A Counterfeiter's Paradise (40 page)

77, First Sullivan boasted

The scene at the gallows: Sullivan,
A Short Account
, pp. 11–12, and
New-York Gazette: or, the Weekly Post-Boy
, May 17, 1756, reprinted in Scott,
Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut
, p. 141. Prices in New York:
New-York Mercury
, May 3, 1756.

77–78, A century later

Physiological effects associated with hanging: Charles Meymott Tidy,
Legal Medicine
, vol. 3 (New York: William Wood, 1884), pp. 241, 243–244.

78, Killing the moneymaker

“[I]t appears by…”:
from the text of “An Act more effectually to Suppress and prevent the Counterfeiting of the Paper Currency of this Colony,” quoted in Scott,
Counterfeiting in Colonial New York
, p. 93. Beecher’s efforts at capturing the remainder of the gang: Scott,
Counterfeiting in Colonial America
, pp. 208–209. Sullivan’s products had a long shelf life: “It is not improbable that much of the counterfeit money circulating in the province in 1758 originated with the Dutchess County Gang,” writes Scott in
Counterfeiting in Colonial New York
, p. 95.

78–79, Sullivan’s posthumous paper

Sale of gallows speech:
New-York Mercury
, May 17, 1756.
“[t]aken from his own mouth”:
Boston Evening-Post
, April 30, 1756. Sullivan’s meager possessions when he stood trial are recorded in the New York Supreme Court of Judicature Minute Book: April 1, 1754–January 22, 1757 (Engrossed), p. 255.

79, Sullivan’s career lasted

Printing large amounts of paper money to fund the war effort: Fred Anderson,
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766
(New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 582.

79–80, Americans couldn’t reform

British monetary policy toward the colonies: Joseph Albert Ernst,
Money and Politics in America, 1755–1775: A Study in the Currency Act of 1764 and the Political Economy of Revolution
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 24–37, 39–40, and Bray Hammond,
Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 [1957]), pp. 25–26.

80, The legal tender

British creditors’ concerns: Ernst,
Money and Politics in America, 1755–1775
, pp. 40–41. The peace treaty: Anderson,
Crucible of War
, pp. 505–506. Louisbourg’s destruction: James D. Kornwolf with Georgiana W. Kornwolf,
Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America
, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 307–308.

80–81, After the joy

The war’s impact on the economy and the postwar depression: Anderson,
Cru-cible of War
, pp. 583, 588–591. The collapse of the Amsterdam firm Gebroe-ders Neufville in the summer of 1763 led to a panic throughout northern Europe.

81, In a case

“any bargains, contracts…”:
Anderson,
Crucible of War
, p. 584. Currency Act of 1764: Hammond,
Banks and Politics in America
, p. 26, and Ernst,
Money and Politics in America, 1755–1775
, pp. 43–88, 90–133.

81–82, On a summer night

The scene of the attack: Malcolm Freiberg, “Thomas Hutchinson and the Province Currency,”
New England Quarterly
30.2 (June 1957), pp. 207–208, and Edmund S. Morgan, “Thomas Hutchinson and the Stamp Act,”
New England Quarterly
21.4 (December 1948), pp. 459–460.
“threatened me with destruction…”:
from Hutchinson’s letter to Henry Seymour Conway, dated October 1, 1765, quoted in Freiberg, “Thomas Hutchinson and the Province Currency,” pp. 207–208. Hutchinson’s refutation of the Declaration of Independence was entitled “Strictures Upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia: In a Letter to a Noble Lord,” published in London in 1776.

82–83, The revolutionaries’ first

Charles W. Calomiris, “Institutional Failure, Monetary Scarcity, and the Depreciation of the Continental,”
Journal of Economic History
48.1 (March 1988), pp. 55–57, and Ralph Volney Harlow, “Aspects of Revolutionary Finance, 1775–1783,”
American Historical Review
35.1 (October 1929), pp. 46–68. On June 22, 1775, the Continental Congress resolved to print bills of credit “for the defence of America”; see Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed.,
Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789
, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905), p. 103. For the July 29 resolution concerning the retirement and redemption of continentals, see Ford,
Journals of the Continental Congress
, vol. 2, pp. 221–223. Franklin’s designs: Jennifer J. Baker,
Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 74–75, and Benjamin H. Irvin, “Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Enriching Virtues,’”
Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life
6.3 (April 2006),
http://www.common-place.org
.

