Set It Off

ED: Our next story takes us to the Wild West of the 1830’s. It was a time of boom and bust and that was especially true in the Mississippi and Louisiana region, then known as the American Southwest.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: Pretty much anybody can get a loan. People are speculating on real estate. They’re speculating on cotton. They’re speculating on enslaved people. And it was the kind of time and the kind of place in the Southwest where people would come and they would say, you know what, anyone can win here.

ED: This is historian Joshua Rothman. He says that this rough and tumble atmosphere sparked an infamous 4th of July party.

In 1835, residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi gathered to celebrate the holiday with a barbecue, many toasts, and a reading of the Declaration of Independence. At some point, one of the attendees started to get a little rowdy, a professional gambler named Frank Cabler.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: He starts picking fights with people. He starts throwing dishes around.

ED: He’s just drunk I take it, right?

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: He’s pretty drunk. Probably most of the people there are drunk. It’s the 4th of July.

ED: Rothman says this members of the local militia, doctors, lawyers and other volunteers who protected the town, then forced Cabler to leave. But the gambler was itching for a fight. So that night, Cabler came back to Vicksburg looking for revenge.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: People in the militia, they hear he’s coming back to town. They say, you know what, it’s really time to show this guy we mean business. And they tar him and feather him. They basically kick him out of town.

And then they decide, you know what, we’re going to get all of these professional gamblers out of town. And they announce to professional gamblers, you have 24 hours to get out of town or we’re going to make you leave town.

ED: Wait a minute, all these professional gamblers? What’s Vicksburg like that it could have an entire class of men who are professional gamblers and what does that mean? What do they do?

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: So Vicksburg was a brand new town. It has emerged as, essentially, a shipping center for cotton from the surrounding countryside. And Vicksburg, like all river towns, any time a boat would come through, you’d have sailors, you’d have boatmen, you’d have travelers, and they often were looking to have a good time. And a good time in the 1830s meant you would find a place to drink, you’d find a lady of the evening, perhaps, If that was where your tastes ran, and you would find a gambling hall.

And professional gamblers were people who were, essentially, established businessmen. These were men who would run, usually a bar and they would have gambling tables in the bar. They were all called coffee houses.

ED: That’s weird.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: None of them really were coffee houses, they’re bars, but that was the term of art for gambling houses at the time. But the men who stayed in a town for any period of time, they considered themselves to be businessmen and this is their particular type of business.

ED: So Josh, what would motivate this militia to decide that all gamblers have to be driven out of Vicksburg? What were they hoping to gain by that?

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: So part of it is a kind of broader cultural sense that gambling as an activity ran entirely counter to the kinds of morals and the kinds of economic discipline that particularly middle class white people were attempting to cultivate. And gamblers were thought to be people who didn’t really work for a living. They were people who came in and, essentially, cheated and fleeced people in order to make their money.

And so the larger goal here is to try to make Vicksburg a place that people who live there could tell other people, this is a safe, respectable, moral place.

ED: All right, so all this kind of kindling burst into flames with the persecution of the professional gamblers. I’m guessing the professional gamblers didn’t just say, OK, hey, thanks a lot. We’re out of here.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: It seems pretty clear that some people leave town.

ED: The smart ones.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: I mean, there were people who saw what happened to Francis Cabler and they say, you know what, there are a lot of other places to gamble that I might not get tarred and feathered and they skipped town.

But after the 24 hour warning is over, the mob, and it’s a militia unit but, essentially, at this point, has become a mob, starts going through the streets of Vicksburg, going into people’s houses, and into gambling halls and essentially taking out whatever equipment they could find, pool tables, faro equipment.

Faro was a very popular card game at the time and had sort of boxes and roll outs that went along with it. Decks of cards, any kind of equipment that could be associated with gambling. And they literally start piling it in the street and they’re going to light it on fire.

So that’s part of the drill until they get to a particular coffee house that is run by a man named Truman North. So, essentially, Truman North decides he’s going to hole up in his gambling house and he’s got probably about half a dozen other men in there with them. And mobs being mobs, they break down the door and Truman North and the men inside open fire on them. And standing in the doorway, one of the first man who leads the charge here, he is shot and he is killed.

And so the mob, there really is no stopping them at that point. They grab everybody inside that they can. They drag them all outside and they, essentially, tie ropes around their necks, drag them to a makeshift gallows, and they string them up.

ED: Wow, so that’s quite the 24 hours in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: It was not a good place to be.

ED: So what do people outside of Vicksburg think about all this?

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: Well, the short answer is people outside of Vicksburg are outraged by this. You see all kinds of outpourings in the newspaper saying, look, no matter who these guys were, it’s un-American to simply take people out and string them up in the street without any trial.

ED: So it seems to me that they wanted their town to be known as a respectable place that wouldn’t tolerate such people in their midst, but what they ended up doing is becoming famous as a place where you could get lynched on the street.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly what happens. Instead, what you saw is, essentially, from about 1835, really up until the siege of Vicksburg during the Civil War, if people in the United States when they have an association in their minds with the city of Vicksburg, their memory of Vicksburg is, oh, that’s the place where they murdered the gamblers.

ED: So what does this episode tell us about America in the 1930s and ’40s and the role of gambling in the American mind?

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: So gambling is a thing in the 1830s and ’40s that is really rife with all kinds of contradictions because on the one hand, you have a widespread discourse, really throughout the country, of gambling as an activity that undermined discipline and frugality and all of those values that people in the middle class said were imperative for the United States to be a moral and economically successful country.

But on the other hand, you have an economy that is so grounded in the idea of that you can become something from nothing in the United States and it can happen really, really quickly. And the truth is, if you do it in the right kind of way and in the right kind of place, you don’t have to work that hard for it.

And so you have gambling sort of sits at this junction between the moralistic middle class values on the one hand and the realities of the way the economy works on the other and gamblers really are the personification of exactly that kind of tension.

ED: Joshua Rothman is a historian at the University of Alabama. He’s the author of Flush Times and Fever Dreams, A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson.