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The Dark Side of Riverboat Gambling

As riverboat traffic increased, the cities bordering the Mississippi River swelled in population.

Unfortunately, as the towns expanded, they drew unsavory characters as well as law-abiding citizenry. Prostitutes, thieves and sharpers flocked to such cities as Louisville, Natchez, Memphis, and Cincinnati.

At first, the townspeople ignored this influx of criminals. By the 1830s, however, even hamlets far from the river were subjected to scandalous and violent behavior from the criminal element.

From this lawless territory sprang the Clan of the Mystic Confederacy.

The Clan was very much like the organized crime syndicates of modern times. The leader of the Clan was John Murrell. He established this group of criminals in 1832 and determined that a slave revolt which he had planned would take place in December of 1835 throughout the river valleys.

His gang of thugs, in the midst of this revolt, were to plunder the river towns. The Clan, ruled by a Grand Council of one hundred criminals, consisted of fifteen hundred outlaws.

Some of the gang incited unrest among the black slaves. The Clan bought weapons and whiskey with funds contributed by the river sharpers.

A man named Virgil Stewart posed as a gambler and infiltrated the Clan successfully. While he was at Murrell's headquarters in Randolph, Tennessee, he learned about the planned revolution.

With Stewart's information, charges of slave-stealing were brought against Murrell and he was sentenced to ten years in prison. Stewart capitalized on his heroic role by writing a bestseller named The Western Land Pirate.

After Murrell's trial, Tennessee made it illegal to play faro within its borders ans some cities ran gamblers out of town after they had been tarred and feathered, but most of the river valley residents felt safe because the Clan's leader was in jail.

Their complacency was shattered, however, when they learned that the revolt had only been postponed to July 4, 1835.

Alarmed citizens authorized lawmen to arrest every gambler they could lay their hands on. One of those arrested was a member of the Clan's Council; he was persuaded to divulge where the Clan's weapons were hoarded before he was hanged.

Arrests escalated and the revolt was terminated. Even so, July 4, towns all along the river had to combat looting and burnings engineered by the Clan members.

The river town residents were mostly successful in their efforts to quell the riotous outbreaks and only encountered substantial resistance in Vicksburg.

The outlaws intended to burn down the city but were driven back to their gambling hells. The citizens gave them 24 hours to get out of town, an edict which the gamblers ignored. The civilian army assaulted every gaming house and confiscated all equipment.

One physician was killed when the volunteers were fired upon. The citizens dragged several sharpers out of their sanctuaries, hanged them, and burned all gambling apparatus. By the next morning, every gambler had fled.

Riverboat gambling resumed after the hiatus caused by the Civil War, but it never regained the popularity of the ante-bellum era. Very few riverboats were making scheduled trips. The slave owners and cotton planters who had widely traveled on the boats no longer existed.

In addition, professional gamblers were not looked upon with the same tolerance they had enjoyed before the War.

Many of them wandered to the larger cities, joined the settlers moving to the West, or traveled on the trains that ran throughout the settled territories in the South and Southwest just as they had traveled on the riverboats.

However, gambling on the trains was not as lucrative nor as long-lived as river gambling had been; the train crews barely tolerated the sharpers and the journeys were over too quickly for the gamblers to set up their victims properly.