Gambling: Cultural Significance to Virginians
The cultural significance of racing to Virginians served as a measure of the impact of the pioneer experience in England's imperial West.
Justices of the peace took very seriously the cases brought before them and generally upheld eagers as binding contracts so long as they had been negotiated fairly and with due regard for the well-being of all society.
The integrity of both the gentry class and the gentry sport depended upon excluding the lower orders as well as upon eliminating outright cheating in a contest on which a great deal of money, or rather a great many pounds of tobacco, had been wagered.
Like Englishmen, Virginia planters wanted to regulate racing more closely as all aspects of recreation came to be commercialized, but the notable increase in court cases pertaining to bets on horses suggests another factor at work.
Such inordinate litigiousness was the hallmark of an insecure gentry forming on the imperial frontier.
While a self-assured aristocracy dominated gaming and society in England, a new and uncertain gentry had begun to prevail in Virginia.
This class regarded horse racing as its exclusive domain in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and regarded racing events as chances to stake individual honor.
Every match seemed to reiterate to planters the personal daring and enterprise--- the adventurousness--- that characterized their penetration of a new continent.
Moreover, the rituals of racing and gambling provided a common ground for fractious planters striving to bring order to the colony.
The sport underlined the shared values of individualism, competitiveness, and acquisitiveness, and at the same time provided a peaceful outlet for aggression between members of the elite.
Isolated on the outskirts of empire and distant from English conventions of status, the leading planters of Virginia remade horse racing to suit both their own uncertain image and conditions on the colonial frontier.
The notable absence of cockfighting may also be attributed to the frontier circumstances o seventeenth century Virginia. Widely popular in Restoration England, this particular kind of contest apparently became common in the southern colonies only after 1725.
One historian has reasoned that the early colonists did not share the Englishman's thirst for blood sports because as members of pioneer cultures, they regularly hunted instead.
In England, a few cockpits catered primarily to the upper orders of society, but most brought diverse types together.
The planters of Virginia, concerned for the moment with establishing status, may not have welcomed cockfights to the colony if the contests served to blur social distinctions.
They behaved more as adventurers striving to find older in the wilderness than as aristocrats secure in their social position.
