As he told it, twenty-six-year-old Thomas Brown “went into no spasms” upon learning that his ticket, number 3333, had won a $15,000 prize in the 1811 Potomac and Shenandoah Navigation Lottery. Instead, Brown wrote, “[I] went on with the business in which I was engaged, with the simple remark that I had not relied on the ticket with four threes.” As word of Brown's improbable win spread through Alexandria, Virginia, that day, his family's mercantile shop became crowded with people eager to congratulate him. If they were hoping to see an elated man overwhelmed with gratitude for a much-improved financial situation, Brown's well-wishing neighbors were entirely disappointed. “All were astonished that I was calmly attending to my duties,” he recalled, clearly proud of this feat of self-composure. Although he “was not insensible to its importance to me in a pecuniary point of view in enabling me to make my young and growing family more comfortable—and in doing more good in society,” Brown continued, “I never for a moment supposed that it could enhance my worth or merits as a man, or add to my importance.” As such, he saw no reason to accord special significance to the experience. Winning the lottery, for Brown, was but one “episode or digression” of his life.Footnote ¹

Brown did not apply this insouciant rationality equally. Earlier in the same autobiographical account, written in the 1860s, he described almost drowning as a boy twice in less than two months. On the first occasion, he was sailing in a small boat with a friend and ended up far too close to an enormous swell caused by a large ship. With just enough wind to avoid a certain wreck, the boys were spared. This, for Brown, was a “miracle.” A short time later, while walking around a wharf, he accidentally fell in the water just as another large ship was docking. “I recollect the circumstances distinctly. I remember the rushing sound of the water in my ears, as the tide impelled me on,” Brown wrote. Eventually, he swam to safety, though he “never was much of a swimmer.” Typically, he noted, a ship that size would have created an inescapable downward suction in a situation like his. The sailors who observed his escape agreed and attributed his success to the unusually strong outward tide, which Brown recalled impelling him on at the time. Had the inquisitive neighbors who filled Brown's shop on hearing of his lottery win been present for these events, they would have been given a more conclusive explanation for why and how they came to be. “This was the second time in a month or so,” Brown reasoned, that “a protecting Providence” had spared him a “watery grave.”Footnote ²

God saved Thomas Brown's life but did not help him win the lottery. Much more than a causal oversight, Brown's selective application of divine providence is wrapped up in the history of early American lotteries. There is also more to say about the religious significance of that “ticket with the four threes.”

Lotteries played a crucial role in early American economic and civic life. Before the development of banking and brokerage industries in the early nineteenth century, lotteries were a common and sensible way to raise revenue for an array of public works. These included everything from military fortifications, wharfs, and bridges to poor houses and churches.Footnote ³ On average, American colonies and, later, states held six lotteries per year between 1721 and 1783, just under four hundred in total.Footnote ⁴ Colonial legislatures found lotteries particularly attractive as an alternative to compulsory taxes. Instead, officials could scrutinize proposals to hold lotteries and approve them on a case-by-case basis. This made the lottery a convenient form of “voluntary taxation” to support a colony's general welfare.Footnote ⁵ Cities, schools, churches, and charitable organizations benefitted from lotteries, all to undergird the public good.

This version of the lottery—public, state-sponsored gambling to support local government—was first implemented in the Netherlands and Italy in the fifteenth century. Grounded in biblical and classical uses of the “lot” (a disk, bean, or pebble) as a fair and equitable means of solving disputes, awarding political positions, or aiding the poor, lotteries expanded across Europe and into England by the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶ Elizabeth I implemented England's first (ultimately unsuccessful) lottery in 1567 to offset the costs of harbors and other public works. By the seventeenth century, lotteries were a well-established and largely uncontroversial way to raise revenue for public and private causes. The Virginia Company received royal approval in 1612 to host lotteries across England to benefit the fledgling Jamestown colony. These were so crucial to the colony's success that John Smith, early Jamestown's most infamous leader, referred to lotteries as “the reall and substantial food” fueling Jamestown's survival.Footnote ⁷

From the fifteenth century onward, lotteries sought a broad and diverse group of participants, known as “adventurers,” including women and men of varying status. This was primarily a practical effort to sell tickets and enhance the likelihood of a lottery's success. Nevertheless, the impulse to reach a broad audience made lotteries a distinct form of gambling. Lotteries were purposefully crafted to be a widely accessible, public event in which almost anyone could participate and possibly experience the thrill of winning. Prizes, which ranged from cash, books, and furniture to silverware and fabric were carefully selected to appeal to, as a 1761 lottery advertisement put it, “the various tastes of the adventurers in this undertaking . . . especially the ladies.”Footnote ⁸

Scholars have long debated the social, political, and gendered implications of games of chance in early America and elsewhere. Though they disagree about whether these games reinforced or offered spaces to challenge prevailing hierarchies, they agree that lotteries differed from other forms of gambling.Footnote ⁹ Most eighteenth-century games of chance—cards, billiards, and horse-racing, for example—limited participation based on class, sex, or race. Elite men and women gambled in their homes or while visiting friends and imposed strict regulations on horse racing. Historian Linda Sturtz makes a convincing case that lotteries were less “contentious or personal” than domestic games of chance, in which women competed directly against their husbands and other men. Lotteries, Sturtz argues, were “the most impersonal type of female gambling” in early America.Footnote ¹⁰ The same could be said for nonelite men, such as the apprentices who “belonged” to a Connecticut papermaker but nevertheless won $1,000 in a 1790 lottery.Footnote ¹¹

Despite the rhetoric of civic duty and public good, adventurers entered lotteries on their own terms with their own hopes. The painstaking efforts organizers took to ensure a fair draw only enhanced the exhilarating sense that anyone could, and did, win. Grounded in the structure and intent of early modern European lotteries, early American lotteries offered adventurers a singular experience and the very real possibility of acquiring something of value, perhaps even incalculable value. In 1799, for example, an enslaved man in Charleston, South Carolina, won $1,500 in the East Bay Street Lottery, purchased his freedom, and changed his name to Denmark Vesey.Footnote ¹²

Historical treatments of lotteries have tended to place them in the context of a wider “taming” or “secularization” of chance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote ¹³ Put simply, scholars have emphasized how the rise of new scientific and philosophical insights associated with the Enlightenment slowly eroded chance by offering rational causal explanations for everything from the weather to disease and death. Gambling, more generally, has been presented as a “negative analogue” to the patterns of work and productivity created and condoned by nineteenth-century capitalism.Footnote ¹⁴

While lotteries eventually became the target of reform-minded attacks on gambling after 1815, they were largely uncontroversial and dissociated from the deleterious contexts and consequences of other games of chance throughout the eighteenth century. In fact, lotteries replicated and were key in furthering the eighteenth century's increasingly consumer-oriented economy. Flush with goods, lotteries sought to attract participants with alluring prizes and the prospect of risking money for potential gain.

