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Abstract
From the founding of the Jamestown colony to the financing of the American Revolution, lotteries played an important role in the economic life of the colonies. Private citizens and public officials held lotteries in the British North American colonies and offered prizes of money, land, slaves, animals, and a variety of other goods to those colonists willing to purchase a ticket. Lotteries had been used in England since the sixteenth century, and colonists saw lotteries as a part of British life and brought lotteries with them as a proven means of raising revenue for public and private projects. Lotteries played a pivotal role in the development of colonial America, subsidizing the construction of churches and schools, financing internal improvements, and providing land owners and merchants with an effective means of disposing of possessions. And at least initially, the Crown and colonial governments granted colonists free reign to establish public and private lotteries.
The establishment and frequency of lotteries in colonial America indicates three distinct trends that occurred in western culture. Lotteries served as a form of “voluntary taxation” that proved invaluable to both communities and private individuals in colonial America who needed to raise money, and was usually approved by colonial legislatures who opposed enacting new taxes to pay for such endeavors. Secondly, the eighteenth-century consumer revolution transformed both the purchasing power of consumers and how buyers viewed the goods they purchased (or in the case of lotteries, won). By advertising certain goods, or presenting their advertisements in a certain way, managers hoped to persuade consumers to purchase a lottery ticket in the hopes of obtaining what had been presented to them as valuable prizes. And finally, this consumer mentality inherent in the holding of colonial lotteries had a foundation, at least in part, in an older western tradition of combining the will of the Christian God with the human ability to control one's own economic fate via one's actions—symbolized in the role of fortune (and the symbolic Fortuna with her wheel) in lotteries.
