D. PAINE & CO., Managers, 42 Broad st.,
Successors to James Phalen & Co.
☞ J. Phalen & Co. guarantee the payment of all prizes sold under the management of their successors, D. Paine & Co. 2 Ap 12
The other reference to the gambling habits of the time is that of the Duke de La Rochefaucault Liancourt, who visited Charleston about 1798. He says: “The French planters and commanders of the privateers differ widely in their political opinions, but the love of gaming reconciles them all, and in the French gaming houses, which are very numerous in Charleston, aristocracy and sans culottes mix in friendly intercourse and indiscriminately surround the tables. It is asserted that they play very high.” From which it appears that the gambling table was then, as now, a great leveler.
Newspaper advertisements and a few traditions are all that exist to show the history of the gaming table from the times of La Rochefaucault to the present day. Rich planters still kept up and encouraged horse racing at the courses in Charleston and throughout the state, as the records of the Jockey club show, though, as intimated before, the improvement of horse-flesh rather than betting was the main object. Faro banks undoubtedly existed in Charleston, but they were not so numerous nor as well patronized as they are to-day. Undoubtedly there was considerable private gambling, chiefly poker, and there are stories of large and valuable plantations changing hands over a card table in a single night.
The most widespread and approved gambling was the lottery. We read that in the year 1800 Denmark Vesey, the notorious mulatto who planned, organized, and almost brought to a successful condition, the great negro insurrection of 1822, bought his freedom with $600 of a $1,500 prize won in the “East Bay (local) Lottery,” and the newspapers of Charleston about 1814 show three lottery advertisements, one to build a college in Beaufort, another to build a Presbyterian and another to build an Episcopal church in Charleston.
In 1844 the lottery craze was at its height, and as much as thirty thousand dollars was occasionally drawn at the weekly drawings of the South Carolina Lottery which were held at the City Hall. The City and State levied no license and it appears that the community favored the enterprise. J. S. Gregory & Co. of Baltimore, the great lottery managers, employed agents in this city, and their agents, Messrs. Gatewood & Cochran, were highly esteemed citizens, whose reputation and social standing were not in the least affected by their occupations.
The foregoing clipping from the Charleston Courier of April 13, 1844, will give some idea of the “schemes” and of the extent of the business.
The most notorious case of ante-bellum losing, at a sitting, took place at the old Charleston Club House. The parties were Motte A. Pringle of an old aristocratic family, and Mr. Bunch the British Consul at Charleston. Mr. Bunch, who was a good deal of a sharper, professed to know nothing of the game of “grab,” and Pringle offered to teach him the game. When they arose from the table Pringle owed Bunch $10,000. Pringle told his father (who was a prominent business man in the city) the next morning, and the old gentleman recognizing it as a debt of honor, gave him the money, and it was promptly paid over to Bunch the next day. At the Charleston Club, frequented by professional men and cotton merchants, there are two sets of poker players, with limits of $50 and $200 respectively. The proportion of poker playing members is not large and I have never heard of but one man squandering all his means (almost $30,000) there. This was a present member of the Charleston bar, and it took him almost ten years to do it. The other club is the Queen City Club, which is more of a poker club than anything else and where men occasionally lose and win as much as $2,000 in a night. No professional is allowed there, but it is the favorite resort of the non-professional poker player of the city.
The Otranto Club (chiefly lawyers) owns a beautiful villa about sixteen miles from the city, where they have six or eight meetings a year, and I understand play a pretty stiff game of poker. Hunting and good eating are, however, the main delight at Otranto.