Examining how lotteries were run, why participants purchased tickets, and how they made sense of the results opens new perspectives on early American religious life. Whether motivated by economic gain, civic duty, indulgent consumption, or the excitement of an unlikely win, lotteries gave every adventurer a specific causal experience with which to reckon. Why did winners win and losers lose? When adventurers answered this question, they laid bare fundamental assumptions about how and why things happened and the extent to which they believed God intervened in their daily lives.

Drawing on adventurers’ firsthand accounts, the records and correspondence of managers who organized and implemented lotteries, newspaper coverage, and promotional schemes, this article uses the lottery to illuminate the history overlapping providences in early America. For adventurers such as Thomas Brown, the lottery's precisely engineered randomness seemed to nullify any religious significance to winning or losing. Other adventurers understood their lottery participation as a generous and carefully calculated economic risk that would contribute to the public good and could yield a profit. For them, the lottery's outcome, like other life events, was overseen by a steady but not particularized providence. Other adventurers could not imagine a world in which God did not control even the mundane workings of a lottery. For them, winning was a special providential gift, reminding them of God's abundant provision. Losing was a call to resign and submit oneself to God's sovereign wisdom. Both were equally instructive manifestations of the divine will. Despite notable differences in these explanatory frameworks, they were all held together by providence, which remained the central, flexible node of causality in early America across the late eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, order had reemerged to challenge wonder in shaping the way many Americans assumed God worked in the world. Far from disenchanting the cosmos, this renewed providential framework built on and enhanced earlier renderings of God's steady, overarching providential governance. A close look at how adventurers made sense of a lottery's outcome demonstrates how chance was neither tamed nor secularized in early America but mediated through both longstanding and novel understandings of God's providential care.

While they shared a belief with other European Christians that one aspect of God's providence governed the world in a general, ordered manner, English Protestants from the Reformation through the early eighteenth century expected to encounter providence primarily through wondrous, out-of-the-ordinary experiences and events. English Puritans played a key role in modifying John Calvin's doctrine of providence, which stressed God's sovereign control over all earthly affairs and humanity's inability to interpret the specific meaning of providential events. For Calvin, providence was mysterious and inscrutable. For Puritans, providence was a source of revelation through which God made his disposition, approval (mercies), and disapproval (judgments) known. Puritans and other English Protestants regularly interpreted and debated the meaning of a special act of providence revealed in their daily lives.Footnote ¹⁵ Historian Alexandra Walsham has detailed the breadth and depth of popular lore surrounding sudden deaths, horrific calamities, monster births, and a host of unusual “providences” through which God spoke across early modern England. God was believed to use these disorderly providential interventions, which Walsham describes as “spontaneous interruptions of the normal sequence,” to call sinners to repentance and admonish them to obedience and more zealous piety.Footnote ¹⁶ Although seventeenth-century English Puritans wrestled intensely with how to make specific decisions, such as whom to marry or whether or not to accept a job offer, they shared with other Protestants a framework in which extraordinary providences spoke unequivocally.Footnote ¹⁷

This far-reaching expectation that God's providence was revealed primarily through the unusual permeated seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British North America. God's providence acted overwhelmingly, as historian John Demos puts it, through “anything that departed from the normal, expected course of everyday affairs.”Footnote ¹⁸ In early New England, comets, hailstorms, apparitions, and bizarre events, such as an infant speaking, revealed God's judgment and impelled colonists to amend their lives.Footnote ¹⁹ The link between providence and the disorderly continued into the early eighteenth century, as colonists interpreted illnesses, native attacks, natural disasters, and other atypical occurrences as betokening God's providential intervention. Unforeseen providences drove colonists to repent and redouble their efforts at godly living and holy obedience.Footnote ²⁰ In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, God's providence was assumed to operate and, more importantly, speak primarily through the disruptive.

At the same time, eighteenth-century intellectual, scientific, and economic changes were reorienting how British Protestants understood God's providence. Though the pace of this shift was, as historian Barbara Donnagan puts it, “glacial rather than volcanic,” these far-reaching changes slowly eroded providence's connection to wondrous events.Footnote ²¹ While English Protestants throughout the seventeenth century had been interested in the natural causes through which God expressed his providential intentions, these secondary factors became increasingly important and of interest in the second half of the seventeenth century. As a result, God's providence subtly became more and more attached to steady secondary causes.Footnote ²² Providence's realignment to the orderly was also propelled by broad economic and social changes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that made everything from financial markets to the weather more traceable and less spontaneous.Footnote ²³ This shift did not diminish the centrality and vitality of providential reasoning; it merely moved God's providential voice from the wondrous to the orderly. Lotteries reflect both the rising importance of regularity in the eighteenth century and the assumption that God's providential care was more apt to speak through order than wonder.

