Gambling and The Puritans
The regularization and commercialization of gaming intended to curb the unwanted side effects of gambling without condemning the practice itself.
However, they contended that gaming was not only sinful in itself, but also served as 'a doore and a window' into all sorts of ungodly behavior.
Moreover, while most Englishmen naturally followed the nobility in deriving encouragement a to gamble from the emerging economic culture, Puritans incorporated the ideas of capitalism into a more self-denying, and hence more self-righteous, mode of thinking.
Their perspective came to be identified with the 'urban bourgeoisie'.
The saints associated diversions that involved betting with both pagan ungodliness and idleness. In England, Puritans objected to popular recreations like gaming because they violated Sabbatarian principles.
Sins like gambling were doubly condemned because they profaned the Lord's day.
Puritans held that an introspective abstinence from both play and work would constitute the best method of eliminating ungodly diversions on the Sabbath.
In the saints' distinctive mixture of capitalism and Calvinism, the obverse of keeping Sundays sacred, of course, was to work intently the other six days of the pagan-like Saints' days and holidays that appeared on traditional Catholic calendars.
They held May-games in especially strong contempt, not only for their yearly idleness, bit also for the drunkenness and bastardy that called to mind the saturnalia and bacchanalia of ancient Rome.
Similarly, the Puritans' aversion to celebrating Christmas was no doubt stiffened by the gambling that with lawful sanction flourished during the Yuletide.
The American frontier constituted the best environment, they believed, for achieving ideals that could hardly be realized clearly in England.
Indeed, the Puritans' lack of success in changing the homeland may help to explain why in such New England towns as Plymouth and Boston, colonists proved so vigilant at protecting their exemplary settlements in the New World.
The Puritan indictment of traditional recreations was transported across the Atlantic and served with a vengeance at Ma-re Mount. Thomas Morton's company threatened the saints as a rival claimant to territory in New England, as a provider of arms to local Indians, and as a superior competitor in the fur trade, but the renegade plantation also offended puritan notions of leisure and recreation.
In 1627, Morton and his young, lonely male followers proclaimed a yearly holiday on the first day of May, erected a maypole to celebrate the founding of Ma-re Mount, and asked neighboring Indians, especially the women, to join the festivities.
In sum, Morton's corps of adventurers proposed to resurrect the traditional English festivities of May Day, replete with all sorts of promiscuous revel, in North America.
By transplanting a pagan celebration to the pristine New World, and by inviting heathen natives, who were known to the saints as unrepentant gamblers, Morton and his followers challenged all puritan strictures on play.