and has a well-
formed and graceful figure. His long brown hair falls

in wavy folds over a broad forehead and his distingué air
owes something to his light mustache. On close inSpec-
tion, one sees something repulsive in his features, the
cold gray eye and dead-pan expression of the most deadly

of his Species. Dressed in the height of fashion, he

 

8Sixteen Months at the Gold Diqgings (New York:
Harper & Bros., 1852), p. 74.

 

163

wears a snowy white shirt and black suit that complement
the Sparkling diamond rings on his fingers, the telltale
badges of the professional blackleg.39

In summary, the primitive social scene in gold
rush California produced two sentimental themes: vio-
lence and reform. This combination, present in one de-
gree or another in all writings in the periods covered
by this study, except the yarnspinner, testifies to the
potency of the sentimental tradition. Despite obstacles,
the gambler story retained its fundamental characteris-
tics and accommodated itself to changing social and
literary movements, such as the pervasive strain of the
adventure and sensational stories. This is not to deny,
however, that the gambler novels are shoddy affairs re—
plete with cheap melodramatic devices and a bothersome
homiletic atmosphere. The primary reason for this pre-
vailing moral tone relates to the puritanic ethos of the
lady writers who insist upon an old-fashioned eye-for—an—
eye and a tooth-for—a—tooth outlook.

Noticeably absent in this fiction, although one

hesitates to offer a broad generalization on the basis

 

39William G. Chester (San Francisco: D. P. Hull

& Co., 1856). p. 28.

164

of only those sources that happened to come under his
surveillance, are certain motifs which do not appear
frequently enough to form clusters. As isolated stories
they deserve to be omitted, although one Should mention
them anyway. We have in mind the old stand-by motifs

of seduction, formal duels, and rOper incidents. Appar-
ently by 1849, the pOpular Richardsonian theme of seduc—
tion ala Clarissa Harlowe had lost some of its appeal,
although it did not expire entirely, for the Beadle books
made capital Of it in scenes smacking of vaudeville and
the paddlewheel stage.

The reform element latent in seduction, neverthe-
leSS, remained stable and dominant in gold rush gambler
stories. This vigorous strain attaches directly to the
main stream of sentimental fiction and drama stemming
from eighteenth century plays, Richardson's Pamela and
Clarissa,and Henry Fielding's Amelia.

One exPected to find more duelist-gamblers in the
tales. Undoubtedly, the urge to kill had not diminished
on the gold rush frontier but informal rather than formal
methods were employed there,unlike the codified behavior
of duelists in Southern and big city novels. In the

crowded gaming houses the idea of holding a code duello

165

is absurd, and furthermore, avarice, not honor was the
issue at the gambling tables of the Eldorado, Parker
House, or Diane Saloon,unlike that in The Beauty of
Woman's Faith and Sixty Years of the Life of Jeremy
Levis.

Ropers or cappers continued to operate both in-
side and outside gambling houses as is apparent in
D'Alby's "The Gamester's Doom" and "'Lucky' Bill, the
Thimble—rigger," but these coney-catchers did not prac-
tice Barnard's Law. One did not have to resort to
trickery to get his pigeon to light; the bird flew into
the cage of his own volition.

The confession factor in the gold rush gambler
story forms a main tributary to the main stream of sen-
timental fiction dating from Richard Head's The English
Rogue in the eighteenth century and gathers renewed
support in the period after our study dates terminate.
The sensational Beadle novels make capital of it in the
late 1870's and l880's,and a spate of adventure stories
on the cattle frontiers feature the device on the fron—

tiers of the West and Southwest.

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the sentimental gambler story in
America has its roots in literary and social movements
that took place in EurOpe in the days of England's Tudor
monarchs. The general tendency among these sentimentally
inclined writers, both imaginative and realistic, from
the mid-Sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, was
to view gamblers as products of social upheaval rather
than as disciples of the Devil.

Attuned to this ”modern" attitude, a spate of
plays, to be lumped under the classification of senti—
mental domestic tragedies, appeared——prodigal son, abused
wife, gamester, and penitent rake. Supporting this more
humane attitude toward the gambler in these plays was
that of the chroniclers of London street life, who, in-
trigued by the cunning tricks of vagrants and thieves,
included in their Beggar Books and Coney-catching pam—
phlets accounts of gamblers. Among the better writers

166

167

in these groups were Awdeley, Harman, Greene, Dekker,
and Lodge.

Closer in time and literary impulse to sentimental
American gambler fiction'are the novels of three great-
British authors——Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and
Henry Fielding. Each of these writers contributed some-
thing to a sentimental background necessary to appreciate
the short gambler story. Richardson provided the gambler
genre with a magnetic villain-seducer in the person of
Richard Lovelace and a harassed maiden type in Clarissa
and Pamela. Sterne supplied an embroidered style and a
tearful, melancholy mood in A_§entimental Jogrney: and
Fielding offered a model for magazines in his gambler
story imbedded in his novel Amelia, which featured a
suffering middle class wife, negligent husband, and con-
fidence man as a nemesis factor.