A lottery's exhilaratingly arbitrary outcome was made possible by carefully managed and well-ordered procedures. Unlike contemporary winner-take-all lotteries in which the central prize grows larger and larger over time, early American lotteries were designed to raise a fixed sum for a particular purpose by selling a limited number of tickets. By the 1740s, a majority of American colonies required legislative approval to hold a lottery. Interested organizers would petition their assembly for permission to raise a specific amount of money for a designated purpose to promote local economic development. A 1773 New Jersey lottery sweetened its plea to raise £2,000 for a glass manufactory by giving £100 each to four charitable societies.Footnote ²⁴ These were “public” lotteries overseen by state-appointed managers. Violators who arranged unsanctioned private lotteries faced fines or jail time.Footnote ²⁵

The lottery's promotional and structural apparatus emphasized order and causal fairness. Like other adventurers who purchased lottery tickets, Thomas Brown would have had the opportunity to examine the Potomac and Shenandoah Lottery's “scheme” before buying a ticket. A distinct and largely formulaic genre, schemes included a description of the lottery's purpose, the amount of money it would raise, the number of tickets to be sold and where they could be purchased, the ratio of blank (losing) to winning tickets, and a list of prizes. The Potomac and Shenandoah lottery included only cash prizes, of which Brown's $15,000 win was the second largest overall (after two $25,000 prizes). Of the 20,000 tickets sold, 6,390 yielded a prize (roughly one in three). These odds, the scheme claimed, afforded “an equal prospect of gain to adventurers with any other which has been offered to the public.”Footnote ²⁶ The first line in a scheme written to build a wharf in Rhode Island introduced the lottery's directors who had, in typical fashion, bound themselves to a “faithful performance” of their duties. A standard feature of schemes— the inclusion of the managers’ names—was merely practical, as these men had also agreed to sell tickets. It also bolstered a lottery's propriety, reminding prospective adventurers that notable community leaders were at its helm. By laying bare the lottery's odds, prizes, and details, schemes reassured prospective adventurers of the system's mechanistic and causal fairness, cultivating a well-reasoned trust that, apart from the advantage gained by purchasing a larger number of tickets (itself wrapped up in power and inequality), everyone's chances of winning were equal. Thomas Brown left no indication that he read the Potomac and Shenandoah Lottery's scheme or was concerned with its odds, merits, or rationale. He simply asked his brother to purchase him a lottery ticket, trusting the system's inherent fairness and financial possibilities as a reasonable realm in which to risk.

Lottery schemes also enticed adventurers by detailing their chances of winning. A 1764 Rhode Island scheme offered a direct pitch based on probability: “This lottery is manifestly calculated for the advantage of the adventurer (there being less than two blanks to a prize).” It would also, of course, have a “great public benefit,” but the emphasis here was on the likelihood for return on an adventurer's charitable investment. A lottery for the construction of a Methodist preaching house in Philadelphia made no mention of Christian virtue or civic duty, emphasizing instead: “The scheme of this lottery is as favourable to adventurers as any lottery that has been offered to the publick, there being a number of valuable prizes, and less than two blanks to a prize.” A 1774 Rhode Island lottery to support a Baptist meeting house was similarly silent in its appeal to religious duty as a rationale for adventuring in the lottery. Instead, it reminded readers how “obvious” it was that “the above scheme is calculated more in favour of adventurers than many heretofore published.”Footnote ²⁷

Schemes reveal the reach and everyday appeal of probability among adventurers. Arising in concert with the mathematics of bookkeeping and shipping insurance in the seventeenth century, probability theory supported the rise and mitigated the uncertainties of mercantile exchange. As the intellectual historian Lorraine Daston puts it, probability theory offered a philosophical position located “between the poles of absolute certainty and total doubt.”Footnote ²⁸ Lottery organizers integrated probability into their schemes, advertising precisely what an adventurer's odds were of winning. Although formulated initially in abstract philosophical debates, probability became a tangible means by which consumers could determine whether or not to purchase a lottery ticket. The theory infused every lottery with a measure of rationality, turning adventurers into well-informed consumers rather than simply charitable donors or, especially, dupes. Lotteries afforded almost anyone the chance to take a calculated “risque” with money, playfully extending an experience typically reserved for merchants.Footnote ²⁹

If orderliness and odds were not enticing enough, schemes encouraged prospective adventurers to participate out of civic duty. The Potomac and Shenandoah Lottery's scheme noted that those interested in the area's commercial and agricultural development “have additional inducements to give their support, as the money to be raised by the lottery is for their immediate benefit.” Broadening its appeal, the scheme continued: “It is also hoped that the patriotic and public spirited” would also join the lottery, which would encourage economic developments beneficial to the entire country.Footnote ³⁰ Schemes offered adventurers a multifaceted set of reasons to feel good about their participation regardless of the outcome. Even if they did not win a large prize in the Potomac and Shenandoah lottery, every adventurer's ticket was itself a causal agent, playing a small role in building a canal where there had not been one. It was a good cause.

Schemes also fostered and appealed to self-interested consumption. Every lottery's success depended on the allure of its prizes. While some schemes included a simple list, others attempted to enhance a lottery's attractiveness by cultivating consumer desire or pandering to an audience's keen ability to recognize tasteful objects. A 1733 lottery in which participants could win a house, land, a building for a small business, money, and a fine desk promised: “And for the adventurers further satisfaction, the prizes may be seen three days before drawing and those who think they are over valued may receive their money advanced on the return of their ticket.”Footnote ³¹ A 1761 scheme published in Philadelphia was even more provocative in this regard, reading more like an advertisement for a merchant's goods than a call to civic duty. The organizer promised “a large and very valuable Collection of Books” of various types as well as “several sets of the genteelest Pictures now in Taste in England.”Footnote ³² This language of “genteelest” and “now in taste” reflect the lottery's role in promoting emulative consumption, a wider cultural pattern in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. By purchasing and making use of a shared collection of consumer goods, middling men and women, especially, achieved a measure of equality with their social betters.Footnote ³³ The lottery was uniquely promising in this regard, as it offered a means of circumventing slow social climbing through the immediate acquisition of money or expensive consumer goods. At the same time, should a striving adventurer feel a pang of guilt about this selfish acquisitiveness, the scheme's language of civic duty and public good offered a reasonable antidote.

