A Counterfeiter's Paradise (18 page)

Lewis’s years with Noble had taught him to avoid certain pitfalls. A tavern keeper testified that he once observed the defendant trying to persuade an old traveler from Kentucky to trade a large pile of silver for banknotes. The man declared he would only accept the bills if Lewis endorsed them by hand. The counterfeiter refused, saying he had injured his hand so badly he couldn’t hold a pen, and the Kentuckian, dissatisfied by this answer, walked away. Although it cost him a bundle of silver, Lewis made the right decision. Signing a counterfeit note to verify its authenticity was perjury, and he didn’t need another indictment on top of everything else.

Drawing on more than a month of hard work, Riddle produced definitive proof of Lewis’s guilt. Huston couldn’t hope to dispute such a substantial body of evidence with conflicting testimony, and in any case, he found only four witnesses to testify on Lewis’s behalf. He nonetheless gave a spirited defense, using technicalities to try to dodge Riddle’s well-supported accusations. He contested the court’s jurisdiction, complained about irregularities in the spelling of a witness’s name, and even cited English legal opinion in an unsuccessful effort to convince the judge that someone whose name had been forged couldn’t be admitted as a witness. But the lawyer, for all his persistence, failed to clear his client. On February 13 and February 17, the jurors convicted Lewis on two of the three indictments for passing counterfeit money.

By protesting that a bank had been misnamed in the text of the indictment, Huston managed to get the first sentence reduced to a small fine and ten hours in the Bedford jail. The second, however, stuck. Lewis faced another fine and, far worse, six years in the Philadelphia penitentiary. The court specified that Lewis be transferred to the city prison “with all
convenient speed under safe & secure conduct,” no doubt fearing that the prisoner, after losing his bid for freedom, would take matters into his own hands.

About an hour after the sun rose on February 27, Lewis broke out of the Bedford jail. He had been locked inside for almost a full two months, and given the building’s poor security, it’s surprising he didn’t make his getaway sooner. “He could easily have escaped,” opined a Bedford attorney familiar with the affair, “but his lawyers assured him of an acquittal, and as he did not want to lose the fifteen hundred dollars in the bank, he stood trial.” News of Lewis’s flight had a predictably explosive effect on the town. After Riddle’s artfully orchestrated conviction, the counterfeiter had vanished before the drama could come to its conclusion.

The
Bedford Gazette
was outraged. It accused Lewis’s jailers of freeing him, presumably for a bribe, and blamed the state’s “penny-wise Commissioners” for neglecting to build a better jail. “For the last five or six years we have not heard of any person detained in our prison, contrary to his wish,” the newspaper fumed. The sheriff posted a $300 reward for Lewis, and personally led a fruitless attempt to find him. The
Gazette
demanded an official investigation into how Lewis escaped, and who, if anyone, abetted the criminal. The counterfeiter remained at large for months. In mid-May, the authorities caught him in Ohio, only to have him slip through their fingers again. Around the first of June, he was finally captured in New York and taken in chains to Philadelphia.

LEWIS ARRIVED IN PHILADELPHIA
on June 8, 1816, just as the city was experiencing the worst cold wave in American memory. Three days before, a strong wind had come in from the northwest, driving the temperature down almost thirty degrees overnight. By the time Lewis got there, ice was so plentiful that fishermen brought chilled fish to summer market. The bizarre weather beset the entire country: farther north, snow
fell throughout New England, reaching twelve inches in many places. The year as a whole was so frigid that Americans everywhere dubbed it “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.” Some blamed sunspots, earthquakes, and a lunar eclipse for bringing on the cold; others prayed and fasted, begging God for forgiveness. Thousands of miles from Philadelphia, on the shores of Lake Geneva, the unusual climate kept Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin indoors, reading ghost tales by the fire with her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and other friends. When they decided to write their own stories to pass the time, she produced the idea for her novel
Frankenstein
.

