The Bawdy Cities

In 1790 the first federal census recorded a population for Tennessee of 35,790. In 1820 the total was 422,813. Kentucky had grown in thirty years from 73,000 to 564,000, Mississippi in twenty from 8850 to over 75,000 and Ohio to 581,434. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 had changed a trickle to a gigantic swell of migration into the Ohio and Mississippi valleys.

As wagon wheels rutted tracks into the wilderness, farmers tilled new soil and settlements grew up where immigrants, reacting to the sullen and savage influence of lonely, monotonous frontier life could ride in to drink, carouse, and gamble.

Court day was always important for more than court sessions. The "Day" often lasted several days. Many a backwoodsman arrived on a horse bred from a thoroughbred and wild stock. To these men, who spent most of their time on horseback, the half-breed was ideal-not so heavy as a work horse, capable of traversing great distances with the weight of a rider no handicap. Possessing fast horses, they began to gamble heavily on their mounts. People once calculated time from the day that Truxton ran against Greyhound at Hartsville, Tennessee, in the spring of 1805.

Truxton, a big bay of the best bloodlines in America, was said in all the South and the length of the Mississippi to be the fastest thing on four feet, till a smaller thoroughbred, Lazarus Cotton's Greyhound, beat him. Truxton's owner, Major John Verrel, was convinced that the defeat was due to Truxton's being out of condition. He wanted to get another race against Greyhound, but as he was cleaned out, he took his horse to Andrew Jackson and persuaded him to buy Truxton and put up a purse for a return match.

Jackson's own fortunes were at a low ebb and how he managed to find five thousand dollars to put on his horse is still a mystery. With Major Verrel's assistance he conditioned Truxton to win.

All talk turned on the forthcoming race. Word spread that Truxton was being worn out with the rigorous training he was getting. This was enough to make the big bay underdog in the betting, which was heavy and continued till the horses went to the starting line. Jackson himself bet $1500 in "wearing apparel." Some men risked an entire year's crop, others wagered the land under their houses.

The crowd, and it was a huge one, roared as the two gallant horses took off to the sound of the starting drum. It was a matchless spectacle and Truxton came through the mile heats like the champion he was, to win a halo of glory while his supporters whooped it up on barrels of free beer.

It was dusk before men had paid off their bets. Truxton's admirers are said to have won thousands in money, land, crops, clothing, and other items of value. Many fine ladies went home without the gloves they had wagered, and the road was lined with luckless men afoot because they had risked their horses on Greyhound and must walk from the middle of Tennessee back to Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, eastern Tennessee or wherever their homes might be.

The frontiersman with a racing half-breed frequently jaunted through the countryside with a feed wagon containing a wooden coop of fighting cocks. Stopping wherever a man with another fast horse was willing to risk money on his nag, he would race by day and at night battle his cocks against the local hardy breed for a purse.

The towns grew up, rough and uproarious. The men on horseback pursuing a dream across rivers, swamps and wilderness, brought the same wild energy into the settlements. Frontier loneliness drove them to the comfort of the jug and when they hit town, they headed for the local grog shops to drink in company and play brag and old sledge. In Pittsburgh they were joined by immigrants who preferred floating down the Ohio River to making the arduous journey over the Cumberland and Allegheny mountains and who waited there while a family "kentucky-boat" was knocked together by local shipbuilders. As the pioneers poured through, buying provisions, utensils, and ammunition for their boats or wagons, the inns flourished, and most of Pittsburgh's 4500 permanent inhabitants in the year 1800 were tavern keepers.

Frequently travelers had to sleep in the same room at the overcrowded inns, in the towns and on the frontier. When the bed was not big enough for all, the floor served. One Yankee found himself on a mattress on the floor of an inn in the Ohio Valley surrounded by.snoring Kentucky woodsmen.

The Kentuckians woke during the night and started to play cards by the light of a candle, using the Yankee's back as a table. One, when he was dealt an exceptionally high hand, snapped his cards down with excited vigor. The Yankee started to protest but was held down by the gambler.

"Stay still, consarn ye!" he yelled. "I've finally got a winning hand."

"Play it out then, damn ye!" shouted the Yankee. "I'm going halves with you."

Knoxville, at the junction of the French Broad and Holston rivers was the entrance to the West by land. At its grogshops transients and locals drank liquors distilled from fermented molasses and cane juice. The crafty and sober professional gamblers, just beginning to appear in numbers along the frontier, took them on at cards.

Tavern keepers shared the gains with the blacklegs. Wary travelers tried to judge the safety of an inn by looking at the landlord's ears. If they were nipped or entirely missing the traveler could be certain that the man had been in trouble back East.

When the Louisiana Purchase opened up trade and free markets along the Mississippi, river towns became headquarters for thieves, cutthroats, prostitutes, and professional gamblers who victimized flatboatmen, traders, and farmers. After a good killing the gamblers took passage on a flatboat and floated down-river to New Orleans for a spree.

The long hours of drifting on the river were conducive to gambling. Abe Lincoln, during his flatboat days, played penny-ante poker to while away the tedium. Whenever the boats tied up for a stopover, passengers and crew extended their activities to the river towns, where professional gamblers congregated in wooden shanties that served as barrooms, brothels, and gambling dens. If their victims protested at being gulled, the blacklegs did not hesitate to shoot and kill.

