"Policy" (aka "The Numbers")

[George Thompson]

No doubt you all know that the form of street gambling known
as “playing the numbers” is also known as “policy”.  I see that OED
traces “policy” in this sense to 1830, and I can do no better.  I do
not see, however, an explanation of why this term should be used.

A couple of passages from New York City newspapers of 1818 & 1819
suggest an explanation.  There were a number of legal lotteries in
operation in the early 19th century, all intended to raise money for
some more or less worthy cause.  A lottery ticket was a considerable
investment, though, costing perhaps $5; dealers would sell fractions of
tickets, but even these would still be relatively expensive.  It
appears that an illegal secondary form of lottery gambling arose, in
which people could bet very small sums under the guise of buying
insurance against the possibility that a certain number would be
drawn.  I do not know the rationale for this, if one was offered: what
was the harm supposed to be done by a specific number being drawn that
required insurance against the possibilty.

Both the 1818 and the 1819 references refer to this form of gambling
as “insurance”.  I don’t see this meaning of the word in the OED or
HDAS.

Note that by 1818 the “insurance” racket was already so well
established that people had figured out how to connive against it.

1818:   Lottery insurance offices.  --  ***  . . . this species of
gambling is carried on . . . in petty shops, set up in the more obscure
parts of the city, which, however, are at bottom supported and carried
on for the benefit of others behind the curtain.  To such a pitch has
this vice arrived that the place of drawing the lottery, the Union
Hotel, is surrounded every morning by hundreds of servants and poor
people, black and white, some of whom have horses ready and as soon as
the first drawn number is called out, they jump upon the saddle and
ride off at full speed to some distant office, and get the number
insured, which they call pigeoning.  This, to be sure, is only to bite
the biter; but what a system of morals must exist in the community
where such things are openly practiced, and no notice taken of them.
Qu.  Where is Mr. Superintedent Pinckney with his salary of $1000 a
year?
New-York Evening Post, February 12, 1818, p. 2, cols. 2-3.

1819:   [a new state lottery has been arranged to prevent fraud:] it
cuts up by the roots the mischievous practice of insurance, by
restricting the drawing of the whole lottery to one week. . . .
New-York Evening Post, March 18, 1819, p. 2, col. 3

I see that the OED traces the verb “to pigeon” to 1675.  The practice
of “pigeoning” described in the 1818 passage was being employed on a
wider basis by 1826.  In 1826, a man who had been in NYC when the
lottery was drawn went to Hartford to buy a share in a winning ticket.
A NYC newspaper remarked:
There is no doubt that he is one of a company, who travel through the
country to purchase tickets, knowing them to be prizes.
Commercial Advertiser, January 25, 1826, p. 2, col. 6

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African
Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.