While passersby huddled for warmth, Lewis was hauled to the prison on Walnut Street at the center of town. Its facade stood two stories tall, built of rough-cut stone and capped with a copper weather vane shaped like a key, which spun wildly in the blustery weather. Compared to most American jails, the Philadelphia prison was striking for its size. The main entrance led through iron-grated doors to a long corridor linking two addi-tional wings. Farther on was a courtyard that joined the compound’s other structures, including workshops where inmates toiled at various trades, separate rooms for delinquent debtors, and a solitary-confinement block.

These buildings were the legacy of a vocal band of reformers who, decades earlier, had determined to make the Walnut Street Jail a prototype for a new kind of penitentiary. Colonial justice had emphasized corporal punishment and public humiliation; the new approach called for rehabilitating criminals by putting them to work, segregating debtors from serious offenders, and improving living standards. It also required regulating the conduct of wardens, who in earlier days had let alcohol and prostitutes flow freely through their jails. Although the reformers prevailed on the authorities to adopt the majority of these changes, they had less success with their most revolutionary demand: keeping prisoners in solitary confinement, letting them out only to work. Rather than shaming the convict in public—at the pillory or the whipping post at the center of town—the
reformers wanted to sequester him, so he could reflect on his evil past and begin the lonely process of personal transformation. The plan simply wasn’t practical. The state legislature eventually had sixteen such cells built, not nearly enough to hold its more than three hundred inmates. The jailers ended up using the cells to quarantine particularly tough convicts or to punish recalcitrant prisoners.

The Walnut Street Jail housed convicts from all over Pennsylvania. Small towns like Bedford—whose authorities couldn’t afford to keep prisoners for long periods of time and whose jails were too weak to hold them anyway—dispatched their most troublesome criminals to Philadelphia. This eventually led to severe overcrowding that made conditions at the prison steadily worse. When Lewis arrived in the summer of 1816, the Walnut Street Jail had become almost precisely the opposite of what it was supposed to be. Instead of rehabilitating criminals, it hardened them; instead of segregating Pennsylvania’s worst lawbreakers, it brought them together to conspire and enlist new recruits. People serving time for minor offenses rubbed shoulders with the state’s most desperate felons, with the result that the prison undoubtedly produced more criminals than it reformed. Prisoners fought one another, provoked riots, assaulted jailers, and attempted increasingly brazen escapes. One convict sawed the irons off his leg, slipped through the bars on his window, and used a rope made from tied blankets to lower himself into the courtyard before vaulting over the wall.

The prison’s criminal culture was familiar to Lewis. Twenty-eight years old, he already had years of experience as a lawbreaker, both in Canada and in the United States, and had seen his name in newspapers throughout Pennsylvania after his widely publicized trial. Even so, the Walnut Street Jail transformed him. It left his charisma and his poise intact but toughened his resolve and deepened his daring. He had always been a gambler. Prison made him eager to take greater risks; he emerged ready to commit bigger, more spectacular crimes.

The Walnut Street Jail’s lawlessness not only emboldened Lewis, it also gave him a way to earn his freedom. As the prison descended into chaos, the jailers began relying on informers to help them keep order. Using informers had a double advantage: they supplied information that thwarted attacks and jailbreaks and, since they were usually pardoned, helped relieve congestion in the prison. Freeing inmates who squealed also saved lives, since other prisoners often tried to kill them. Determined not to serve his full six-year sentence, Lewis ingratiated himself with his keepers by informing on his fellow prisoners. In 1819, it finally paid off: after tipping off the jailers about a plan among inmates to escape, Lewis was recommended to the governor for amnesty.

When Lewis’s pardon reached Governor William Findlay’s desk in Harrisburg, he probably didn’t think twice before signing it. He regularly freed inmates at the Walnut Street Jail who had been nominated for clemency; if he didn’t, the overpopulation problem would have become even worse, and Findlay already had enough to worry about. He faced reelection the following year, and if the last contest was any indication, it wouldn’t be easy. An early disciple of Thomas Jefferson and a loyal member of the Democratic-Republican Party, Findlay had narrowly won in 1817 after an especially bitter contest against a coalition of dissident Democrats, Federalists, and independents. The partisan rancor didn’t subside when he took office, as the legislature immediately launched an inquiry into whether the new governor had embezzled public funds during his ten years as state treasurer. In the midst of managing this political whirlwind, granting another pardon would be a relief by comparison, a routine gesture. He couldn’t have known that signing it would soon come back to haunt him.

ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1819,
after three years and three months in the Walnut Street Jail, Lewis walked out a free man. A lot had happened while he was behind bars. He entered prison while America suffered the coldest
summer on record; he left to find the nation in the grip of a depression. In Philadelphia, employment had fallen 78 percent across thirty different trades since 1816, affecting industries as varied as cotton manufacturing, pottery, and book printing. Thousands of out-of-work laborers roamed the streets desperate for food. As winter approached, fears grew that the newly destitute masses wouldn’t be able to survive the season.

Lewis was witnessing what came to be called the Panic of 1819, the catastrophic conclusion to a period of prosperity that had lasted since the end of the War of 1812. The boom had been fueled by a surge in foreign trade, westward expansion, and a steady stream of currency and credit supplied by the nation’s banks. Banks had stopped redeeming their notes for coin in 1814 during the financial uproar surrounding the British invasion of the nation’s capital. When the war ended, the banks still hadn’t resumed payment, which meant they could print more and more paper without bothering about whether they had enough silver and gold to back it. Flush with cheap money, Americans invested in a rapidly diversifying domestic economy, speculating in everything from real estate to road building to textile manufacturing.

In a sign of the times, the New York Stock & Exchange Board opened on Wall Street in 1817. The conservative business ethic of Alexander Hamilton’s era, already under siege for decades, was in danger of being swept away by a horde of schemers and speculators. These men leveraged paper fortunes on stepladders of debt, prospering in an economy where actual cash was seldom exchanged. The engine ran on confidence: so long as people didn’t try to redeem one another’s promises to pay, banks could balance ever-greater piles of debt on a slim base of precious metals. America’s growing financial sophistication, instead of producing real riches, had created a hallucination that everyone conspired to sustain.

This period of false prosperity also saw the federal government incor-porate the Second Bank of the United States in the spring of 1816. Politicians like James Madison, who had loudly clamored for the first Bank’s
demise in 1811, now supported chartering a new one: the dire state of federal finances during the war and the deluge of irredeemable banknotes that followed it had changed their minds. The Second Bank opened its main branch a couple of blocks east of the Walnut Street Jail, in Carpenters’ Hall, a colonial-era Georgian building planned by the same architect who designed the prison. Its redbrick walls and white cupola evoked the receding memory of the Revolution: the delegates of the Continental Congress had first met there in 1774. The same resolve that had won the nation its independence would now be needed to rein in its financial disarray. The Bank scored an early victory in February 1817, when, along with the Treasury Department, it persuaded most state banks to resume the redemption of notes for coin, bringing a much-needed degree of sanity to the economy. At least nominally, America had returned to a specie basis for its currency.

Despite a strong start, the Bank soon became an enthusiastic parti-cipant in the mania it was supposed to regulate. Instead of taming the nation’s wildcat financiers, it helped buoy the bubble with fresh infusions of money and credit. The Bank’s directors, who came from the same aggressively entrepreneurial stock as the men who staffed the state banks, printed reams of notes and freely handed out loans. Regional branches sprang up throughout the country, lending to local borrowers with virtually no oversight from headquarters in Philadelphia; by the end of 1817, there were eighteen of them, in locations ranging from New Orleans to Cincinnati to Providence. The Bank filled its coffers with bills from state banks but, crucially, didn’t try to exchange them for coin—the resumption of specie payment in February meant that the Bank considered these notes equivalent to silver and gold.

The problem, of course, was that they weren’t. The exchangeability of bills for precious metals had grown increasingly theoretical: even banks that had nominally resumed payment did everything they could to prevent people from redeeming their notes. The Bank couldn’t continue
overextending itself for long, and by the summer of 1818, it was forced to take measures to stay solvent. It reduced the number of notes in circulation and, most important, called on the state banks to honor their bills.