In its heyday before the Civil War, the American
sentimental gambler story merged with other pOpular tales
of the time—-those featuring mechanics, philanthroPists,
Gothic villains, seducers, and duelists, for example; but
the adaptability of the genre does not rescue it from
subliterary ranking. At their lowest aesthetic levels,

these gloomy tales of domestic woe reveal all the

168

weaknesses of sentimental fiction in general--poor moti-
vation of characters, characters who are mere abstractions,
pat plots, crude construction, disproportion, "Old—
fashioned" style, and trite moral aphorisms, to mention
the most obvious of their faults. On their highest level
of art, the sentimental gambler stories of Bret Harte,
Josquin Miller, and Leonard Kip strike a familiar chord
in probing the Springs of human action and by humanizing
the gambler to some extent. Even the technical skill of
these authors, however, barely avert the tendency of the
time to stereotype all fictional gamblers.

Several suggestions may be offered to improve
these stylized sentimental tales. As Edna Ferber's §hgw_
l§2g§_and Frank Yerby's The Foxes of Harrow prove, an honest
love motif adds interest to a hum-drum plot. Show Boat
starts out with a strong love affair but it soon deteri-
orates as the author falls to stereotyping Gaylord Ravenal
as a villain. That the romantic gambler could be a ram-
pant lover and an engaging villain in performance of his
occupational duties at the Same time, as in the modern
T-V series Maverick, certainly was within the realm of

the imagination of these old-time authors of the 1840's

169

and "Feminine Fifties," but they failed to take advantage
of the Opportunity.

It is not the subject of gambling per se, or
gamblers branded as villains, or even the want of artis-
try of the writers that fully accounts for the second-
rate status of American gambler fiction in the nineteenth
century. Rather it is the restrictions of the sentimental
tradition. To work within it and produce a first-rate
story after a century of countless versions of Samuel
Richardson's Clarissa in American magazines and novels
demanded insights that outreached the meager gift of
commercially-minded American authors content with the hack-
neyed formulas of the past.

Some experimentation with gambling elements appears
in the Southern "yarnsfl‘but their approach moves in the
direction of the humor tradition of Alfred Henry Lewis,
O'Henry, and the "hard-boiled" school of novelists of the
Colorado mining camps in the mid-1940's.

Another trace of experimentation with the gambler
story can be seen in the dime novels of the 1870's, but
the chief element in them is sensationalism by means of
dangerous action. Sentiment, to be sure, is abundant in

them, but it is relegated to subplots where, deSpite

170

its sexiness, surrenders its appeal as a serious plot
ingredient.

An additional contribution made by dime novelists
was to provide composite models for Owen Wister's The_
Virginian (1902). This story initiated a new movement in
gambler stories based on the exploits of cowboys, plucky
gals as "prairie flowers," and comic pards, in a context
of physical danger. Here coalesce all the previous
gambler—story traditions in America—-the humor, adventure,
and sentimental.

Granted, it is a far cry from Wister's Virginian
to "The Errors--The Consequences--The Remorse" in the 1849
Godey's Lady's Book, but the standardized old gambler—tale
formula of "The Errors" does serve as a rather accurate
reflection of the taste in pOpular fiction of countless
thousands of Americans for over half a century. Indeed,
sentimental gambler stories never died; they merely trans—
ferred their ingredients to other fictional forms. That
they persisted should come as little surprise in an age
of "lady book" readers, but to survive in today's tech-
nological society seems startling at first blush. On

second thought, the old time gambler has a certain

171

glamour, if you will, that appeals to sentimentalists

who yearn for the romance of bygone years.

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A DDENDUM

Addendum: Mary E. MacMichael,
"The Gambler's Fate. A Brief Sketch,"
Godey's Lady's Book, XII

(July, 1836), 41-45.

