A Counterfeiter's Paradise (25 page)

Upham wasted no time. He raced to the
Inquirer
’s cast-iron headquarters, a block away from his store, and persuaded the publisher William W. Harding to sell him a plate of the note. Then he called on a nearby printer and ordered three thousand copies on French letter paper. When the bills were ready, he brought them back to his shop and sold them for a cent each. Along the bottom margin of the notes he included a thin strip that read in small print “Fac-simile Confederate Note—Sold Wholesale and Retail, by S. C. Upham, 403 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.” They sold extremely well. The novelty thrilled Philadelphians, most of whom expected the war to be brief and glorious. They wanted souvenirs of the rebellion before the Union crushed it.

Ever since the Civil War broke out, Upham had been looking for a way to cash in on the conflict. The year before, he printed envelopes stamped with dozens of different patriotic illustrations, ranging from reverential portraits of Union generals to witty visual gags that reflected Upham’s mischievous sense of humor. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, bore the brunt of most of these jokes, appearing as a jackass, a skunk, and a devil with a cloven hoof. One showed Davis hanging from the gallows with the text “A full length drawing of Jeff. Davis, Esq.
taken from life. Executed by U. States
.”

The Confederate notes, however, were something new. Upham had known that the South issued currency; he even poked fun at it in one of his envelopes, which displayed a pile of worthless Southern notes labeled “No Redemption” and “Wild Cat Marked Good.” But it had never occurred to him to sell copies of the bills themselves, and the sensation surrounding the
Inquirer
’s reproduction clearly caught him by surprise. Confederate notes gave Upham the ideal product. His envelopes had faced competition from many stationers who peddled similar items; Southern money, on the other hand, was a commodity that no one sold openly but everyone wanted. He could corner the market, supplying his “facsimiles” to customers throughout the Union.

After the success of his first print run, Upham began expanding his inventory. He searched everywhere for more issues and denominations, and soon came across
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
. An English-born engraver, Leslie published a popular weekly that carried vividly drawn woodcut scenes of the war, and in January 1862, he ran a copy of a $10 Confederate note. Upham bought the plate, printed more bills, and retailed them from his Chestnut Street storefront for the same price as the previous batch: one cent apiece. The new note, while less ornate than the last, made the same grandiose appeal to American iconography. The centerpiece depicted Lady Liberty and a bald eagle with their faces turned toward each other as if deep in conversation; at their feet lay a shield decorated with a Confederate flag.

Now with two plates in his possession, Upham diversified his catalog of Southern money at a rapid pace, promising to pay exorbitant rates in gold for more specimens. He insisted that his notes were souvenirs—“a curiosity…worth preserving,” as the original
Inquirer
article put it. But as Upham’s enterprise grew, it became clear that his merchandise served another, less innocent purpose. The tags along the bottom of the bills bearing his name and address could easily be clipped off, transforming the “facsimile” into a counterfeit note. Upham, the respectable small-business owner, devoted patriot, and upstanding member of Philadelphia’s middle class, had become a moneymaker.

UPHAM MADE AN UNUSUAL ADDITION
to the pantheon of American counterfeiters. Unlike Owen Sullivan or David Lewis, he didn’t sequester himself in the wilderness; instead, he set up on a busy street in downtown Philadelphia, one of the nation’s most densely populated cities, and hawked his counterfeits openly. He didn’t perform daring stunts or stage spectacular jailbreaks. He wasn’t a bandit; he was a shopkeeper driven by the logic of supply and demand. Southern notes, issued by a government that was emphatically not recognized by the Union, had no legal status in the North, which meant Upham could forge them with impunity. The British military had counterfeited American continentals during the Revolution; Upham, however, didn’t belong to an official Union effort to undermine the Southern economy by flooding it with fake money. True to the American spirit of private enterprise, his operation came about as a for-profit business, not a government-sponsored campaign.

