A Counterfeiter's Paradise (13 page)

The currency crisis profoundly shook the country’s Founders. Their first efforts at finance had inflicted real trauma on their fellow citizens. They had more than just humanitarian reasons for trying to fix the mess: financial instability had the potential to undermine the new nation’s authority. The disastrous continentals had provoked antigovernment sentiment, causing people to distrust and despise the national leadership for its role in the catastrophe. “I am so angry at this affair that I hardly know
what I write,” penned one Pennsylvanian during the war. “I sometimes think we don’t deserve the liberty we have been contending for, while such miscreants are suffered to breath[e] among us.” Once the Revolution had been won, American leaders needed to demonstrate the credibility of their promises and pronouncements, to gain the confidence of their citizens by giving them a currency whose value didn’t vaporize overnight.

Antigovernment feeling spilled over into outright revolt in 1786, when Daniel Shays, a decorated veteran of the Revolutionary War, led an uprising of farmers in western Massachusetts. Saddled with high taxes and crushing debt, the insurgents forcibly blocked foreclosures of their lands and shuttered courthouses. Chief among their complaints was the severe shortage of currency that made it impossible for them to pay taxes or debts. After the disastrous experience with continentals, governments and creditors had begun demanding payment in coin rather than in paper, but by the mid-1780s, precious metals were extremely hard to come by. The Massachusetts farmers wanted the government to give them a working medium of exchange by printing paper money and making it legal tender. The Shaysites scattered by February 1787, after an unsuccessful effort to capture a state arsenal killed four of the farmers. But the affair was a vivid reminder of the central government’s frailty: bound by the rigid restrictions of the Articles of Confederation, Congress couldn’t enforce its will, and the task of squashing the rebellion was left to the Massachusetts militia. The incident contributed to growing calls for reforming the nation’s governing document, which eventually brought about the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in May 1787.

The United States faced the same problem that its colonial predecessors had struggled with since the seventeenth century. In a land with few deposits of precious metals, what do you use for money? Taxes and trade required a circulating currency, and paper seemed like an obvious candidate. But the crisis with the continentals had been so damaging that vir-tually none of America’s leading men advocated printing paper money. In
the turbulent period leading up to the Constitutional Convention, they denounced paper in language that would have made Thomas Hutchinson proud. George Washington condemned paper for its propensity “to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.”

Thomas Paine took a similar view. In a vociferous polemic, he compared paper currency to alchemy, since both were efforts to transmute something worthless into gold and silver. Replacing precious metals with paper, he wrote, “is like putting an apparition in the place of a man; it vanishes with looking at it, and nothing remains but the air.” Like the hard-money men in the Massachusetts currency debate almost four decades earlier, these prominent critics saw paper notes as a kind of sorcery, a magical attempt to circumvent the scarcity of precious metals. They feared an economy built on nothing but promises.

At the Constitutional Convention, support for paper was scarce. Only one of the fifty-five delegates, John F. Mercer of Maryland, declared himself “a friend to paper money,” although he qualified the statement by saying that under current circumstances, he didn’t condone its use. The debate at the Philadelphia State House didn’t explore whether the nation should embrace paper currency—the consensus was that it shouldn’t—but whether it made sense for the national government to retain the right to print bills of credit, as provided by the Articles of Confederation. Advocates of keeping the clause explained that in the case of a public emergency like war, Congress might need to print paper notes to cover its costs.

Opposition was predictably fierce. George Read, a delegate from Vermont, replied that the power to issue paper, “if not struck out, would be as alarming as the mark of the Beast in Revelations.” John Langdon of New Hampshire agreed, announcing that he would rather “reject the whole plan than retain the three words” that gave the government the authority to print money. When it came to a vote, the delegates chose to remove the words. The final document they produced in September 1787 came out
firmly on the side of a hard currency under national control. The Constitution gave Congress the right to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin,” and prohibited states from minting coins, printing paper money, or making anything but silver and gold legal tender. While the Constitution didn’t expressly forbid Congress to issue paper currency, the assumption among the delegates was that the federal government didn’t possess any powers it wasn’t specifically given. They hoped that after almost a century of paper bills, the American economy would finally stand on a more solid footing.

They were wrong. The two factors that had caused colonial Massachusetts to print America’s first paper currency—the scarcity of coin and the demand for credit—were just as present in 1787 as they were in 1690. As long as the core issue remained unresolved, paper would find a way to return, and with it, the counterfeiters who capitalized on financial chaos. Far from ending the counterfeiting trade, the founding of the American Republic would usher in a golden era of moneymaking. If Owen Sullivan had been alive, it would have warmed his entrepreneurial heart. In the decades following his death, the Irishman’s successors enjoyed opportunities he could never have imagined, and took full advantage of the young United States.