83–84, Despite Franklin’s graceful

Legal tender policies: S. P. Breckinridge,
Legal Tender: A Study in English and American Monetary History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), pp. 66–67.
“treated as an enemy…”:
from a resolution passed on January 11, 1776, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed.,
Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789
, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), p. 49.
Continental losing half its value in three weeks and the March 1780 issue: Ron Chernow,
Alexander Hamilton
(New York: Penguin Press, 2004), p. 137.

84, Although Congress made

States’ paper money issues during the war: Breckinridge,
Legal Tender
, pp. 68–71. British counterfeiting: Scott,
Counterfeiting in Colonial America
, pp. 253–263.
“counterfeit Congress-Notes…”:
from a newspaper advertisement dated April 14, 1777, quoted in Scott,
Counterfeiting in Colonial America
, p. 254.
“too illiberal…”:
from a letter by the British commander, General Sir William Howe, to Washington, dated February 5, 1788, and quoted in Lynn Glaser,
Counterfeiting in America: The History of an American Way to Wealth
(Philadelphia: Clarkson N. Potter, 1968), p. 43. Capture of British warships with counterfeits aboard: Scott,
Counterfeiting in Colonial America
, p. 255; and Glaser,
Counterfeiting in America
, pp. 41–42.

84–85, The currency crisis

“I am so angry…”:
from a letter by an unidentified Pennsylvanian, reproduced in Henry Phillips Jr.,
Continental Paper Money: Historical Sketches of American Paper Currency, Second Series
(Roxbury, MA: W. Elliot Woodward, 1866), pp. 104–105.

85, Antigovernment feeling spilled

Shays’s Rebellion: John R. Alden,
A History of the American Revolution
(New York: Da Capo, 1989 [1969]), pp. 508–511; Chernow,
Alexander Hamilton
, pp. 224–225; and Hammond,
Banks and Politics in America
, pp. 96–97. After 1779, the Congress stopped large-scale printing of continentals.

85–86, The United States faced

Impact of continentals crisis and states’ paper money on financial thinking: Hammond,
Banks and Politics in America
, pp. 91–99.
“to ruin commerce…”:
from a letter by Washington to Jabez Bowen of Rhode Island, dated January 9, 1787, quoted in George Bancroft,
A Plea for the Constitution of the U.S. of America: Wounded in the House of Its Guardians
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), p. 88.

86, Thomas Paine took

“is like putting…”:
from Thomas Paine,
Dissertations on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper Money
(1786), in Thomas Paine,
Thomas Paine Reader
, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 193.

86, At the Constitutional Convention

Debate at the Constitutional Convention: Hammond,
Banks and Politics in America
, pp. 91–95.
“a friend to paper money”:
Max Farrand, ed.,
The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787
, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), p. 309.

86–87, Opposition was predictably

“if not struck out…”
and
“reject the whole…”:
Farrand,
The Records of the Federal Convention
, p. 310.

CHAPTER FOUR

91, On New Year’s Eve

St. George’s United Methodist Church in Philadelphia was founded in 1769 and remains the oldest continuously used Methodist church in America. The Methodist vigil was called a “watch night”; see Karen B. Westerfield Tucker,
American Methodist Worship
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 65–67. Postwar growth in foreign trade and surge in patriotism: C. Edward Skeen,
1816: America Rising
 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), pp. 18–19, 27. War’s effect on westward expansion: Donald R. Hickey,
The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 303–304.
“Come, let us…”:
from a hymn written by Charles Wesley, included in
Hymnal of the Methodist Episcopal Church
With Tunes
(New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1882), p. 354.

