An astounding number of printed nineteenth-century games centered on Yankee peddlers. Early board game manufacturers tended to be publishers of children’s books. With titles like The Mansion of Happiness (1843) and The Game of Pope and Pagan or Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army (1844), games aimed to instill Christian morality. In 1848, W. & S. B. Ives produced The Yankee Trader, or the Laughable Game of What D’Ye Buy? Players selected a trade and related playing cards. A “conductor” then read a story, looking pointedly at players to fill in the blanks. Quick players contributed to the story akin to a card-directed Mad Lib. Too slow? Lose a card. McLoughlin Brothers published a similar game in 1850, as did Bunce & Brother in 1851 with Yankee Peddler: Or What Do You Buy?
In 1888, George S. Parker & Co. created a new version, Ye Peculiar Game of Ye Yankee Peddler. Parker had invented his first game, Banking, in 1883 as a rejection of games as moral education. He preferred to emphasize a different value: competition. In Parker’s 1888 rendition, the Yankee Peddler served as gamemaster. The rules warned that the peddler should not be a player as he was favored to win. Instead, farmers competed against each other to get the best deals. The game below extrapolates from Parker to enliven lessons on the Market Revolution.
The game sets key historical dynamics in motion. How did distribution channels, including new transportation options, shape manufacturing and consumption? What did money look like and how did people spend it? When scholars discuss market anxieties of this age, what do they mean? This game offers a flexible format that allows students from middle school to college to jump in and actively contribute to the lesson.
Contextualizing the Game
In introducing the game, a variety of lessons can provide context: early industrialization, infrastructure, bankruptcy, banking and the Bank War, global trade, and American expansion and imperialism. But the game must start with the Yankee peddler. To David Jaffee, Yankee peddlers were more than distributors of goods, they were agents of capitalist enthusiasm. Largely young men in their early twenties, itinerant peddlers loaded up packs or wagons after the fall harvest and carried commodities to far-flung consumers. Local shopkeepers and regional factors advocated licensing laws to tax and stymie the competition. Nevertheless, these migrating merchants abounded through the 1850s. The US census counted 16,594 peddlers in 1860, most from New England, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. They thus contributed to an increasingly integrated market economy. But peddlers were especially notable as cultural icons.