During the past several decades, Andrew Jackson’s laissez-faire legacy had enabled many species of semi-legal financial fraud that bordered on counterfeiting. But the circumstances of the Civil War created a new kind of moneymaker: someone who could forge currency without breaking the law. This paradox of a profession was perfect for Upham, whose own
personality contained more conflicts and contradictions than would have been apparent to those who knew him only as a middle-aged shopkeeper. In February 1862 he turned forty-three. His life had seen periods of great excitement and crushing tedium spread over a diverse series of careers. He had been both an accountant and an adventurer: he worked for years as a bookkeeper in Philadelphia, but had also sailed around Cape Horn to dig for gold in California. He was a meticulous man who loved putting numbers and names into lists; he embraced bourgeois values and believed deeply in democracy, capitalism, and self-reliance. But he also had a vision of a wider, sparkling world that couldn’t be contained within the margins of a merchant’s ledger, and occasionally this transcendent stirring would rise to the surface to challenge his otherwise orderly existence.

Upham was born in Montpelier, Vermont, in 1819. He grew up within sight of Camels Hump, one of the tallest peaks of the Green Mountains, and spent enough time looking at its distinctive silhouette to remember it clearly decades later, when he saw a similar summit off the coast of Brazil during his voyage to California. His parents, Samuel and Sally, were devout Methodists. His father, known locally as Honest Sam Upham, earned a living as a blacksmith and later as a farmer; his honesty appears to have been his most memorable trait, and he lived an undistinguished life in the shadow of his older brother William. William mangled his right hand in a cider press when he was fifteen, a gruesome accident that had the happy result of giving him an education. Since he couldn’t work on a farm, he went to school. He became Vermont’s best-known Upham: a successful lawyer and a staunchly antislavery senator whose death from smallpox in 1853 occasioned a moving eulogy from his friend William H. Seward, later Lincoln’s secretary of state. “He had gotten nothing by fraud or guile,” Seward said of Senator Upham, nine years before his nephew began forging money.

Few families traced their American ancestry as far back as the Uphams.
The patriarch, John Upham, sailed across the Atlantic in 1635, a mere fifteen years after the
Mayflower
, and settled in Weymouth, a colony on the Massachusetts coast. Over the course of the next couple of centuries, his descendants became farmers and doctors and congressmen—-pillars of the establishment in communities across the country, earning the quiet esteem of their peers and, occasionally, the hatred of those who felt slighted. Charles Wentworth Upham had the misfortune of being a prominent Whig in Salem when Nathaniel Hawthorne, a Democrat, lost his job at the town customhouse for political reasons. The enraged author blamed Upham, and when his novel
House of the Seven Gables
appeared a few years later, it included a character that was said to be his revenge: Jaffrey Pyncheon, an eminent citizen and self-serving hypocrite who belongs to an old American family.

Samuel was a seventh-generation Upham and the fifth Samuel in a row. The Montpelier where he was born was a town of approximately two thousand people living in the foothills of the Green Mountains. It had become Vermont’s capital in 1805, and the State House, an unpretentious wooden building three stories tall, dominated its center—especially at night, when tallow candles illuminated the facade. Inside hung a garish chandelier that seemed unrepublican to some of Montpelier’s residents, whose mostly agrarian existence afforded few extravagances.

Montpelier’s unhurried pace provided the young Upham with plenty of time for daydreaming about more exciting places. Elsewhere in the country, far from Blackberry Hill, Hogback Mountain, and the other imaginatively named inclines that surrounded his childhood home, life was moving faster. Factories and banks were being built; the twin engines of industrialization and finance were changing the way Americans had lived for generations. Some manufacturing came to Montpelier—cotton mills, a nail factory—but it couldn’t keep up with Burlington, its faster-growing neighbor to the west. The first bank, the Bank of Montpelier, wasn’t
chartered until 1825, well after the banking mania had swept through the rest of the nation and helped trigger the Panic of 1819. Not everyone in Vermont shared Montpelier’s ambivalence about printing money, however: counterfeiters had infested the state since the eighteenth century, producing stacks of fake cash along the rugged Canadian border. David Lewis and Philander Noble had been there the decade before Upham was born, and years later, the trade was still going strong. By the 1830s, Vermont’s moneymakers had built sophisticated distribution networks to ferry their bills hundreds of miles along roads and canals to passers in Indiana and Virginia. As a boy, Upham probably saw at least one counterfeiter led in chains to Montpelier’s granite jail.