Aubrey Fitzhenry was brave, hardy, and handsome;
would Spend freely what he won lightly, and if one day
fortune scowled, he would, like a wild beast, bask in the
sun to rid himself of chagrin the next; if She were pro-
pitious, swagger about, gallant and gay as a lord of a
manor. Like all the sons of God, he could make love to
the daughters of men, and touch the heart of a gentle
maiden. He was wild and reckless, it is true, but then
he made up for this by so many good qualities, and was
so engaging, that all unmarried ladies delighted in his
company. And then he could Sing ballads so sweetly and
mournfully, that even the Old dames leant back in their
arm-chairs to weep whilst he sung. He had one of those
deep, melancholy voices, which, when once heard, lingers
in the ear, and when heard again, however unexpectedly,

seems like a longing realized. In one of his rambles,

187

188

he met with Kate Seyton, the pride and the boast of her
native valley. beyond which She had never been. Familiar
as a household tone, was every step of the garden of her
dwelling-place, belted with shrubs and enriched at the
border by a deep ravine, over which it looked. At the
bottom of that ravine flowed the river, rapid, and yet
sullen; and beyond, scarcely distant two hundred yards,
a range of precipitous cliffs shut in the horizon. The
wild and desolate aspect of the scene was overshadowed
and controlled, as it were, by the stern grandeur of
these ramparts of nature: and the whole contributed to
form such a picture as an artist might travel a thousand
miles to contemplate. Kate, however, had looked upon it
from her childhood; it had never been forced upon her
mind by contrast, for She had never travelled five miles
beyond the pale of her residence, and she would Sit and
Sing, in the soft, low tone, peculiar to her vdice, and
beyond which She had no compass, and ply her knitting—
needle, and dream, without even raising her eyes. Her
voice was rarely loud enough to be caught by the opposite
rocks, although sometimes it did happen that, carried
away by enthusiasm, she produced a note which was re-

peated by the fairy minstrel of the glen.

189

"And he who there at such an hour had been,
Would wistful linger on that hallowed Spot,

Then slowly tear him from the witching scene,
Sigh forth one wish that such had been his lot,

Then turn to hate a world he had almost forgot."

On the present occasion Kate listened with sur—
prise to a Similar effect, for her voice had died almost
to a whisper; She sang another stanza in a louder key;
the challenge was accepted, and a rich sweet voice took
up the strain of a favourite ballad where she had dropped
it. Her first impulse was to f1y—-her second, to sit
still and watch for a renewal of the music-~and her third,
which she obeyed, to steal on tiptoe to the edge of the
ravine, and look down into the abyss, from whence it
seemed to proceed.

There was Aubrey--his face upturned like a star,
watching for the appearance of that maiden, of whom he
had long been enamoured. He had, unseen; been gazing
upon her as she Sang to beguile the time. The soft pro-
file of the young girl had been clearly defined to his
admiring gaze. There was the lovely brow, and the dark

chestnut-hair, parted Simply across it. The small,

190

regular features, the long black eye-lashes, deep eye-lid,
and the pale pure expression of her face, might have
formed a model for a Madonna, till she raised her bright
blue eyes--speaking the Simplicity and hilarity of her
age-~and Showed her parted coral lips, with their sun—
shiny smile. Her Slight, low figure, laced in the pic—
turesque corset, and shaded by the cotton handkerchief,
had all the grace of youth, and more than are generally
found in an obscure peasant. He ascended——they exchanged
salutations—-they conversed; there was nothing mysterious
in their communings. He was bold and vigorous of mind--
and this is beauty to the fair and timid. He skimmed
along the edge of the precipice, and Sprung from a rock
into the torrent, as fearless as a chamois, alternately
vanishing and reappearing on the summit of the rocks,
where no human foot had ever stood before. He was brave,
and proud, and beautiful; and this glorious creature—-
this Apollo of a childish imagination, with radiant eyes,
and glowing cheeks, laid himself at the maiden's feet,

to gaze upon her face, as poets worship the moon. The
world, before so monotonous, so blank, so drear, was now
a heaven to the bewildered Kate. Their sentiments they

avowed without disguise--their faith plighted beyond

191

recall. But why delay the truth? They married. Love
wove his gayest wreath to deck their bridal, and hope
whispered that happiness would crown their union. For
a time it was so, and Kate thought that the bright and
fragrant flowers that adorned her path would bloom for—

ever .

The day was just breaking, as Aubrey, having spent
the night in gambling, emerged, with his companions, into
an obscure street. His frame was exhausted by intense
excitement, and the cold damp air of the season came over
him with a sickening weight.

"Your losses seem to sit heavy on you, Fitzhenry,"
Said one of his veteran associates, "but you will soon be
able to put off these horrors; a little more experience
and you may command fortune at your pleasure."

Some further remarks passed, revoltingly illus-
trative of their habits, and they separated. With a
sunken and blook-shot [sic] eye, that told but too plainly
of the want of rest, while the just awakening city was

rising to new life, and to the glorious pageant that

192

already was colouring the reddened sky, he sought, in the
troubled and feverish Sleep of a weary Spirit, forgetful-
ness of scenes that had robbed him of a more tranquil
repose.