The men who freighted merchandise down the Ohio and the Mississippi were hardy customers, though, and bloody battles took place when one of their number was grossly swindled. If the crooked game was in one of the dens at the river's edge, the enraged boatmen tried to push it into the water. Failing that, they would often rip it apart, board by board, or set a torch to it.

Louisville, Memphis, Vicksburg, and Natchez became the most sinister of the river towns, with Natchez perhaps the wickedest of them all. It was divided in two-Natchez-on-the-Hill where the quality lived, and Natchez-under-the-Hill on a narrow strip of land between the bluff and the water, the home of outlaws, desperadoes, hardened prostitutes, and unprincipled gamblers. John Bradbury, horrified by what he saw there in 1810, said, "For the size of it there is not, perhaps in the world, a more profligate place."

Here straggling, ramshackle dens of infamy catered to the lusty American rivermen. Hundreds of vessels were always anchored or secured at the landing. Sleek pimps did not have to search long to find customers for the girls-white, Negro, Indian half-breedwho looked out on Silver Street in various states of dress and undress. Steerers for gamblers turned up prospects among the travelers and rivermen. Men were ambushed if they won. Losers who challenged the honesty of a game were knifed, shot, or gunbutted to pulpy oblivion and then tossed into the river. There was no such thing as murder in Natchez-under-the-Hill; eyewitnesses could be counted on to forget what they saw.

The elegant owners of the cotton plantations that stretched away from Natchez visited the town to indulge in high-scale dissipation. They drank like sots, fought duels, bet recklessly an horses, and joined the rich slave dealers, commission merchants, and young bloods of the town in spending their money and robustious vitality in the sinkholes of Natchez-under-the-Hill. The respectable gentry paid higher for their pleasures than the rivermen, but they got the best baggages imported from New Orleans bordellos (or "a lady recently arrived from Paris") and enjoyed card and dice games behind closed doors in an upstairs room.

As river traffic increased, so did the number of gambling spats and bagnios till there was room for no more on the strip. The professional gamblers, with loaded dice, marked cards, and sleightof-hand, frequently took the rivermen for all their cash. If there was anything left of their wages after the river-town stopovers, New Orleans generally got it.

The flatboats could not navigate upstream on the Mississippi, so they were demolished and sold for lumber in New Orleans. Captain and crew made their way on foot or horseback back up the Natchez Trail or the Wilderness Road, where bandits robbed and killed for cash along the way and crooked gamblers made the overland taverns their headquarters.

Reformers never ceased trying to retire vice legally. Their efforts were undermined by wary legislatures unwilling to antagonize their gambling constituents. In 1804 Kentucky placed an her statute books "An act effectually to surpress the practice of gaming," but Henry Clay was among the legislatures who, to the dismay of the reformers, saw to it by skillful wording that the law could curb the gambling habits of Kentuckians only slightly. The so-called anti-gambling act permitted short card games and dice but officially frowned on banking games.

Banking games, properly so-called, are those in which one player is continually opposed to all the others. In round games, each player is for himself, but no player is selected for the common enemy. In partnership games, the sides are equally divided, and any advantage in the deal or lead passes alternately from one to the other. In other games, the single player that may be opposed to two or three others usually takes the responsibility upon himself, and for one deal only, so that any advantage he may have is temporary. In banking games, on the contrary, the opposition is continual.... [The banker] must have some permanent advantage, and if no such advantage or "percentage" is inherent in the principles of the game, any person playing against such a banker is probably being cheated.

A writer to the New York Herald who called himself Amicus expressed hostility in 1809 to "the ruinous pursuit of the idle and the vicious." This attitude found no counterpart in the West where there was little antagonism toward those games that every respectable citizen with any sporting blood in his veins played. Even at such haunts of refinement as the mineral springs of Kentucky, where summer after summer, invalids, wealthy Northerners, and rich Southern planters with their unmarried daughters and sporty sons gathered, suave gamblers were among the guests. During the day the cotton planter was engaged in buying horses and marrying off his sons and daughters, the Northerner took the waters, and the gambler slept. At night while the young folks socialized, the wealthy Northerners and Southerners serenely confident of their card skill, sat down with the wellrested, wide-awake gambler. The atmosphere was thick with cigar smoke as they gambled late into the night, for many nights in a row.

In 1807 Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, was directed by Congress to prepare an over-all plan for improvement of internal commerce. Gallatin's report, presented April 6, 1808, considered the establishment of highways, the destruction of the river checks and obstructions, and the building of canals. A year later Peter Buell Porter, representing the people of the Niagara frontier of western New York, made an ardent appeal for the improvement of inland waterways. His reasons: Western lands were so fertile that farmers worked only half time and spent their many free hours in gambling and other unproductive pursuits. They felt it useless to work longer to produce more since transporting their goods to the East by wagon cost too much. Canals would lower transportation costs, it would be worth while to send their surplus to market, and farmers would spend more time in honest labor and forsake gambling.

Ministers of all denominations up and down the Ohio and Mississippi valleys thundered from the pulpit and revival tent that the Lord would soon settle accounts with gamblers and the sinful river towns. At 2:15 a.m. on December 16, 1811, it seemed that the preachers were right. The earth trembled and houses were knocked off their foundations all through the valley. Honest men shivered, but the blacklegs showed a deplorable lack of interest in divine displeasure and the Lord's display of anger. One God-fearing gent dashed into a Louisville gambling hell and shouted, "Gentlemen! How can you be engaged in this way when the world is so near its end?" The gamblers reluctantly looked up and one of them softly commented, "What a pity that so beautiful a world should be destroyed!"