Jonathan H. Green - Biography

Biography

Jonathan Green was born in Ohio in 1813. He became an accomplished professional gambler as a young man, popularly known from Texas to Boston as "Captain Green", and was a regular riverboat gambler on the Mississippi River. Among his most noted accomplishments was winning $23,000 in one night at the old Chestnut Street Arcade during the 1830s. After living in Texas for several years, he suddenly abandoned gambling in 1842. Making restitution to those who had lost money to him, he traveled the country as a lecturer exposing common gambling tricks and spoke out against illegal gambling for the next nine years. His popularity as "the Reformed Gambler" gained a significant following and helped pass anti-gambling laws in several states. He also wrote several books on the subject including "Green on Gambling", Gambling Unmasked (1844), An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling (1845), The Secret Band of Brothers (1848), Gambling in Its Infancy and Progress (1849) and An Exposition of Games and Tricks with Cards (1850).

Green became a general executive agent of the New York Association for the Suppression of Gambling and, between 1850–51, he conducted an exhaustive investigation on illegal gambling operations in New York City. On February 20, 1851, he presented his findings at the Brooklyn Tabernacle reporting the existence of an estimated 6,000 gambling houses, 200 of these being high-class establishments "catering to men of standing and sound financial substance", as well as several thousand raffling, lottery and policy houses. Green was one of several prominent speakers, most notably Horace Greeley, who addressed the large crowd. He continued writing and published his memoirs Twelve Days in the Tombs (1851), The Gambler's Life (1857) and The Reformed Gambler (1858). Green returned to Indiana at the start of the American Civil War and became a captain in the Union Army and was later employed by the US Secret Service. An amateur inventor, he took out 20 to 30 patents although his inventions proved far more profitable to others than to himself.

He moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1876 and lived a private retired life. He eventually became destitute in his old age and, following his wife's death in 1884, a public appeal was made when he was unable to pay for his wife's funeral. Donations from "kindly minded friends" were sufficient enough to allow Green to bury his wife. Green himself died three years later.