At the age of twenty, Upham left home. He got as far away from Montpelier as he could: New York City. The industrial and financial currents that were making slow inroads in Montpelier were literally tearing New York apart. Thanks in part to the demise of the Second Bank of the United States in the 1830s, Manhattan had become the riotous epicenter of American capitalism, a victim of the extreme poverty and prosperity brought about by a laissez-faire economy. On Wall Street, brokers hustled for higher profits, while a mile up the island, newly arrived Irish immigrants cut one another’s throats in tenement slums. For a young man from the countryside, New York would be a fast education. It certainly offered more opportunities for youthful indiscretion than Montpelier: saloons, opium dens, and brothels, to name a few. Upham got a job as a clerk, likely bookkeeping for one of the city’s innumerable firms.

It wasn’t until his late twenties that Upham settled into a more anchored life. He moved to Philadelphia, where he secured a well-paid position as an accountant for a lumber company and, in 1846, married a seventeen-year-old girl named Ann Eliza Bancroft. Within a couple of years, they had their first child: Marion, a daughter. But the restlessness that had burned within him since boyhood remained, waiting to flare up when the moment came. When, in the summer and fall of 1848, reports began to trickle in
that gold had been discovered in California, Upham decided to go. His responsibilities as a father and husband could wait.

ON FEBRUARY 2, 1849,
in a turbulent patch of the Atlantic somewhere off the coast of Florida, the
Osceola
cut powerfully through the waves, its two masts slanted obliquely across the horizon. The night before, a violent storm had blown in from the northeast, splitting the fore-topsail, and while the worst was over, the sea was still rough. On board, the brig’s sixty-five passengers and fifteen crew members braced their stomachs for each heave of the hull, hoping to keep down their last meal. They were sailing to California via Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America, a voyage of twenty thousand miles. Three weeks into the trip, some were having second thoughts. Provisions of food and fresh water were already running low; gales struck the boat frequently. The captain was a stubborn old tyrant who yelled profanities at his mates and, worse, showed little concern for living conditions aboard the ship. Steerage, where most passengers were, looked like a tenement: forty-four people packed into a small, unventilated space littered with chicken coops and pigpens.

The richer travelers stayed above-decks, in cabins that got better air but sometimes flooded with seawater. This was where Upham sat, scribbling in his journal. It was his thirtieth birthday. “Have been a rolling-stone all my life, consequently have gathered no moss,” he wrote. “And now in search of ‘the golden fleece,’ and may return shorn.” He had earned enough as an accountant to buy a cabin berth, but even in his relatively comfortable quarters, the hardships of the journey had begun to take their toll. “Descriptions of a ‘life on the ocean wave’ read very prettily on shore,” he reflected, “but the
reality
of a sea voyage speedily dispels the romance.”

The romance had been intoxicating back in Philadelphia, when Upham started reading stories about California. At first they seemed too ridiculous to believe. On January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James W. Marshall
had found pieces of gold in the American River while building a sawmill at Coloma, about 140 miles inland from San Francisco. The news took awhile to reach the eastern cities, but when it did, its impact was electric. The
New York Herald
raved about rivers “whose banks and bottoms are filled with pure gold”—the mythic El Dorado, sought by the Spaniards for centuries, had finally been found. Skeptics dismissed the rumors as a hoax. It seemed unlikely that California, a sparsely populated backwater that the United States had officially annexed in February 1848 after winning the Mexican-American War, would have so much untapped mineral wealth. But their doubts disappeared in December 1848, when President James K. Polk confirmed California’s “abundance of gold” in his State of the Union address.

Polk’s announcement officially launched what came to be known as the California gold rush. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country and the world—South America, Asia, Australia, Europe—went to California hoping to make their fortune. Contemporaries called it an “infection,” a “fever,” and they were right: what the gold rush resembled above all was an epidemic. Someone traveling across California might think the region had recently suffered from an outbreak of plague. The race to the mines had depopulated the countryside almost overnight, leaving behind the eerie spectacle of empty homes and half-sown fields. Captains who anchored their ships off the coast awoke to find their crews gone, the sailors having fled for the mines. The gold rush warped people’s sanity, inducing a kind of delirium that made enormous risks seem completely justified. Australian sheepherders, Chinese peasants, and Philadelphia bookkeepers like Upham left home for a land they knew little about, with no guarantees that they would get rich or even survive the journey.