Managing a lottery was no small task. In fall 1762, New Jersey's General Assembly approved a request from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) to raise up to £3,000 through a lottery. State officials appointed Robert Ogden, speaker of the Assembly, as one of the lottery's four managers. His papers reveal the complex web of responsibility and record-keeping involved in accepting this role. The lottery's scheme indicated that raising £3,000 meant selling and accounting for 13,333 tickets.Footnote ³⁴ Of course four managers could not do this single-handedly, so they enlisted the help of sympathetic associates near and far. Managers could turn to print shops, taverns, and other local businesses to sell tickets. The bulk of lottery sales, however, took place by soliciting friends or associates to sell and account for a subset of a manager's tickets. Those who agreed to sell tickets on a manager's behalf were known as “receivers.”Footnote ³⁵ Ogden, for example, recruited twenty-six men to sell anywhere from 20 to 230 tickets based on their assessment of how interested their friends and neighbors would be in purchasing them. Here, again, the lottery replicated the wider economic decision-making of the market. Hawking tickets among their friends and associates was also a form of collective public service for those with a stake in supporting the College. It aligned perfectly with the lottery's function as a means of raising funds for a community's greater good.

Benevolent purposes and honorable intentions, however, could not make a lottery legal where it was illegal, as Ogden soon learned. From the extant manuscripts, it appears he first wrote a letter to each potential receiver explaining his request and the lottery's contribution to the college's success. A letter to Ogden from Thomas Smith dated December 26, 1763, informed Ogden that Smith had “received yours of the 20th . . . and am heartily willing to do everything in my power to promote the interest of the New Jersey College.” There was only one minor inconvenience: “You know that we have a law in this province against lotteries.”Footnote ³⁶ Smith lived in Pennsylvania, where Quakers staunchly opposed lotteries and other forms of what they considered ungodly leisure. Throughout its early history, Pennsylvania's General Assembly attempted to curtail lotteries and punish those who participated in or organized them. Its first General Assembly passed a law against lotteries in 1682, only to have it nullified by the crown in 1693. After additional legislative efforts, which coupled lotteries with plays and other activities parliament saw no need to limit, failed in 1693, 1700, and 1705, Pennsylvania successfully banned all lotteries except those approved by the legislature or the British government in February 1762. The law stipulated a £500 fine for organizing a lottery and a £20 fine for advertising or selling tickets.Footnote ³⁷ This did not stop Thomas Smith from selling lottery tickets illegally to support Princeton. It did, however, attenuate his willingness to do so boldly. “What I do therefore must be in a private way among such persons as are friends of the institution,” he wrote, just before asking Ogden to send him one hundred tickets.Footnote ³⁸

As a manager, Ogden was responsible for overseeing a well-ordered process of selling and accounting for lottery tickets. A careful procedure convinced adventurers of a lottery's perfectly arbitrary, fair outcome. Ogden fielded numerous questions from his receivers and kept precise records of which ticket numbers were sent to each associate. To begin, every receiver would sign a brief contract indicating how many tickets he had taken and their numbers. William McDonald's account read: “Rec[eive]d of Robert Ogden forty College Lottery Tickets to Dispose of what I Sole will be answerable for & return those unsold if any be before the drawing of the Lottery from No 6201 to 6240 Inclusive also Recd for Col. John Hacket Sixty Tickets which I will Deliver him to be sold on the above found from No 6241 to 6300.”Footnote ³⁹ The promise to return unsold tickets before the drawing was a standard and important feature of the arrangement. First, unsold tickets had to be accounted for in the lottery's overall financial outcome. Second, the policy prevented sellers from cherry-picking winning ticket numbers after the lottery had been drawn and claiming them as their own. As one of the lottery's managers, Ogden had to keep track of each of the 3,976 tickets he distributed.Footnote ⁴⁰

Even minor errors required Ogden's attention and accounting. An associate named Jeremiah Halsey wrote Ogden in April 1764 asking for permission to resolve the loss of five tickets. Halsey had recruited a friend named John Longstreet to sell one hundred of the tickets he had agreed to sell for Ogden. When Longstreet accidentally lost five tickets in New York, he asked Halsey to write Ogden for permission to become an adventurer and “run the risque of the tickets himself, so that the college will suffer no loss.” In his letter to Ogden, Halsey listed the five ticket numbers and requested that Ogden stop any “villain that has got possession of them” from claiming them as prizewinners.Footnote ⁴¹ While adventurers awaited the excitement and promise of a lottery's drawing, managers and receivers relied on the exacting standards of mercantile exchange, record-keeping, and thoughtful decision-making about when and whether to “run the risque” to ensure a lottery's success.

This laborious process continued after a lottery drawing was completed. Managers had to collect money from both their own ticket sales and those of their receivers. They also had to pay off lottery winners. A seller named James Parker wrote manager Robert Ogden after the drawing, offering to send him $100 to help Ogden pay some of the smaller winning prize numbers before Parker could collect money from the 120 tickets he sold to “trusted” buyers without collecting payment at the time. This made for a cumbersome system wherein each seller had to collect any outstanding debt and, in some cases, pay off smaller prize amounts himself before arranging to send funds and the winning tickets he had paid off, which carried the value of the prize associated with the ticket, to the lottery manager. Each seller's account was then tabulated in the manager's general account book. This careful accounting ensured a lottery's reliability and profitability. It was an instrument cut from the cloth of merchant capitalism.

