In An Excursion through the United States and Canada during the Years 1822-23 by William N. Blane, published in 1824, the English author makes mention that it was not customary to tip in the U.S. at that time, which was different from the contemporary European custom:

"...[N]o one ever thinks of giving anything to the chambermaid. I may make a similar remark with regard to the drivers of the coaches, of whom indeed nine out of ten would feel highly affronted at being offered money. All us payd when the passage is paid...

"By this laudable custom of not paying waiters and coachmen, travellers are exempt from a heavy tax, which is levied in England, and indeed in every other country which I have travelled."

In James Fenimore Cooper's The Travelling Bachelor: Or, Notions of the Americans from 1828, the American author makes a similar claim:

"You must also remember, that in America, when you pay the regular price for anything, you commonly have paid all. I have never known a servant ask for a douceur; and though people of a certain class generally give a trifle to the man who cleans boots, or to him who does a little extra services, neither waiter, chambermaid, nor any one else, demands it. It is just the same in the steam-boats, stages, hackney-coaches, &c., when you get the regular price, you know all the necessary expense, and I use the word necessary, in reference to custom no less than right."

Until the mid-1800s, tipping was seen as a European custom. But that changed with the introduction of the French-style restaurant in New York City in the mid-1800s, beginning with Delmonico's (opened 1827) and the Astor House (1836). Before restaurants, dining out in the U.S. was done at "eating-houses", which were basically the same thing as a restaurant, except they were more cafeteria-style or English tavern-style: you paid at the beginning of a meal instead of at the end. If you needed service, you flagged down a waiter doing the rounds--you didn't have a dedicated waiter who would check on your table unprompted. And the food choices were limited, and mostly prix-fixe. And you didn't tip.

According to the article "Dining-Hall Mendacity" by James Q. Howard, which appeared in the May 1887 issue of The Forum magazine, tipping was introduced to the U.S. at Delmonico's in the 1820s:

"The practice of tipping, or giving gratuities, to hotel porters, restaurant and hotel waiters, and other servants, is of comparatively recent introduction into the United States. Some eighteen or twenty years ago, when our foppish young men about town began to make trips abroad, it was observed, on their return home, that they had adopted foreign accents, inflections, affectations, and especially that they aped everything English. Tipping was at that time, as now, an established custom in England, as well as throughout Europe...[But] [w]hen tipping was first introduced at Delmonico's, by some of the traveled fops, the astonished waiters did not know what to think of it."

A similar article appeared in an 1888 issue of Harper's Weekly about tipping's origins in New York's French restaurants. A notice in the 1891 New York travel guide A Week in New York by Ernest Ingersoll re-iterated this, too, calling the practice a "bad habit" that was unfortunately spreading from New York's high class French restaurants to the more common and affordable eateries.

The practice was often condemned. An article in an 1888 issue of The Epoch wrote of it:

"It is to the selfishness and thoughtlessness of the rich that the growth of 'tipping' is mainly due. But while the result is not oppressive to them, it has become a serious tax on the persons of moderate incomes who travel much or take their meals in restaurants."

Similarly, the March 1896 Ladies' Homes Journal called the practice "evil":

"Restaurant keepers and proprietors of public places of all kinds, for the larger part, employ[ing] their help at such small wages that it is dependent for its livelihood upon fees from the patrons...[T]he remedy must be found with the employer, who should be compelled to pay his helpers commensurate with the services rendered, and not demand that his customers pay a share of their wages."

Ultimately, though, these opinion pieces did little to dissuade the dining class from engaging in the practice. Lower-scale New York eateries started re-branding themselves as "restaurants" instead of "eating-houses" and "taverns", even if their cuisine didn't change much. They began offering full service wait staff, and those wait staff began accepting tips from "foppish" New Yorkers. These amenities were introduced to show that the eatery was "fancy", and so the clientele followed suit by tipping. By the 1890s, the practice had become the norm in New York. Other East Coast cities weren't far behind. But a lot of Americans who came of age in an earlier era, such as Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller found it pretentious and un-American, so they refused to play along. The Chicago Times-Herald wrote an article in 1901 praising Mark Twain for refusing to tip a cabbie. A whole anti-tipping book was even published in 1916, by William R. Scott of Kentucky, calling it a result of "flunky-ism".

According to Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities by Kerry Segrave, five Southern states actually made tipping illegal in the first decades of the 20th Century: South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Georgia. Iowa and Washington also had anti-tipping laws on the books by 1915.

Illinois was of the same sentiment. The February 6, 1912, edition of the New York Times ran an article entitled "Tipping Is Illegal" about a court case in Chicago where "tipping was branded as illegal and un-American by Judge Theodore Brentano". The case was about proprietors of some hotels and restaurants in Chicago who were forcing the wait-staff to turn over some of the tips they made to the owners.

But this was all for naught, as proprietors insisted on instituting the practice, and dining houses had the upper hand. According to William Grimes in Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York, by the 1880s, restaurateurs only kept staff employed if they were able to turn over a minimum amount of tips to the owners. If they came up short, they would be let go and replaced by someone more successful at coaxing the tips out of customers. Though there was a general unease among the public about the practice, the wait staff knew how to get what they wanted:

"I can remember when we were mighty glad to get a dime and would dash around very lively for a guest if we knew it was in prospect," a former waiter at the Astor House recalled in 1884. "Now we consider a quarter a fair tip for a lunch or dinner service. If we don't get it, and a guest comes a second time, we get partly even by keeping him waiting for his order as long as we dare, and giving him a poor service generally."

And so it grew from being a voluntary institution to ostensibly being compulsory. That same year, the Nov 30, 1884, edition of the New York Times ran an article about "The Tipping Nuisance":

"The difference in the tipping system in London and New-York is that in London one is obliged to tip if he wishes anything like adequate service, while in New-York, it is a matter of choice...Englishmen express satisfaction on visiting America that tipping is not compulsory. In a sense it is not, but if good service is desired, it is."

Several sources claim that the practice became popular specifically to short-change African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War, such as this New Yorker article. Segrave's and Grimes' books both do point out that African Americans were often primary victims of penny-pinching eatery proprietors, but they both also point out that all wait staff were such victims. It was a universal of the industry.

As Grimes writes, waiters at the best restaurants did quite well, but "ordinary waiters, even at the big hotel restaurants, toiled long hours for little pay, which could be whittled away by fines for small infractions." Grimes writes that male wait staff generally earned better wages than female staff, and surely white staff did better than minorities. Still, the whole industry suffered the effects of low wages supplemented by tips, to the point that there was a strike in 1916. Around the same time, some Russian restaurants in New York, became explicitly anti-tipping:

"The menu...included a stern warning to bourgeois American diners: no tipping. Soviet waiters, it explained, were adequately paid for their labor. They needed no charity, unlike their oppressed brethren in the capitalist West."

But by then, tipping had gained its foothold. The industry lobbied, and anti-tipping laws were repealed throughout the 1920s. The practice has become an American custom since.