To begin to answer these questions, it is important to realize that most colonial settlements, even in the eighteenth century, were part of an untamed frontier. Everyone knows that in the "Wild West" of the nineteenth century, towns such as Dodge City, Tombstone, and Deadwood were not filled with God-fearing, Sunday-go-to-meeting folks, but were
wide open, lawless capitals of vice and violence. Why should it have been any different when the frontier boom towns were New York or Charles- ton?4 It wasn't. On any given Sunday morning there were at least as many people recovering from late Saturday
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