Elite Virginians on Gambling
The growing appeal of cockfights reflected changes in elite attitudes and pioneer conditions--- during the mid-eighteenth century.
Philip Vickers Fithian, a plantation tutor during the early 1770s, recorded the prevalence of betting among the elite and attested Virginians' proficiency at the practice.
His charges, sons of a prominent planter, all showed great interest in betting sports, demonstrating an aptitude for pastimes in which they would naturally participate as mature members of the elite.
A devout Presbyterian from the North, Fithian was startled to find that even the local person joined the play.
The minister's participation suggested the cultural identification of the Anglican establishment with the planter elite.
Gentry and church dominated Virginia society together. The secular seat of their authority resided at the country courthouse, which served as community center and as backdrop for local cockfights.
In the later eighteenth century, crowds gathered round the pits to witness the matches.
Now secure at their locos of power, 'genteel people... promiscuously mingled' not only with 'vulgar and debased' whites, as in England, but with black slaves as well.
Paradoxically, heightened appreciation for such a bloody diversion as cockfighting implied greater refinement to the colonists because it likened them to Englishmen.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, planters in the Old Dominion made conscious attempts to imitate the cultural forms of their English counterparts, including patterns of genteel gaming.
The informal horse sprints of the seventeenth century gradually gave way by the mid-eighteenth century to subscription meets at circular race tracks.
Members of the gentry began to import English racing stock and to keep horses exclusively for the turf.
Moreover, planters' sons more customarily visited London in order to 'complete their education in polite society'.
In that metropolis, the youths of Virginia learned their intricacies of gambling as only savvy sharpers and titled gentlemen could teach them.
Such an education heightened in the colony the popularity of household and tavern games like cards and dice, the most fashionable diversions among London nobility.
Great planters, who had long preferred outdoor pastimes gambled increasingly at table games after mid-century.
Colonists in eighteenth-century South Carolina and New York looked similarly to the example of English play.
Prior to 1750, Carolinians had also raced horses along open stretches of road. Afterwards, they erected round tracks, gave them English names like York Course and New Market, and established racing seasons.
In addition, as in Britain, cockfights often accompanied these race meets, offering that dose of sporting brutality that characterized not frontier conditions but rather civilized society in the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth century.
Owing most likely to tolerant attitudes inherited from the first Dutch settlers, New York City had permitted horse racing since the mid-seventeenth century, when the sport earned the governor's approval 'not so much for the diversity of youth alone', as for 'bettering the breed of horses'.
By the mid-eighteenth century, New York, like low-country Virginia, and South Carolina, had developed a schedule of organized racing.
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