In a small habitation, whose Situation was, in—
deed, beautiful, sat the wife and mother. The house stood
on a gentle eminence, whence the eye looked out on a
gentle mead, rich in wood and water; and the extreme verge
of the prospect was lost in the blue waves of the deep,
distant ocean. And yet there was something about the
dwelling itself, which seemed to Speak of desolation so
much in unison with the heart of its mistress. Her mar-
riage had been productive of misery. Five years had
gilded down the dark and deceitful current of time, into
the deep and noiseless gulph of oblivion, three of which
had been happy. But a natural propensity for play, had
lured Aubrey from his home of love, and the once gay and
joyous Kate was neglected and forgotten; the fountain of
unspeakable affection which she bore, thrown away as a
priceless bauble. Look upon her as She Sits there watch-
ing the stars go out, one by one, in that pale dome, as
though the glory they had all night showered upon the

Silent earth had exhausted their eternal fountains of

193

brightness. Gracious heavens! What a change is there;
the Kate of bygone days can scarcely be recognised. The
sunny smile was gone; the rose had fled from her cheek,
the light from her eye, and buoyancy from her step; but
her hair was still soft and beautiful, and her voice sweet
and gentle, as in the palmy days of youth and hOpe. The
lovely child was the very image of herself at that fairy
age, save that a shade of thoughtfulness, perceptible

even in Slumber which the mother had not then, played

over the chiselled features. She leaned over the sleeping
innocent, her eyes suffused with tears, and murmured,
"Have mercy, oh my God, upon my child! let it not share
its mother's life; that smile, 'tis all his fond, sweet
smile, that won my virgin heart. Oh, keep in the pale of
thy mercy, this green leaf of promise--this sweet bud of
hOpe and delight! My child! my own, my beautiful! may
the breath of flowers and Shrubs——the coolness of the
air—-the murmur of the water-—a11 nature, animate and in-
animate, lend to thy existence a charm; and mayest thou
never, never know the agony, the heartache, which has been
all mine own in this chequered pilgrimage. My youth--my
dream of love and happiness--my Obscure and unpitied

death—-and, above all, far, far above all, my still dear

194

husband, where are you now? Oh, Aubrey! How inestimably
dear, fallen as thou art, to this breaking heart of mine
are thou; if you but knew the anguish that rends my bosom
in your absence, and the sunshine which your presence can
give, even now, to the world of my existence, methinks

you would make it more spring-time with me." At that in-
stant the child stirred, and she turned to hush it, and
gaze upon that fair and beautiful face, looking like some
lovely statue of Cupid; there was a sort of fascination

in the contemplation, and She watched more closely. There
is an awful something stirs the soul's deep places in
looking upon those we love dearly in Sleep; that extra-
ordinary suspension of the communing with external things;
that temporary extinction of being, so like death itself--
an extinction that would make death too fearful in the
contemplation, if we did not escape from it in the hOpe

of immortality. Sleep is his youngest brother-—his very
counterpart; the body lies senseless, while the soul takes
a new range of activity--it lives in another world.

There, divested of its materiality, it looks into the
secrets of nature-—holds communion with higher powers.

The sight is nearly allied to pain; it is not the picture

of our own dissolution which presses so heavily upon the

195

mind, it is the prophetic spirit within us, Speaking of
ties to be broken--hopes to fail-~affections to wither--
and a thousand other cherished memories that rise up in
dreadful array before the vision. Oh! what a feeling of
desolation--Of the breaking up of the heart's dearest
associations——came over that mother's mind, as her eye
wandered round the apartment. Every corner of that sweet
thing--home, had its feelings, and their eternal vacancy
and destruction, shot through her heart like an ice-bolt.
This was the very Spot in which She had passed the time
since her marriage, and when every fresh idea, won by

her young mind from the world around it, was a positive
joy. The places where She had ranged, when every look
was watched and granted ere made known, by a well—beloved
being: all those bright hours—-the transient sorrows——
the Sports-—the visions——bright, youthful dreams of never—
ending love--the melancholy voice of silence told her now
that they were mingled with, and belonged to the solemn,
the unchangeable, the irrevocable past! The trees, round
about, with their immemorial branches, tall and dark, rose
calm and clear in the still moonlight, like a green sea
of waving masses. There was the heavy oak and chestnut,

the trim pOplar, with its tall straight rows--each grove,

196

and glade, and avenue, and lawn, looked forth phantom
remembrances of the past. The whole scene was fraught
with living associations; but they were associations that
for every by—gone smile, called down a shower of tears.
That wringing, yearning of the heart; that hopeless an-
guish for the return of halcyon hours—-forever lost on
earth, and that only lived in the memory as a remembered
thing. Exhausted with watching, sleep overtook her, and
fancy, or imagination, did its fairy work most splendidly.
She was again, as of old, by that being whom She loved
more than any thing else on earth—-his brow was wreathed
in gladness-—her eye undimmed by a tear; again she lived
on every joyous look and feature-~the bright light shining
from those beautiful eyes, overflowed her soul with glad—
neSS; She listened, enraptured, to the magic tones of
love, and the thrilling tones of joy; the laughing hours
of other days came back again with all their mirth and
guileless thoughtfulness, and hope and joy were all that
was before her in the cloudless perspective of the future.
From such blessed meditations--replete with such antici-
pations of pleasure and happiness, she awoke to find

herself-—alone.

