Look Away, Dixie Land

Oh, I wish I was in the Land of Cotton

Old times there are not forgotten …

- Daniel Decatur Emmett, 1859



By the middle of the 19th century, draw poker with a 52-card deck had become the game of choice not only for planters and blacklegs, but for bartenders, cobblers, bootblacks, and stable hands. From sawdust saloons in Bleeding Kansas, where the abolitionist John Brown and his sons hacked to death five members of the proslavery Law and Order Party, to sophisticated parlors in Gramercy Park, where Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858 to parents on opposite sides of the slavery question, Americans of every station were taking up the riverboat bluffing game. Though many officers and chaplains actively discouraged it, a growing number of Mexican War veterans and younger recruits carried a deck in their knapsacks. When the army split into blue and gray factions after Fort Sumter was fired upon in April 1861, just about every soldier, from raw privates to commanders in chief, soon became conversant with poker's cunning and expedient stratagems.



For the hundreds of thousands of troops in Civil War camps, the game provided an upgrade from such entertainments as drinking, bare-knuckle boxing, chuck-a-luck (a three-dice game similar to craps), or betting on the outcome of a race between lice. "There is some of the onerest men here that I ever saw," one soldier wrote to his family, "and the most swearing and card playing and fitin and drunkenness that I ever saw at any place." Given an acre or two in warm sunshine, such recruits preferred the new game of baseball – often using a walnut wound with twine for the ball and just about any length of wood as a bat – but when cramped terrain, weather, or darkness kept everyone close to their tents, poker helped even the athletes pass the time between marches and field drills and bloodbaths.



As they gradually became inured to the blistering firepower of both armies, some players continued to shuffle and deal as the minié balls of snipers whistled by overhead, though most games were somewhat less tense. One glass-plate photograph shows four officers of the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry, the famous Zouaves, casually posed in a small clearing of a pine forest in front of their Sibley tents. Attended by a pair of black servants, three of the officers relax at a rickety table, playing five-card draw in the twilight.



Using a blanket for a table, rank-and-file soldiers knelt or sat cross-legged on the ground, squinting through dusk or candlelight at whatever grimy cards were available. Since accidental marks were unavoidable in even the squarest of games, recognizing the creases or smudges on the backs of particular cards conferred a substantial advantage to those with a cheating heart coupled with above-average eyesight. Decks of that era had single-ended court cards, and the lower cards were printed without index numbers. A player had to fan his hand wide, upend the facecards, and meticulously count pips to determine whether he in fact had triplet boxcars to go with his pair of red jacks.



The backs of the cards usually featured patriotic imagery – generals, admirals, Lady Liberty, Jefferson Davis, or Abraham Lincoln. Some decks had suits of eagles, shields, stars, and flags, with the court cards picturing colonels instead of kings, goddesses of Liberty as queens, and majors as jacks. Among the most widely distributed were the Highlander decks produced by L. I. Cohn Company of New York. But whoever manufactured them, the designs on the backs of most cards were predominantly red, white, and blue. After the battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Merrimack in March 1862, the Andrew Dougherty Company issued an "Army and Navy" deck whose ace of spades neutrally stated: "To Commemorate the Greatest Event in Naval History – the Substitution of Iron for Wood."



Although stud was beginning to gain a foothold in the Ohio River Valley, where Grant's Army of the Tennessee had been in control since capturing Fort Donelson, draw was by far the more popular variant. Graycoats from the Mississippi Delta preferred a 53-card version called Mistigris, the French word for joker, in which that card was "wild" – could be used as a fourth deuce, for example, in a hand already containing three of them. In the case of tied Mistigris hands, a pair of kings lost to a king with the joker.



Those preferring an even more wide-open game could agree that all four deuces were wild. Four aces might then lose to five treys, though the house or camp rules would have to determine whether a straight flush outranked a quintet. Other variations in hand rank played mostly in the South included a Blaze, any five picture cards, which beat two pair but lost to three of a kind; a Tiger, a 7-high hand without any pair, straight, or flush, which beat a straight but lost to a flush; a Dutch or Skipping Straight, such as 2-4-6-8-10, which beat two pair and a Blaze; and a Round-the-Corner Straight, such as Q-K-A-2-3, which beat three of a kind but lost to a regular straight.



While such variations must have led to some testy confusion, a more serious problem for Confederates was that by 1862, decks had become fairly scarce. As the Federal navy tightened its blockade, London card makers loaded their wares onto ships tasked with trying to run it, but the law of supply and demand soon made cards so valuable that a Union colonel was caught smuggling some 4,000 decks into Warrenton, Virginia, where he expected to turn a profit of $5,000 by selling them to a Confederate sutler. Before that deal could go down, however, the colonel was arrested by Union detective Lafayette Baker and locked up in the Old Capitol Prison. (Baker later helped track down and kill John Wilkes Booth.) After Grant's army captured Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, riverboat gamblers whose venues were dry-docked by Union control of the Mississippi moved their operations back down to New Orleans or north to Chicago. In these and other cities occupied by the Union, decks cost about 3 cents apiece.