Lottery drawings relied on a similar collection of safeguards to ensure a fair outcome and assure adventurers that, while God's hand may have been involved in determining the outcome, human hands were not. Newspapers kept adventurers informed as to when and where a lottery would be drawn. These drawings were public events any interested observer or adventurer could monitor. On the day of the drawing, managers brought forth either two boxes or two “wheels”—spherical containers that could be spun. Both contained small, rolled-up slips of paper. One held ticket numbers. After a number was drawn from the first box or wheel and announced aloud, another slip of paper marked with either a specific prize (a winning ticket) or left blank (a losing ticket) would be drawn from the second box or wheel. After both sides were drawn and announced, the results were recorded in the lottery's account book.Footnote ⁴² Some or all of the managers listed in the lottery's scheme oversaw this entire process. After naming the “gentlemen” who would “superintend” a 1735 Pennsylvania lottery, its scheme added that three managers would attend each day of the drawing and appoint “proper persons” to keep exact accounts of every blank and prize-winning ticket. In addition, these records were made available for inspection by any adventurer.Footnote ⁴³ The boxes or wheels were locked and stored at the end of each day, sometimes with multiple locks with a different key for each manager. At the lottery's conclusion, managers arranged to print either a list of the “fortunate numbers” or a complete list of each ticket's outcome. In his role as a lottery manager, Robert Ogden created smaller versions of these “list of fortunate tickets” tailored to include only the winning numbers sold by the receivers he recruited to assist him.Footnote ⁴⁴ These lists were particularly important to adventurers who had purchased their tickets in another colony or state and could not be present for its drawing.

Dishonest managers could easily disrupt this well-ordered system, tainting what was designed to be a fair mechanism and affecting adventurers’ explanations of the result. An upset adventurer in Virginia named John Crockwell, who should have been awarded $300 in the 1802 Strasburg Church Lottery, did not resign himself to the mysterious workings of providence in response. He sued the lottery's managers. Crockwell won a jury trial in Augusta County. The managers then appealed this decision to Virginia's High Court of Chancery. According to Crockwell's deposition, the managers had partnered with the trustees of the church to purchase at least one hundred lottery tickets, none of which yielded a prize in the drawing's first days. On the last day of the drawing, when only around sixty tickets remained, the managers abruptly stopped pulling numbers and carried the lottery wheel containing the tickets out of public sight to an upstairs room. The crowd of onlookers quickly “expressed their astonishment and the said managers were then charged in their hearing and to their faces with an intention of committing a fraud.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Typically, a lottery's carefully produced and managed arbitrariness enhanced the experience of winning. This situation appeared to be an unfair corruption of the lottery's rational underpinnings.

According to the managers and the clerks who assisted them, the lottery was stopped only because it had not been fairly and properly conducted. As deponent William Booth explained, toward the end of the drawing, one of the managers mentioned “that they thought it advisable to have the wheel examined in order to rectify any mistake that might have happened in consequence of the little boys [who drew the tickets] sometimes taking out two tickets instead of one and frequently letting one fall.”Footnote ⁴⁶ To ensure fairness, he said, the wheel was then taken to a private room to be inspected. When the managers determined that errors had indeed been made and tickets were missing, they decided to redo the entire drawing a second time.

This meant nullifying the results of the first drawing, including Crockwell's $300 prize. The second time, it seems, the managers went even further or were more successful in executing their original plan. A newspaper account reported that the managers had “contrived together to insert a net work into the wheel, which isolated part of it” from the other tickets. They placed their own tickets into this smaller compartment and opened its door to match their numbers to a sizable prize. When someone who was not privy to the plan “accidentally” opened the doors of the wheel, the managers were caught and “immediately apprehended.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Although justice ultimately prevailed, it did so because of human error and accident. This account made no mention of the “protecting providence” that twice intervened to save Thomas Brown's life in explaining these developments. Here, human tinkering and dishonesty had soiled the possibility of God's providential involvement in Crockwell's victory.

Most often, a lottery's procedural steps were closely followed, creating a random outcome for adventurers to explain. Despite managers’ best efforts to maintain scrupulous accounts of every ticket's status before a drawing, however, conducting intercolonial and interstate lotteries through multiple ticket agents was invariably imperfect and, occasionally, fraught. The story of Josiah Smith, Jr.'s involvement in the Second Newcastle Lottery of 1772 illustrates the delicate inner workings of trust between lottery managers and those who sold tickets on their behalf. Smith's understanding of providence also illuminates the increasing link between orderliness and God's intervention in earthly affairs in the eighteenth century.

Smith, the son of an influential New Light minister in South Carolina, had been asked to sell tickets by the Reverend John Rodgers, pastor of Wall Street Presbyterian Church in New York City. Rodgers was not listed as a manager in the lottery's scheme but was, presumably, recruited to sell tickets by one of them. Rodgers then wrote Smith, inquiring whether he would be willing to sell a portion of Rodgers's tickets in South Carolina. The Second Newcastle Lottery sought to raise money for Presbyterian churches in the New York area, so the Reverend Rodgers was certainly interested in its success.

Josiah Smith believed God would protect him from being caught and punished for selling lottery tickets illegally in South Carolina. “Our Laws are excessive severe against Lotteries and which I did not know to be so till yesterday, when I had a perusal thereof,” Smith wrote Rodgers in January 1772. If caught and convicted, he would face a £1,000 fine and twelve months in prison.Footnote ⁴⁸ Had he been aware of the law before receiving Rodgers's request, Smith noted, he would not have agreed to it. Having made his decision, however, Smith reasoned that, because the lottery would promote “the Glory of our gracious God & Benefactor, I trust his good Providence will fully protect me therein.”Footnote ⁴⁹

This statement represents a more nuanced and specific understanding of providence than it may seem at first glance. Smith was not claiming that God had singled him out for protective care—whether on the basis of his merit or that of the lottery. Instead, he drew on an early eighteenth-century reformulation of providence inspired by the British Enlightenment. Convinced that God had revealed himself through a gloriously balanced cosmos held together by fixed principles, the natural philosophers and ministers who promoted this version of providence argued that, like other natural laws, providence was a universal and orderly force. As Mark Valeri explains, this providence ruled over economic and political matters “through universal principles of causation, rather than through peculiar interventions in worldly affairs.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In another letter to Rodgers describing William Tennent III's trip to South Carolina, for example, Smith described how “providence indeed did Appear to frown on him during the Course of his Passage” because the journey took longer than expected and was plagued by rough weather.Footnote ⁵¹ This was a providence whose frowns and smiles were revealed through traceable natural principles rather than wondrous events. Smith would almost undoubtedly have been introduced to this version of providence by his father, the Reverend Josiah Smith, who trained at Harvard and was immersed in the logic and language of the British Enlightenment. Benjamin Colman, a prominent Boston minister who played a singular role in promoting the centrality and glory of order, regularity, and balance in the cosmos, wrote the preface to the Reverend Smith's ordination sermon.Footnote ⁵² Like many other merchants, Josiah Smith, Jr., believed this same providential oversight extended to the operation of economic markets, which mirrored the cosmos's order, balance, and ability to convey and foster virtue.Footnote ⁵³ He trusted that providence would protect him from the legal consequences of selling tickets because the Second Newcastle Lottery was a divinely sanctioned economic instrument that would bring glory to God.