197

A heavy tread in the passage, and the sound of
approaching footsteps, broke upon the ear. In an instant
the tear was dashed aside-—the head raised--the eyes
flashed-—and the mouth curved in a bright, sweet smile.

"My husband! my dear husband," she uttered, as
she started forward to great him. His face was pale and
altered, and the cold dew stood on his garments like one
fatigued; the damp air had numbed him, as he stood the
object of so much love. He took her hand; his own was
cold as ice; its touch thrilled through and through her
frame.

"You are ill, love; why, oh why, will you wander
through the damp night!"

"I am not ill," said he; "my body is strong enough
to bear me, and you are my Spirit's love. Oh, Kate!
Kate! if you but knew how bitterly worthless and mean in
mine own eyes your matchless devotion makes me appear,
scorned and despised as I am, you would still pity and
forgive me."

"Oh, Aubrey! I would rather thou Shouldst in hot
words of anger chide me, than hear thee talk thus. I have
been Sitting here in my solitude, imagining thee lost to

me forever.”

198

"Kate," he murmured, unconsciously, "thou knowest
I love thee."

"Aubrey! Would I might say I loved thee; but
see," and she stepped nervously to his side, then dropping
her head on his shoulder, She took his hand and placed it
beneath her bosom. He started, for he thought her heart
was bursting from her side; but tears came to her relief,
and She became calm, for she felt that his were mingled
with them, and that his arms were round her as they were
wont to be.

"Aubrey," said the wife, as she looked up implor-
ingly into his face, "why will you not abandon this mode
of life? It is this, combined with your long absences
that, like a cold spectre, lays his hand upon all within
his reach, and sends shivering and death into my heart's
inmost cone; it is this that frightens, and finally un-
nerves me. You tell me of success at play; alas! if suc-
cessful are you happy? Is it not at the expense of
health, quiet, happiness, nay, even remorse, honour, that
you succeed? IS there no principle to betray, no obloquy

to follow?"

199

"Fear not, dearest," he answered, fondly, "that
dear, delightful, exciting being, HOpe, assures me that
we shall yet be joyful as we once were."

"Be it so," she replied, "for whilst you are a--
alas! my lips will not utter the word which crawls in my
brain, and chokes in my throat. That thought, my husband,
haunted me by night and by day. If I kneel to pray, that
only will rise to my lips; if I would kiss our child, it
rests between her eyes and mine; there is but one time
it comes not-—when I think not of it--when with thee,
thee, Aubrey. Thou art not guilty, with thy smile bent
on me; heaven is on my heart and soul; then am I thine,
thine-~proud1y thine."

Aubrey promised, and for a time it was so, that
every moment not consumed by him on absolute business,
should be devoted to her, and to their child. In the
cultivation of the earth, in the beauties of nature, and
the society of those he still loved, he found employment,
enjoyment, and content. At length he began to yield to
the seeking of those haunts, that, like an evil conscience,
haunted his wife, and pressed dark and gloomy upon his
own soul. Each day he resolved more strongly to disen-

tangle himself from his dissolute companions, and seek

‘l'l'.l ll
'

 

 

 

200

that calm retreat, and bestow those thousand nameless,
little attentions that his wife now doubly merited; but
he remained, now, longer absent than before, knowing that
he had given pain he did not choose to witness, and fear-
ing, not reproaches--her nature was too loving for that--
but tears, and the wan cheek and faded smile of her who
Should have claimed all his kindness.

Brilliant glowed the autumn, with its many-coloured
leaves; it was that calm hour, when the solemn light of
the radiant stars Shine through the straggling branches
of old treeS--when all living and timid things throw Off
the restraining fears of the steps of man--and when we
calm our sorrows, and exalt our Spirits by a communion
with external objects. There is a rich music in every
intonation of nature's voice, and the melody of that sweet
voice is never still; all that has life has a season or
an hour for its eloquent and Sweet song——each bright bird,
each beautiful and laborious insect, pours out its tribu-
tary streamlet into the deep ocean of universal harmony--
the winds and plumy forest--waves and sinuous caverns;
and Shells, their miniatures—-the upspringing plant, and
herb, and budding flower, all mingle in the hymn of gen-

eral jubilee, and the soft influence of sleepless sounds,

 

 

 

201

with their cadence, to which passion's voice ministers,
and their contemplation, make the spirit gentler and
wiser.

