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Gambling Risks
In a society attuned to the risk taking, gamblers were vulnerable because they minimized risks to themselves in games designed to turn around pure chance.
Reformers, however, generally attacked the profession from another perspective.
Antebellum Americans tended to pace the sharper at the bottom of the class of 'idlers'--- lackeys, servants, lazy sons of the rich, mere men of fashion, 'lottery people', and a few gentlemen who occupy themselves with breeding horses--- that compared so unfavorably with the 'industrious producers' who comprised the common man in contemporary belief.
Because he created nothing of value and got by on trickery rather than on honest labor, the gambler stood outside respectable society in settled regions.
Moralists likened his trade to thievery. Betting amounted to little more than an attempt to by one person to deprive another another of his property or possessions , against his consent, and without the return of an equivalent.
However, it clearly led to even greater crimes.
The nation's willingness to perceive sharpers as out-and-out criminals meant that gamblers were frequently identified as blacklegs, especially in southwestern territories where they apparently congregated and operated freely.
Foreign investors to the Mississippi Valley learned from their American hosts that although these outlaws were labeled gamblers,, as such was their ostensible profession, they were ready for any crime which might offer an advantage to them.
There seemed to be simply no legitimate place for the sharper in American civilization.
In a country filled with people of chance, however, there also seemed to be no effective barrier to separate the gambler from respectable society.
While most citizens probably agreed that gamblers were distasteful, the profession nonetheless took shape and flourished in the early nineteenth century.
The prosperity of a sizable class of sharpers suggests that to many people the arguments against gaming remained largely unpersuasive.
Americans were caught up in the risks and rewards of free enterprise and westward expansion during the antebellum period, and gaming often seemed a natural extension of daily economic life.
These observers doubtless exaggerated the trait, perhaps in order to document a common European stereotype of American vulgarity on the frontier, but their perceptions clearly contained a kernel of truth.
Gambling and gamblers thrived, despite rhetorical disapproval, in an atmosphere congenial to wide-open, commercial betting.
Foreigners explained Americans' fondness for gaming in terms of the overall cultural climate They contended that the dynamics of capitalism and democracy in the new republic generated a restlessness and an infatuation with risk that heightened the urge to wager.
The life of an average American, passed like a game of chance., and every endeavor came to be structured around risk taking.
The national trait appeared most clearly in the country's commerce, which can be likened to a 'vast lottery', and in the westering process; each adventure was undertaken not only for the sake of profit it holds out to them, but for the love of the constant excitement occasioned by that pursuit.