A Counterfeiter's Paradise Read Free

entrepreneurs secure capital on credit and catalyzed commerce, but it also made the economy highly volatile and vulnerable to periodic fits of inflation. Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of this financial chaos were counterfeiters, who thrived in a virtually unregulated economy that ran mostly on faith. These moneymakers were characters worth remembering—people like Mary Peck Butterworth, a housewife from Rehoboth, Massachusetts, who during the early eighteenth century ran a counterfeiting operation out of her kitchen with the help of a hot iron. Butterworth would cover a note with a strip of damp muslin and run her iron over it, transferring the bill’s design to the fabric, which she then imprinted onto a blank piece of paper. She made a fortune selling the notes to her husband’s friends. When the authorities learned of Butterworth’s activities and came to arrest her, they couldn’t find a shred of incriminating evidence, just an ironing board and a few burnt scraps of muslin in the fireplace. Another counterfeiter named Peter McCartney had less luck eluding arrest but earned a reputation as a talented escapeartist. According to one story, he once bet the chief of the Secret Service that he could break out of an Illinois jail. When McCartney showed up at the chief’s hotel room that evening, he told the astonished detective that he was calling to pay his respects and would return to his cell presently. “I merely wished to show that some things could be done as well as others,” the counterfeiter explained. McCartney eventually went to prison for twelve years. “He was not an ordinary man,” wrote Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the country’s first private detective agency, “and when he disappeared suddenly, it was as if some great wreck had gone down at sea.” The counterfeiter died in an Ohio penitentiary in 1890 at the age of sixty-six, having forged more than a million dollars.
    Counterfeiters owed their success in large part to the patronage of their fellow citizens, who often didn’t discriminate between forgeries and the genuine article. They were grateful to get a note that could hold its value until they could pass it, regardless of its authenticity. The men who printed the genuine bills and those who counterfeited them were opposite sides of the same coin: both hoped to inspire trust in pieces of paper whose value relied entirely on the confidence that people had in them.
    It was this faith that enriched three of the most colorful counterfeiters in American history: Owen Sullivan, David Lewis, and Samuel Curtis Upham. Owen Sullivan (c. 1720–1756) was an Irish immigrant whose extraordinary talent for earning people’s trust made him among the most notorious counterfeiters of the colonial era. After stints in Boston and Providence, Sullivan settled in a sliver of swampy land on the lawless border between New York and Connecticut, where he forged tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of colonial currency. David Lewis (1788–1820) was a charismatic counterfeiter and robber who prowled Pennsylvania’s Allegheny backcountry. His legendary acts of charity catapulted him to prominence as a populist folk hero, a Robin Hood who dispensed his ill-gotten gains to the poor while punishing the greedy. Samuel Curtis Upham (1819–1885), a Philadelphia shopkeeper and former Californiagold prospector, sold counterfeit Confederate currency from his storefront during the Civil War. Upham’s “mementos of the Rebellion” proved enormously popular, and the influx of these fakes into the South drove down the value of Confederate currency, infuriating Southern leaders.
    The biographies of these men tell the story of a country coming of age—from a patchwork of largely self-governing colonies to a loosely assembled union of states and, finally, to a single nation under firm federal control. Each responded to the political and economic realities of his era, propelled by a desire for profit and fame. They