While Yankee soldiers had a steady supply, the Rebels were forced to make do with increasingly raggedy decks, sometimes playing with as few as 45 cards, which made calculating the odds of drawing to certain hands even more of a challenge. For chips, working-class soldiers on both sides used buttons, pebbles, beans, or grains of rice or corn. Those who played well and got lucky in smaller games were sometimes invited to test their skill against the officers, who used proper chips, gold coins, or paper currency. An aristocratic major in a Louisiana regiment, for example, might raise a newly flush sergeant a thick wad of dixies – "dixie," after the French word for ten, being the nickname of not only his home state's $10 bank note, but also of the entire Confederacy.



The popular hit Dixie by Daniel Decatur Emmett was actually Abraham Lincoln's favorite song, too. He had even chosen it to be played at his 1861 inauguration, despite winning zero electoral votes in what would soon become the Confederate States of America. Not much of a poker player himself, Lincoln had still tried his luck in penny-ante games while piloting a flatboat from Illinois to New Orleans in 1831, when cheating and physical threats had already become routine. But he apparently gave up all forms of wagering when he became an attorney and congressman, especially during his momentous debates in 1858 with Sen. Stephen A. Douglas about whether slavery should be extended into the western territories. Lincoln may well have believed there was too much at stake to allow any listener or potential voter to call his personal morality into question. Even so, it is clear that he still understood poker's lore, and that its ruthlessly expedient logic was essential to the American character, whether northern or western or southern.



With his background as a riverman, Honest Abe had naturally heard plenty of tales about cardsharps, one of which he fine-tuned and told to great effect during the first international crisis of his presidency. In November 1861, with Union armies generally in retreat from Joe Johnston, Robert E. Lee, and their lieutenants, the British mail steamer Trent, bearing two Confederate envoys to London, was intercepted by Yankee Captain Charles Wilkes. When Wilkes decided to take the envoys prisoner, he created an incident that threatened to bring Great Britain into the war on the side of the South. The British assumed that orders to board the Trent had come from on high, when in fact Captain Wilkes had been acting on his own initiative. In any case, they delivered a stern ultimatum: release the envoys and apologize, or else. To back it up, an army of 8,000 regulars set sail for Canada, and the Royal Navy began fitting out a fleet of warships. Fourscore years after waving the white flag at Yorktown and 47 after Old Hickory licked them in the Battle of New Orleans, the most powerful military on earth was bristling for a rematch. For those who thought England was bluffing, Lincoln had a yarn concerning a dangerous bulldog in his hometown. "I know the bulldog will not bite. You know he will not bite, but does the bulldog know he will not bite?"



Secretary of State William Seward initially favored an aggressive response to the bulldog's growling threat. Seward, after all, had publicly stated on several occasions his romantic belief that a war with Great Britain would reunite North and South against their former antagonist. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles' telegram to Wilkes had also been made public. "Your conduct in seizing these public enemies," Welles declared, "was marked by intelligence, ability, decision, and firmness, and has the emphatic approval of this Department." With few exceptions, Union citizens heartily agreed. Attorney General Edward Bates confided in his diary that the president and his cabinet had ample reason to fear "the displeasure of our own people – lest they should accuse us of truckling to the power of England."



As the crisis came to a head, Lincoln refused to let any such fears force his hand. "One war at a time" was his stated rationale as he "cheerfully" freed the ambassadors. To anyone feeling less cheerful about it, he and Seward cited American and international law. "We must stick to American principles concerning the rights of neutrals," said Lincoln. "We fought Great Britain [in 1812] for insisting, by theory and practice, on the right to do precisely what Wilkes has done."



Reporters and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic wanted to know whether the president would also apologize to Queen Victoria, as the British had demanded. Said Lincoln to one of them: "Your question reminds me of an incident which occurred out west. Two roughs were playing cards for high stakes, when one of them, suspecting his adversary of foul play, straightway drew his bowie-knife from his belt and pinned the hand of the other player upon the table, exclaiming: 'If you haven't got the ace of spades under your palm, I'll apologize.'"



If our most articulate president could explain his position during a wartime diplomatic crisis with such a parable, there can be little doubt that poker tactics were deeply ingrained in the American way of thinking by 1861, though it also lent credence to Jonathan Green's claims about the prevalence of cheating and thuggery in the national card game.



Freeing the rebel envoys had been "downright gall and wormwood" to many Northerners, including most members of the cabinet. Lincoln himself admitted it was "a pretty bitter pill to swallow." But if it was a tactical defeat in one early battle, it confidently prepared the ground for a larger strategic victory.



At the Hampton Roads Conference in 1865, a few days before Lee surrendered, General Grant asked, "Mr. President, did you at any time doubt the final success of the cause?"



"Never for a moment," said Lincoln. It was an exaggeration, perhaps, but when Grant then asked him about the Trent Affair, he explained: "I contented myself with believing that England's triumph in the matter would be short-lived, and that after ending our war successfully we would be so powerful that we could call her to account for all the embarrassments she had inflicted upon us."



While refusing to apologize, that is, the president had decided back in 1861 to wait for a better hand before committing too many Union chips to a single pot against a pair of aggressive opponents; by 1865 he and Grant had "busted" the Confederacy, and the re-United States was too strong to ever again be challenged by Britain. As the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote wrote of the Trent Affair: "Poker was not the national game for nothing; the people understood that their leaders had bowed, not to the British, but to expediency."



A footnote: Those who might wonder what Lincoln would think of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act should consider what he said as an Illinois congressman in 1840. "Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."



Amen.



Next: Decks Cold and Colder.