It also brought the lottery's top prize to Smith under suspicious circumstances, initiating a careful exchange centered not on apposite insights into the workings of providence but rather honesty in business. The dispute centered on a missing letter. In early September 1772, Smith wrote Rodgers that he “may be tempted to take upon me the Risque” of purchasing all the unsold tickets remaining in his possession after September 25. Smith promised to decide by then and told Rodgers in the same letter that, if he chose not to buy the remaining tickets, he would carefully set them aside, seal them up, and return them to Rodgers.Footnote ⁵⁴ This normative procedure ensured a lottery's transparency and fairness. On October 6, Smith wrote to inform Rodgers that his receivers in Beaufort, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, had not notified him which ticket numbers remained unsold by September 25. As a result, Smith could not have kept his promise to mail Rodgers a full accounting of his tickets by the originally promised date. Having now heard from his receivers, Smith resolved to take “the whole Remaining Numbers of Said Tickets as my Own.” He was now “at the Risque of 178 Tickets,” which he reasoned would be enough to offset loss and afford him “the pleasing thought that I have been somewhat useful in the benevolent design of benefitting a number of Fellow Christians.”Footnote ⁵⁵

For Smith, this risk was a sound business decision with meaningful religious import. He mused that, should a “kind providence” make his investment especially lucrative, he could donate the proceeds to his church. While, in a broad sense, this fusion of theology and business aligned perfectly with Smith's enlightened, refined sensibilities as a cosmopolitan merchant, he also held onto and here proclaimed the possibility of a special “kind providence” operating outside the fixed predictabilities of the market and the natural world.

Of all the letters to go missing, Smith would have preferred it not to be this one. Rodgers never received it, leaving him to assume that Smith would be sending him all the unsold tickets before the drawing commenced. As it turned out, one of the 178 tickets Smith had decided to purchase—without Rodgers's knowing—was number 4953, which won the lottery's $4,000 top prize. Soon after any lottery had been drawn, its managers arranged for a list of winning or “fortunate” numbers to be printed in newspapers. Ironically, and certainly without Smith's knowledge, the Second Newcastle Lottery's final day of drawing in New York was October 6, 1772, the date of Smith's missing letter to Rodgers. In late November, Smith read “a Paper from New York of 26 October,” informing him of his victory.Footnote ⁵⁶ He wrote Rodgers with measured delight at “so providential and unexpected a gift.” As he had indicated in the missing letter, Smith reiterated here his plan to donate the money to his church and offered Rodgers a full accounting of the additional proceeds he calculated were due him. He then waited for the Reverend Rodgers to respond.

“I have not been favoured with a Line from you since receiving the printed List of the Lottery,” Smith wrote Rodgers restlessly on February 13, 1773, almost three months later. It was not just that Smith hoped to receive his portion of the top prize. After being pestered by some of the winners who had purchased their tickets from him, Smith had paid off a number of small and large lottery prizes since November, leaving him more deeply indebted and still unpaid by the lottery's managers.Footnote ⁵⁷ While awaiting a response, Smith received a letter from the lottery's managers explaining that his October 6 letter had not made it to Rodgers. Thus, no one in New York knew that Smith had agreed to “risque” 178 tickets until after the drawing.

The managers were suspicious. Smith was resolute. Although he was “extreamly sorry” that his letter to Rodgers had gone missing, admitted that “its miscarriage” was “very unlucky,” and acknowledged that suspicions “might naturally arise” among the managers as a result, Smith calmly laid out the multifaceted evidence supporting his claim in a March 17 letter. First, his clerk would confirm under affidavit that the letter was composed and copied into Smith's letter book on October 6. The flow of letters surrounding the October 6 entry suggests that Smith was telling the truth. The alternative feat of letter book engineering required for Smith to manufacture this evidence is far less likely. Second, Smith had informed several people of his decision to purchase the unsold tickets. This included his minister, William Tennant III, who had attended Princeton and carried a notable family name, as well as a man named John Ray, Jr., whom Smith implied was known by the lottery's managers. Third, Smith mentioned a “Mr. Thomson,” who could certify that, when he delivered a letter from Rodgers to Smith with details on the lottery's outcome, Smith had confirmed his purchase of number 4953—presumably by providing Thomson the full range of the numbers on which he had risked. This evidence, Smith reasoned, should “convince every one concerned in said Lottery, that I had actually & I will add (with generous Designs) taken upon me so heavy a risque in the aforementioned.” He then reminded the managers of the additional debts he had incurred by paying off a variety of large and small lottery prizes.Footnote ⁵⁸ The evidence satisfied the lottery managers, who informed Smith to draw the balance due him for the Second Newcastle Lottery in late March.Footnote ⁵⁹

Josiah Smith inhabited a world of overlapping providences. He simultaneously proclaimed a God whose steady, nonpreferential providence would shelter him from legal trouble and one whose “kind providence” rewarded his carefully calculated economic risk. The first version of providence operated like a natural law, inviolably rewarding that which was good. The second retained and rearticulated the unpredictable blessings and curses, or “smiles and frowns,” as Smith might put it, of a mysteriously sovereign deity. He also left space for accidents, labeling his lost letter not as providential but “very unlucky.” All of these causal formulations were tightly interwoven with Smith's experiences of the market. Like other cosmopolitan merchants, Smith viewed economic exchange as a providentially arranged instrument through which God would improve people's lives. Beyond its material benefits, the market, like the cosmos, conveyed fixed principles such as harmony, balance, and beauty. At the same time, like the cosmos, the market was not safe. A storm or an unexpected freeze could imperil individuals, the crops they raised, or the goods they traded. Despite the most diligent calculations according to the rules of a system he believed and trusted in deeply, Smith knew that neither the market nor the natural world whose principles it emulated were entirely tame, predictable, or disenchanted. His varied renditions of providence reflected both the glorious steadiness and the ineffable uncertainties of the natural world and the market.

