Lotteries and Overlapping Providences in Early America

ABSTRACT What kind of world did early American men and women believe they were living in? Did God choose lottery winners or did intellectual, economic, and scientific insights engender more reasonable, skeptical, or secular formulations? Lotteries were a common and uncontroversial presence in early American economic and civic life, funding the construction of everything from bridges to churches. George Washington liked giving lottery tickets as gifts. Denmark Vesey purchased his freedom by winning a lottery. Although scholars have used the lottery and other forms of gambling to make important claims about class and culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lotteries hold rich, untapped insights for American religious history. By offering a specific causal experience to explain, lotteries prompted answers from their participants, known as “adventurers,” about why things happened. Relying on firsthand accounts of lottery winners, correspondence among the managers who oversaw lotteries, promotional schemes designed to entice participation, and newspaper coverage, this article demonstrates providence's ongoing centrality to causality in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America. Far from jettisoning an animated, meaningful universe with the aid of reason or in the face of debilitating doubt, lottery adventurers employed both longstanding and novel versions of providence to explain how the world worked and how God worked in the world.