"Kate," said Aubrey to his wife, one evening,
towards the latter part of November, "where is my cloak;
I must go forth to-night," my word is pledged with my
partners in infamy, and I will redeem it."

That pale cheek grew paler at this intelligence,
but She knew it would be useless to remonstrate with her
husband, for, lawless as he was, he would not break his
word idly.

"Look not so drooping, wife, I promise, nay more,
I swear, by Him who is Almighty and powerful, and all
merciful, that after this night I will quit that accursed
trade forever."

"May God, in his mercy, have it so," she added,
in a low and deeply agitated tone; "then can I resign my
soul into the hands of my creator, and die in peace."

With the deepest agony and remorse, he clasped
to his bosom that being who had, indeed, given him so
many beautiful proofs of the depth of woman's undying

love--and thus they parted.

202

Her tenderness and affection had unclosed the
flood-gates of memory, and as he called to mind her coun-
sel and excellent warnings, he determined, internally, to
abandon this mode of life and live for her alone.

With the very resolution upon his lips, which
would have proved his safety, he was lost and ruined.

Oh, that fatal morrow, which was to have witnessed refor—
mation for the past, and joy for the future, never came!
He had tottered for an instant upon the brink of a dark
and yawning precipice; he had pushed rudely aside the
friendly hand which would have saved him from destruction,
and even as the ground crumbles beneath the feet, he was
whirled headlong into the abyss.

It was with great anxiety that this erring man
wandered forth that night; the hours seemed to pass with
painful tardiness; time appeared to his restless mind to
stand still; and the occasional gusts of wind which wailed
wildly through the trees, sounded to his ear like the
knell of death. He heard the sullen moaning of the dash
of the waves at the foot of his dwelling; he thought of
his wife, alone and deserted by him who had Sworn "to
cherish her,” and of his only child, till he wept—-stern

as was his soul, he wept in very bitterness. Now it was,

203

that the pure and upright would have looked and clung

to the hOpe which never forsakes the righteous; but there
had been, too long, no place in his heart for holy
thoughts; he looked not for consolation, in the gloomy
hour of tribulation, where alone, it was to be found,

and therefore was he desolate.

The moon, as She sailed along the heavens, im-
parted a distinctness to the surrounding scenery; and
the tall trees, with their leafless branches, resembled
so many Spectres, with their gaunt arms extended to
clutch the unwary traveller at every step.

The cloudless sky was studded with millions of
brilliant luminaries that seemed to be shining with more
than ordinary lustre, as a figure, closely enveloped in
a mantle, glided into a lonely street. Had he been a
lover of nature, the Silent beauty of the heavens must
have attracted his observation; but he was seemingly too
much wrapped up in his thoughts to throw a single glance
towards the gem-like orbs that glowed so beautifully in
the overhanging firmament. A piercing wind Swept through
the street, moaning and sighing, as if it felt the pain
that it inflicted. Doors and shutters were closed against

the common enemy, and the streets were forsaken, except

204

by a fearless or necessitous few, who glided along like
grim ghosts of the night. Aught, save love or murder,
would hardly venture forth on this bleak night, it would
seem; and yet pleasure sends forth her thousands, and
necessity her millions, to brave all the dangers and
troubles of this boisterous world.

The place to which our wanderer directed his foot-
steps, was a lonely back building, in the heart of the
city of ------ , but SO concealed by the surrounding
houses, that it might as well have been in the Silent
bosom of the forest. He ascended a narrow flight of steps
that led from the outside of the edifice, with the famil-
iarity of an accustomed visitant, and soon emerged from
the gloom of the night, into the light and life of a
gaming-room--that gay altar of dissipation and temple of
pleasure, which too frequently makes those that laugh,
and that within its precincts, feel more desolate than
the house of mourning.

The countenances of the assembled group, bore the
gloomy and absorbing earnestness of men whose hopes are
thrown into a fearful hazard. Oh! that Aubrey had, ere
that fatal night, detached himself, at once and for ever,

from this haunt of dissipation and subsequent misery, and

205

stood forth a redeemed and unfettered being; his virtue
would have acquired new strength daily; and those faults
which soathed [Sic] his maturity, been then thrown back
among the rubbish of his youth.

But we know not what we do; we weave the garlands
of joy even at the precipice of death, and disport in the
sunbeam, unmindful of the storm that is lowering afar off,
and will soon be at hand.

Aubrey left that room a beggar; his last cent had
been staked and lost; he was irretrievably ruined. His
prospect over the bare wilderness of life was, indeed, a
desolate one, with not one bosom to gladden his path. All
that made the past delightful, was a curse, and an abyss
of misery. His heart was like the Sands of the desert,
parched and barren—-no living stream of hope or gladness
quickened it--it was a bleak and withered region, the fit
abode of never—ending gloom and comfortless despair.