Other adventurers had less room for nuance, accident, or human agency when explaining a lottery's outcome. They believed God chose every winner and loser. Unlike the more flexible providences embraced by Josiah Smith, these adventurers retained and exclaimed sixteenth-century Calvinism's emphasis on the sovereign operation of God's mysterious providence. In this rendering of providence, contingencies and uncertainties, precisely because they were prone to stir doubt, offered believers the chance to reaffirm their faith in God's absolute power and goodness, irrespective of circumstance.Footnote ⁶⁰ A more theologically tidy causal perspective, this God had to control everything were he to control anything. Commenting on his participation in a 1745 Massachusetts lottery, the New England magistrate and lay preacher Josiah Cotton wrote: “This Year the Government Set up a publick Lottery at Boston The Tickets at 6L Old Tenour. I had One No. 100045 which drew Nothing, & Plymouth all Save One came off by the Loss. Proverbs 16:33.”Footnote ⁶¹ The Bible verse Cotton appended to this brief reflection on lotteries exemplifies the fixed, deterministic world he inhabited. It reads: “The lot is cast into the lap: but the whole disposition thereof is of the Lord.” Equating God's role in lotteries to that of the biblical practice of casting lots to determine the divine will, Cotton proclaimed a universe held together by a uniform providence, which guided and decided earthly affairs. Remarking that same year on the British military victory over the French at Louisburg, Cotton applied the same providential framework: “This therefore is the Lords Doings & Ought to be Marvellous in Our Eyes!” On a darker note, he concluded that “providence seems to frown” upon his son-in-law, whose ship had not yet returned from Jamaica and was rumored to have wrecked in Bermuda: “And God be praised if it be no worse.”Footnote ⁶² For Cotton, God was as involved in determining the outcome of lotteries as he was in ordaining souls for heaven or hell.

While Cotton's response to the lottery and other notable events of 1745 reflected an older formulation of God's sovereign providential oversight, he was simultaneously involved in a concerted effort to rid eighteenth-century New England of superstitious naivete regarding invisible forces, spirits, and witchcraft. In the early 1730s, Cotton became enmeshed in a legal dispute over whether or not he owned a haunted house. When a group of tenants complained that supernatural activity was afoot in a home Cotton had rented to them, he eventually took them to court on slander charges (and lost). He also composed a lengthy essay titled “Some Observations Concerning Witches, Spirits, &Apparitions, Collected from Divers Authors.” Cotton critiqued what he viewed as a misguided, widespread interest in ghosts and spirits fueled by human depravity and lurid, sensationalized popular books.Footnote ⁶³ Although his vision of providential oversight was more uniform than Josiah Smith's, Josiah Cotton inhabited a world replete with providential mercies and judgments in which one should be suspicious of human claims to understand and manipulate the supernatural.

Josiah Cotton's more rigid strand of providential thought remained meaningful not just among elites. Margaret Fleming of rural Dumfries, Virginia, spent most of 1791 reckoning with perilous financial and personal circumstances. She lost both a sister and a nephew within six months. Their deaths left her brother-in-law John with nine children to look after. Nevertheless, by July, when Margaret wrote her brother William, she could include at least one positive, unexpected development. After recounting the series of hardships she and her family had endured, Margaret explained, “we have the greatest reason to thank that kind all mighty God that hase taking care of us all our life.” Although she was “not wel[l] abeal to work,” God “provided bountifully for us independent of all human aid. it was in my poure [power] to sie a dutty done my sister and hir son.” Noting that her brother would likely be surprised by the turn of events, she continued “itt was in the state lottery,” where Margaret won one-sixth of the $25,000 prize. As a result, she could urge her brother that his “anxiety about our world[l]y affairs may be over than[k] God.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Like Josiah Cotton, Margaret Fleming assumed no space between a lottery's outcome and God's active providential involvement in her affairs. She stressed the absence of any “human aid” in the experience. Although she won while Cotton lost, the two shared a causal framework in which the lottery was one of many realms, like human health and the natural world, from which to receive and accept the unfolding allocations of a sovereign God.

Like the lives of adventurers and the world in which they lived, lotteries were both orderly and unpredictable. This tension lay at the heart of their appeal to participants. They offered a pious, entrepreneurial merchant such as Josiah Smith a well-structured outlet for sensible financial risk. Unlike a typical commodity or risk, however, the lottery guaranteed a certain kind of return on investment as it would support the public good whether or not Smith was a winner. For this reason, Smith merged and fluctuated between the language and practice of shrewd commerce and well-intentioned piety when writing about the lottery. Selling tickets and taking on his own lottery risks drew out Smith's causal framework. Like many cosmopolitan elites by the early eighteenth century, Smith believed that God's providential oversight was bound to and intertwined with the workings of economic exchange. Its wider operations and outcomes, he believed, were a God-given instrument designed for the greater good. For an elite public official such as Josiah Cotton or a struggling woman like Margaret Fleming, the lottery, like every other life circumstance, presented an opportunity to accept and trust God's absolute sovereignty.

