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Early American Lotteries

The florida lottery craze that swept England in Georgian times had counterpart in the American colonies. As early as 1665 the Dutch held a lottery for the poor in New Amsterdam. There were a half dozen lotteries operating in each of the 13 colonies most of the time preceding the American Revolution, and it was all very respectable. Benjamin Franklin and other prominent citizens sponsored a florida lottery to raise funds to buy a battery of cannon for the defense of Philadelphia. In 1762 John Hancock helped managed a lottery to raise money to rebuilt Boston’s Faneuil Hall after it had been damaged by fire; in 1768 George Washington managed a lottery for the purpose of building road over the Cumberland Mountains. These, like the early English lotteries, were a form of voluntary taxation.
One contemporary account says that in 1672 there was “a lottery wheel in every city and town large enough to boast a court house
and a jail.”

The Continental Congress in 1776 voted a lottery to raise $10 million to finance the Revolution. There were to be 1 million tickets selling at prices from $10 to $40 with prizes ranging from $20 to $50,000, all prizes over $50 to be paid in government notes redeemable after five years. The scheme was abandoned when it was realized that the population was less than 4 million and most people couldn’t afford the minimum $10, let alone $40. The wealthier ones who could were mostly Tories who had no desire to aid the rebellion.
This abortive Continental Congress lottery and a congressional act of 1823 permitting a group of professional operators to run a florida lottery whose proceeds were to be used to beautify the city of Washington D.C., were the only lotteries ever authorized by the U.S. Congress. One reason may be that the 1823 Grand National Lottery, as its promoters called it, sold thousands of tickets, held the drawing, announced the names of the winners—and never paid off. The promoters vanished and were never apprehended. The top prizewinner of $100,000 sued the city of Washington for that amount in the United States Supreme Court and was the only winner to collect when the Court ruled inhis
favor.

The many other legal lotteries which were advertised as “government-sponsored” were not national but were authorized by state legislatures for a variety of worthy causes. The Virginia Legislature granted thomas Jefferson permission to run a lottery in 1826—he was then 83 Is old, land poor and in debt—so that he could by this means dispose of some of his property, including Monticello. Tickets had already been
printed at the time he died, but his heirs abandoned the scheme. Wean 1765 and 1806 Massachusetts authorized four lotteries to build dormitories and supply equipment for Harvard; many other colleges in days—Dartmouth, Yale, Columbia, William and Mary, Union, Brown—profited from lotteries. Money for many church building funds was also raised through lotteries.
By 1800 that early form of the Numbers game, insurance betting, was well established in this country. In 1831 a major drawing was held on an average of once a week in New York City alone; by 1832 the Boston Mercantile Journal published the results of a study of lotteries held the previous year which showed that 420 lotteries were operated in eight Atlantic seaboard states—and this is incomplete because some states were omitted. Even so, it means that there was more than one drawing for each clay of the year, and the total sum spent for lottery tickets for the year was calculated to be $66 million—five times the expense of running the Federal government. Since many of these lotteries were now privately owned, some were bound to be crooked—with the usual result that public opinion turned against them. By 1840, most of the states had passed legislation barring lotteries, but tickets were still shipped in from states that had not done so. The anti- lottery groups then began to lobby for Federal legislation, and, in 1890, Congress barred the distribution of lottery tickets through the mails. This was also ineffective because the lottery operators used other means of distribution.
The legal lottery drawings of this period were conducted with elaborate ceremony in large halls before crowds of spectators. The most popular form of drawing was to use cards numbered from 0 to 99. A frock-coated operator placed 100 cards in a glass cylindrical drum mounted on a center spindle. The drum was turned for several minutes to mix the cards; then a blindfolded boy reached into the drum and removed one card. The operator read its number aloud; it was verified by a public-appointed watchdog committee and then written on a blackboard.

This was repeated twice more, and the three drawn numbers were bined to form the winning numbers. If 25 was the first drawn num5 the second and 10 the third, the winning number would be
253510. Some lotteries used the present raffle-draw principle of placing ticket stubs bearing the buyer’s name and address into the drum.

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