In the meantime, deeper sorrow than ever fell upon
the unhappy being left to pine in solitude. There was a
weight on her Spirits, an abandonment in her heart, and a
chillness in her limbs. A calm, such as comes over a

wound that mortifies, had settled down upon her mind.

206

Memory tuned her harp of a thousand chords, and
the joyous days, lost to her forever, came crowding thick
and fast upon her brain; as unsullied nature, a light un-
broken spirit, child—like thoughts, and merry gladness,
in all their freshness, had departed. Who could restore
them! The sunshine of existence was gone—-the brightness
of hOpe extinct. Life was now before her unveiled; the
beautiful, the bright romance was at an end, and She had
waked to grieve awhile--to mourn-—to struggle—-and to die!

How strong is that desire of the thing called
happiness, implanted in our hearts; and yet it exists not;
its promises dazzle our eyes, but its reality is unknown:
there may be joy and p1easure-—happiness never. If we
look back to each moment we have experienced happiness,
how has it ever been mingled with fever and with fears.
It is the mirage which leads us over the desert of life,
ever fated to end in disappointment. Or, like the clear
and azure waters, that in the east, seem to flow before
the weary and parched traveller, yet a little further,
and on he urges his weary way; but in vain--the fair
stream is a delusion!

The dews fell heavily, as with hasty and rapid

strides that lost one left the city, and pursued his path

207

homewards; the red stars were still visible in the
heavens, and the dangerous damps clung to him as he
wandered onward. Silence was on that crowded city, and
deep sleep, for it was long after midnight; the latest
lingerers had disappeared from the streets, and the lights
from the long line of windows in the dwellings of the
rich. Even the voice of wrangling and debauch was stilled
in its own haunts--for men, the dissolute and wicked, were
gone to their repose.

It was not the frown from the brow of his lovely
wifetflun;he feared; to him that had always been unclouded,
and her lips had only breathed affection. She was one of
those gentle beings whose sweetness withers not with the
hour or the season, but endures through all vicissitudes.
It was the recollection of that fervent and forbearing
love that now pressed like an incubus upon the conscience
of the gambler, and he bitterly reproached himself, as
he thought of the many little delicacies he had deprived
her of, and squandered in selfish dissipation. His
imagination wandered to the past and future, and every
picture he conjured up, added keenness to his pain.

In an agony of terror he reached his dwelling--

once so happy, now cheerless as the tomb. That pure,

 

 

 

 

 

 

208

angelic being, whose very existence seemed bound up in
his, why comes She not to meet him?

He entered. Silence hung o'er the hall--a death—
like and breathless gloom. His senses reeled, and his
brain whirled round and round with giddiness. He strode
hastily to his apartment; a number of persons were pass-
ing through it with appalled looks, as if assembled there
by some event of horror. ”What has happened." The tone
of his voice was almost a whisper, and yet SO solemn, so
thrilling, that it arrested the step of her to whom it
was addressed.

"Look, and see.‘ll He threw an anxious and confused
glance upon the marks of recent disorder and desolation.
In one corner the child lay sleeping on the floor, but not
with the soft quiet that is wont to lie on the lids of a
babe; it seemed to have wept itself to slumber, and sobS
were yet breaking heavily from its surcharged heart. Poor
child! is there no one left to take care of you? Alas!
the eyes that have hitherto watched over your Slumbers,
are closed forever. Sleep on, poor babe! you will waken
no more to the kiss of maternal love.

He stepped towards the bed; his wife, still young,

and bearing the traces of loveliness, lay there evidently

209

in the agonies of death. A dead new-born infant lay in
smiling beauty near her, and a few attendants stood,
awaiting in tearful Silence, the last Sigh. He stood
aghast. His lips moved fruitlessly for awhile, at last
he uttered, audibly: "I have killed you." His eye was
wild and staring, yet expressionless, as he left the room.
All the hOpes of his ill-spent life were crushed; the
only prop that had so long withheld him from his doom,

had been suddenly taken away.

What fearful sound is that, which, borne upon the
night-wind, breaks the surrounding stillness?

Come hither, and learn. That blood-stained floor,
and out—stretched human form, discover in the features of
the mangled corse, the once gay and thoughtless Fitzhenry.
But yesternight he sat, amid his proselytes, full of ex-
citement and hope; now his own hand has done the deed that
nothing human can remedy.

How little does a gambler reck of his work: or
of the horrors which result from a practice, of which many
think SO lightly. The aim of a gambler embraces the rob-
bery of a fellow-being, and the ultimate ruin of self.
However successful he may be, his end at last is crime.