91–92, About two hundred

The story of New Year’s Eve at Bloody Run: Hill Wilson’s testimony at Lewis’s 1816 trial,
Commonwealth v.
David Lewis
, Court of Oyer and Terminer, Bedford County (January and February Terms, 1816). The testimony appears in the -fifty-eight pages of trial transcript recorded by someone working for Charles Huston, Lewis’s defense lawyer, and currently held by the Centre County Library and Historical Museum in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. The pages are difficult to read, but portions of them are transcribed in a pair of articles written for a special edition of
Centre County Heritage
devoted entirely to Lewis: Douglas Macneal, “Uttering, Publishing and Passing—Counterfeiting in 1816” and “A Suspicious Camp, an Arrest in Bedford, and Showdown on the Sinnemahoning,” both in
Centre County Heritage
24.2 (Fall 1987). All dialogue is taken from Wilson’s statements.

92, Lewis was a man

Physical description of Lewis:
American Volunteer
, May 9, 1816, and the record of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail, where Lewis arrived as a prisoner in June 1816, both quoted in Mark Dugan,
The Making of Legends: More Stories of Frontier America
(Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1997), pp. 34–35.

92, Wilson the tavern keeper

Wilson was anxious because he feared how Lewis might react. “I felt uneasy,” he explains in his testimony, “because [Lewis] was suspected.”

93, The sheriff later

“Lewis said he…”:
from the testimony of Thomas Moore, the sheriff, included in the fifty-eight-page trial transcript.

94, Lewis had every

Description of the jail:
History of Bedford, Somerset and Fulton Counties, Penn-sylvania
(Chicago: Waterman, Watkins, 1884), pp. 196–197. Scenic details of Bedford: Fortescue Cuming,
Cuming’s Tour to the Western Country (1807–1809)
, vol. 4 of
Early Western Travels
, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1904 [1810]), p. 65. The coalfields were located at Broad Top Mountain, in northeastern Bedford County. Samuel Riddle, a lawyer who played a major role in Lewis’s prosecution, was the first to mine coal there and ship it commercially; see John Woolf Jordan, ed.,
A History of the Juniata Valley and Its People
, vol. 1 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1913), p. 306.

94, Lewis was virtually

“a man calling…”:
American Volunteer
, January 18, 1816.

94–95, Despite his apparent

The facts of Lewis’s childhood and early life are hard to come by, not only because of the ever-present problem of a thin paper trail, but also because of a spurious confession that appeared after his death in 1820. The confession, which purported to be written by Lewis in his jail cell in Bellefonte but which was in fact forged, offered false information about his life that subsequent genealogists incorporated into their histories. One resident of central Pennsylvania was so enraged by the confession’s inaccuracy that he wrote a letter, published in the
American Volunteer
, September 21, 1820, offering many corrections. He gave Lewis’s birthplace as “
Bald-Eagle Valley
, on the banks of the Bald-Eagle creek,
about half a mile below the Bald-Eagle Nest.” This is corroborated by records showing that Lewis Lewis, David Lewis’s father, lived in the region that later became Upper Bald Eagle township in 1787—roughly a year before the counterfeiter’s birth—according to John Blair Linn,
History of Centre and Clinton Counties, Pennsylvania
(Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1883), p. 23. The year of Lewis’s birth is debated, but 1788 is the best estimate. Mac E. Barrick, in “Who Was Lewis the Robber?”
Cumberland County History
6.2 (Winter 1989), p. 55, gives 1788 as his birth year after looking at the records of the Philadelphia penitentiary that he entered in 1816, which listed him as twenty-eight years old. Lewis Lewis’s life: Rosalie Jones Dill,
Mathew Dill Genealogy: A Study of the Dill Family of Dillsburg, York County, Pennsylvania, 1698–1935
, pt. 2 (Spokane, WA: 1935), pp. 17–18. The vigilantes that stormed Philadelphia, known as the Paxton Boys: Walter Isaacson,
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), pp. 210–213. The 1774 war was called Lord Dunmore’s War, after the Virginia governor (John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore) who provoked it; see John Grenier,
The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 148–151.