The Sage of Monticello's opinion of the Tennessee lottery
by Jack Neely
An earlier version of this column appeared in this space several years ago. It seemed appropriate to dig it out and spruce it up a little.
People don't like taxes, and some prefer the idea of a lottery. But it seems to me that a lottery is a sort of a tax. It's a tax based not on your income or sales, but on your gullibility. It's like a 1040 form where the TAX YOU OWE is determined by how you answered one question: If you buy lottery tickets every chance you get for the rest of your life, will you probably get rich? If you answer "yes," of course, your tax might well be over $1,000 a year. If you answer, correctly, "no," your tax is $0.
It's the uneducated, people who didn't get far enough in school to study probabilities, who buy the bulk of lottery tickets. And it's the uneducated we may soon be expecting to foot part of the bill for higher education.
Like nearly everything, we've already tried it. UT was once East Tennessee College, a tiny liberal-arts school in a single building on Gay Street. In 1809, the college's founder, Presbyterian minister and classics professor Samuel Carrick, suddenly died. Legend has it he was exhausted from writing a sermon, but he might well have been trying to balance the books.
His college was in deep trouble. Though the federal government had mandated that Tennessee use half the proceeds derived from a land grant of 100,000 acres to support ETC, the squatters who lived on the land weren't participating in the rent-payment part of the equation. By 1809—its funds depleted, its founder and primary instructor dead—our college closed its doors.
A lottery seemed the only salvation. The state legislature, then meeting in Knoxville, passed an Act to authorize the drawing of a Lottery for the benefit of East Tennessee College. In early 1810, the Board of Trustees publicized the lottery, offering a total of 3,405 cash prizes ranging from $6 to $5,000. They planned to sell 11,000 tickets at $5 each. You stood a 30 percent chance of scoring at least a slight profit, better than the odds in most modern lotteries.
Still, the trustees assumed people would be motivated more by civic responsibility than by the odds. "When the object to be attained by this lottery is considered," went the ad, "it is believed every individual will be anxious to become an adventurer."
Advertising 11,000 tickets just in Knoxville obviously wouldn't be enough. A committee headed up by future U.S. senator and presidential candidate Hugh Lawson White hoped to sell it to a nationwide audience by recruiting a few very-high-profile salesmen. One was President James Madison. We're not sure how he responded.
We do know how the recently retired president, 66-year-old Thomas Jefferson, responded. If somebody I don't know calls me out of the blue and asks me to sell lottery tickets, I hope I can answer as politely as Jefferson did.
On May 6, 1810, Jefferson wrote a letter and mailed it to Judge White and company in Knoxville. Jefferson wrote that if he were sent lottery tickets to sell, "It would be impossible for them to come to a more inefficient hand. I rarely go from home and consequently see but a few neighbors and friends who occasionally call on me."
He followed that with a gentle reproach: "Having myself made it a rule never to engage in a lottery or any other adventure of mere chance, I can with the less candor or effect urge it on others, however laudable and desirable its object might be."
As if to deflect the whole idea, the Sage of Monticello complimented ETC on the fact that it already had some money from other sources: "I am sincerely rejoiced...to find that so excellent a fund has been provided for this noble purpose in Tennessee." (Jefferson's own University of Virginia was still just a dream.)
Jefferson advised that ETC take the $50,000 he understood the trustees had already obtained and deposit it in a "safe bank" to earn $1,000 a year to build the new college. Two percent was apparently the going APR in 1810.
He also advised us not to be extravagant with the physical plant. A large, expensive building, he wrote, would be "unfortunate and erroneous." ETC should be an economical and modest "academical village, instead of a large and common den of noise, of filth, of fetid air."
When Hugh White read that patronizing two-page letter, he probably spat a wad of tobacco on the floor, as was his custom.
Tennesseans didn't share Jefferson's prejudices against gambling in 1810. As one traveler observed, Knoxville in those days was full of "gamblers, hard-eyed and vigilant." Many Tennesseans were gamblers, and because they were gamblers, they knew the odds. And the odds in any lottery weren't nearly as good as the odds in a cockfight or a quarter-horse race, or at a game of poker or dice at Anthony's Tavern.
Whether Jefferson's rejection of the idea made any difference, the lottery was a dismal failure. Some ticket sellers apparently pocketed the money, because the trustees received some claims on tickets which hadn't even been sold. Their total take from the gamble, almost three years after they announced it, was $450—about one- twentieth of what they'd projected, and not nearly enough to reopen ETC. The college stayed closed, in fact, for 11 years. They didn't break ground on their new, hilltop campus until 1826, the same summer that Thomas Jefferson died. Meanwhile, Judge White's lottery proposal just took a very long nap.
October 17, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 42
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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