How many still persist, by this baneful practice, in

210

destroying the good feelings of a mind, whose opening
promise was fair; many souls, who partake largely of
kindly and noble elements, who, if they could dissolve

the illusions of vice, might be rescued from this guilty
enthrallment. With a determined effort, let them throw
aside their partners in iniquity, and detach themselves,
at once and forever, from their pestiferous influence.

If they have talents it will call them into public favour;
if of too mercurial a temperament to remain inactive, let
their attention be drawn to the politics of the day, and
in the frequent discussions Opposing opinions call forth,
the higher tone of their minds and sentiments may be dis—
played, the precocity of genius brought into action, and
they may finally ameliorate the conditions of their fellow-
citizens, and instead of having the name of a gambler,
blazoned forth as a monument of everlasting infamy, their
names may be recorded, and handed down to posterity, as

among the benefactors of mankind.

"The Gambler's Fate" has the characteristics of
an eighteenth-century sugar-coated moral tract. The tone

is gloomy; the diction ornate, the characters wooden, the

 

1w:

 

 

 

211

point of view "female" and the subject, marriage to a
ne'er-do-well. The anecdote has a two-part structure:
the first deals with the heroine's maiden life, including
her solitary, lonely, and melancholy prOpenSities, and
the second, her married life.

The first part relates to the popular eighteenth
century cult of filial obedience. According to the basic
tenet of this creed, an unmarried lady has the social and
moral obligation to check on her fiancé's background,
especially concerning his companions and nocturnal habits.
To gain this end, any means is acceptable. One of the
best is to have a friend or relative Spy on the gambler—
fiancé and report his findings to the lady. In Kate's
case here, as an orphan She has no one to call upon;
nevertheless, in terms of the hard world of lady-book
writers, She deserves her punishment. She has committed
the unforgivable Sin of rushing headlong into a marriage
without preparing for it. Sentimental fiction writers
make much of this issue of whether a reformed rake makes
a good husband, and the answer in most cases is in the
negative. 1

The second and longer part starts out with a

reference to the male gambler. This strategy is

212

misleading, however, as is the title, for the story is

about a lady who dissolves in her own tears and dies in
childbirth. Fitzhenry exhibits a few human character-

istics but on the whole he functions as an abstraction.
He loses his individuality and becomes inseparable with
the institution of gambling. If one doubts Fitzhenry's
homiletic purpose in the tale, he will be convinced of

it in reading the tag ending.

Kate's literary progeny is found in two writing
traditions. As an abused wife she links with the type
in the sentimental plays of Steele, Cibber, and other
eighteenth—century authors. AS an abused wife in the
tradition of fiction her ancestor may be patient Griselda
popularized in Chaucer's exemplum; and as an abused gam—
bler's wife, She may have a fictional prototype in Henry
Fielding's novel Amelia (1751).

A few other ingredients in "The Gambler's Fate"
have a basis in the sentimental tradition as we have
established it in our study. First and foremost is the
figure of Fitzhenry's companion. Although he speaks only
a sentence to Fitzhenry, there is a strong hint that he
is a rOper for the proprietor of the gambling house

Fitzhenry frequents. His type forms a coil of gambler

213

tales, the chief of which is the greenhorn cluster. The
ancestor of this greenhorn Species traces back to the days
Of Elizabeth of England and the coney—catchers that hung
about the Churchyard of St. Paul's on the prowl for gulls
to fleece.

Another sentimental device in gambler fiction em-
phasized in "The Gamber's Fate" is the use of children.
This feature does not appear as often as one might suppose
in our period. In tale after tale we read of ragged,
hungry, and wild children but only in passing reference.
None of the tales that have come under my attention em-
phasize children in pathetic scenes to the same degree
as does Miss MacMichael's. Bret Harte does not rely on
this device to any extent either, although his disciples
Joaquin Miller, Leonard Kip, and others seem fond of it.

AS a final comment, "The Gambler's Fate" belongs
in the mainstream of American gambler fiction dating from
Dorval (1801) and Mattilda Thayer's The Gamester (1805).
The 1836 date affixed to MacMichael's story may as well
be 1810. In that early period, the same kinds of tech-
niques, characterization, and style was pOpular, including
Wordsworthian raptures which seem out of place in a story

with an 1836 date. Yet, the point perhaps Should not be

 

 

 

214

pushed, for the gambler story belongs to a species of
magazine fiction with a petrified formula lodged in a
form of publication that engaged in piracy and shameful
borrowings. What Showed up in Godey's of 1836 may have
been the same or slightly revised story in The American
See_before the turn of the century. Nevertheless, des-
pite its rigid format, the lady-book story adequately
serves as a standard of reference for gambler fiction
before and after "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (1870),
by Bret Harte, the Homer of American gambler-story

writers.

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