And what about Thomas Brown, who thanked God for saving him from drowning but distanced that same intervening providence from his lottery win? While he seemed to deny any and all supernatural elements to his victory—“ [I] went on with the business in which I was engaged, with the simple remark that I had not relied on the ticket with four threes”—he had more to say about the “very singular circumstances” surrounding ticket number 3333. Although he claimed these details had been “much talked of with some exaggeration,” Brown promised only to “relate the whole story as truthfully as my memory will enable me.”Footnote ⁶⁵

The remarkable tale Brown spun belied the matter-of-fact, dismissive tone with which he introduced it. Around two years before his lottery win, while measuring fabric for a customer named Betsy Simpson, Brown discovered a fifty dollar note from the Bank of Alexandria tucked inside the chintz. After making inquiries to banks in Baltimore and Alexandria about the note for a year, Brown decided he was the rightful owner. “Going on the principle of luck and multiplication of chances,” he used the money to purchase one ticket in five different lotteries. To acquire one of these five, Brown wrote to his brother James, who sold lottery tickets in his duties as a merchant and postmaster of Shepherdstown, Virginia. Shortly before James opened Thomas's letter, a woman named Ora Moore entered his store, claiming she had had a dream the previous night that ticket number 3333 would win a large prize in the Potomac and Shenandoah lottery. James promptly cut the ticket out and placed it on the counter. Unfortunately for her and fortunately for Thomas Brown, Ora Moore had a change of heart. “I won't be such a fool as to give this pretty piece of gold for that bit of paper,” she announced, refusing to take the ticket even on store credit, concluding, “No, it's all a foolish dream,” as she exited.Footnote ⁶⁶ Turning to the mail, James found his brother's request for a lottery ticket and sent him number 3333 because it was likely to be lost, having now been cut out of the ticket book. As early American lotteries often took years to complete, Brown thought little of the ticket until the day he came across the newspaper account informing him of the outcome.

Despite his explanation that these details were merely “the facts as I subsequently had them from my brother and Mrs. Moore,” Brown knit together a story thick with providential iterations. Not the least of these was the fact that he married Betsy Simpson, the woman for whom he was cutting fabric when he found the fifty dollar note with which he purchased his winning lottery ticket. Combined with Ora Moore's dream about ticket number 3333, the narrative is replete with providential intervention in its details but not its rhetoric and interpretation. Brown described these events as fundamentally circumstantial: “Taking the whole chain of events together, it makes a very remarkable story. But not more so then [sic] may have happened in ordinary events a hundred times before.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Why would he include these tantalizing details if they were insignificant and “ordinary”? Thomas Brown dropped the language but not the presence of providence from his story. Why?

Although they played a crucial role in funding building projects and charitable causes across early America, lotteries became less and less respectable in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The rise of a commercial banking system and brokerage firms combined with more robust state-level tax structures to make lotteries far less necessary and practical than they were before 1800.Footnote ⁶⁸ These newer sources of revenue were also much more stable and efficient than lotteries. Adding to the lottery's declining status, reformers in the 1820s began targeting its economic and moral shortcomings. Like any other kind of gambling, they claimed, lotteries preyed on the poor and fostered a lack of self-control and industriousness. Backed by inside accounts composed by former gamblers, ticket vendors, and managers, reformers denounced the lottery, like alcohol, for its dissipation and wastefulness.Footnote ⁶⁹

By the time Thomas Brown sat down to write his autobiography in the 1860s, lotteries had become disassociated from God's providential oversight. In fact, the devil was quickly becoming the religious figure most involved in lotteries and other kinds of gambling.Footnote ⁷⁰ Brown had established himself as a successful business owner and respected politician, having been elected to the Virginia House of Delegates (1818–1820) and, later, to the Florida Legislature (1845) and as Governor of Florida (1849–1853).Footnote ⁷¹ Reflecting on his life, Brown thus interpreted God's providential intervention in his near-drowning as a “miracle,” while his lottery victory was surrounded by “singular circumstances.” Had he been asked to relay this story in 1811, Brown would likely have credited God's active intervention, like Josiah Cotton and Margaret Fleming, or his benevolent providence, like Josiah Smith. Instead, embarrassed by the immorality associated with gambling and lotteries as he wrote, Brown severed God's explicit providential intervention from his lottery win. At the same time, he could not help but litter the story with circumstantially supernatural dots, leaving it to the reader to connect them and spot God's providential presence.

In addition to their practical value as sources of revenue for the public good, early American lotteries depended on and playfully enacted key elements of natural philosophy, market exchanges, civic duty, and consumer culture. Every part of the lottery's sequential arrangement and implementation, including promotional schemes, ticket sales, and the drawing itself, was held together by an ordered set of rules and regulations not unlike the natural laws regulating the cosmos. Drawing on the insights of probability theory and the precise requirements of bookkeeping, lottery organizers safeguarded causal fairness to carefully construct the arbitrary. Mirroring the market, lotteries offered adventurers the chance to weigh their odds, risk their money, and acquire more than they invested. As instruments designed to support various public works, lotteries beckoned prospective adventurers to participate for the sake of a good cause. Unlike taxes, however, this was civic duty with potential. Lottery schemes implored participation in the name of the public good while appealing to the acquisitive possibilities of both merchant capitalism and consumer culture.

Perhaps most significantly, lotteries were uniquely organized to draw out renderings of why things happened. Other than the obvious and sometimes substantial advantage gained by purchasing more than one ticket, as in the case of Josiah Smith's victory, lotteries were a singularly nonpreferential realm. In fact, these very neutralizing tendencies removed or modified customary explanatory filters and barriers (age, sex, rank or class, and race), whittling causality to its core. And there, providence, in various forms, remained the central framework adventurers relied on to explain a lottery's outcome. Scholars have long and decisively shown how early modern natural philosophy reoriented rather than renounced longstanding conceptions of God's providential oversight of earthly affairs.Footnote ⁷² By creating an exquisitely arbitrary and potentially exhilarating causal experience, lotteries elicited explanations from their participants, especially those who won, about how the world worked. These explanations reveal the durability, flexibility, and ongoing significance of varying providential formulations throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Like layers of clothing best suited for certain conditions, early American Protestants changed their interpretation of God's providence over time. By the middle of the eighteenth century, an emerging interest in the orderliness with which God operated in the cosmos made lotteries an emblematic and lively experience through which to encounter and inquire about God's workings in the world. Adventurers carried a collection of distinct, sometimes overlapping providential frameworks with them as they tried to make sense of a lottery's outcome. By eliciting an answer to why one thing happened in early America, lotteries shed light on the range of reasons people gave for why everything else did, too.