[Rockingham]

Gambling was legal, common, and normal on the American frontier and in most other places and times. Although gambling can be addictive and a vice, for most people, it tends to teach (sometimes painfully and expensively) the value of restraint, caution, and hedging one's bets.

These are useful lessons because life itself is a succession of gambles and choices poorly understood. That is why probability -- which was first developed by gamblers -- is so useful a field of mathematics.

[Jonty30]

Your revolution was funded through a lottery.
The government just made it illegal in order to monopolize the gambling. Those neighbourhood lotteries had a higher ratio payout than your lotteries through government.