O
N NEW YEAR’S EVE 1815,
Philadelphia’s Methodists crowded into a brick church on the northern end of town. They planned to stay up praying and singing past midnight while less pious Philadelphians caroused drunkenly through the streets. The congregation had a lot to give thanks for. On the verge of its fortieth year, the Republic was surging with patriotic feeling after having fought the British to a draw in the War of 1812. Americans had reasserted their freedom from a foreign power, safeguarding the experiment that had begun with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—documents that were signed in the hall of the Philadelphia State House, only a few blocks from where the worshippers stood. The nation was expanding westward and the economy, energized by an increase in foreign trade, was thriving. “Come, let us anew our journey pursue,” began one of the Methodist hymns for the New Year, a verse that captured the moment’s optimism.

About two hundred miles west, the year’s last sunset darkened the sky over Bloody Run, a village in the Pennsylvania backcountry. Under the orange silhouette of the Allegheny Mountains, David Lewis rode up to a tavern, dismounted, and walked in. He had left a horse with the proprietor, Hill Wilson, a couple of days before, with the understanding that
Wilson would either keep it for him or sell it. Now he wanted first to find out what happened, then a tumbler of gin to slake his thirst.

Lewis was a man who made an impression when he entered a room. Close to six feet tall, he held himself straight and walked with an easy, confident step. He had fair features—sandy blond hair and blue eyes—and dressed like a gentleman. His elegant attire would have been enough to attract attention from the other patrons, whose clothes, while less refined, were probably better suited to life in the Allegheny outback. But there was something else in the air that focused people’s eyes on Lewis, a palpable undertow of tension that followed him as he walked through the door.

Wilson the tavern keeper was nervous. When Lewis asked about the horse, he said the sheriff had confiscated the animal after discovering it was bought with counterfeit money. Lewis laughed. “I haven’t bought a horse in two months,” he replied; he didn’t even own the animal—he had borrowed it from someone named Leeper. Overhearing this, a local man named Jim Peoples called his bluff. “That was none of Leeper’s horses unless he got him lately,” Peoples said. “I don’t care when the devil he got him,” Lewis snarled. “Leeper gave him to me.”

Peoples and Wilson didn’t believe him. As it slowly became clear that they intended to arrest him, Lewis kept calm. He didn’t run; he took off his coat, ordered more gin, and made conversation. He maintained his innocence, laughing off their accusations. Escaping would have ended the moment too soon. He enjoyed sharing drinks with them: the civility of it tickled him, and he took great pleasure in hearing their impressions of him. “What did you think when I came in?” Lewis asked Peoples. “I considered you damn safe and pitied your case. I knew you could not get away,” he answered. This rankled Lewis enough for him to drop his genteel demeanor and declare that no man had a right to touch him. He promised to remain peaceable but swore to kill whoever laid a hand on him.

Lewis had been at Wilson’s tavern for two hours by the time the sheriff arrived. The officer came in with the man who had sold Lewis the horse
to help identify the culprit. After he confirmed that Lewis paid forged notes for the animal, the sheriff grabbed the counterfeiter by the wrist to take him prisoner. Wilson, either out of respect for Lewis or fear that he would become violent, told the sheriff there was no need to use force. The officer relented, and soon the evening’s good-natured tippling resumed as everyone settled down to drink more gin. They sat there for an hour before the sheriff pulled himself away from his glass to ask Wilson for a rope. “I must tie this man,” he explained. Wilson said it wasn’t necessary, but the sheriff insisted, so the tavern keeper reluctantly agreed to go find some cord.

A moment later Wilson heard a sound. He picked up a candle and ran toward the noise. The fluttering flame revealed a shadowy tableau: Lewis was clutching a gun in his right hand, trying to shoot, while Peoples, the sheriff, and another man struggled to disarm him. Wilson rushed to help, and the four of them knocked the pistol out of his palm and restrained him. “Why would you shoot me?” asked Wilson. It wasn’t personal, the counterfeiter explained. “If it was my own brother, I would kill him rather than be tied.”

The sheriff later described what happened while Wilson had been looking for rope next door. When the boozy socializing came to an end and the reality of his capture sank in, Lewis abruptly changed course. As the sheriff told the court at Lewis’s trial:

Lewis had every intention of murdering the sheriff, and would have done so if his weapon hadn’t misfired. After securing the prisoner in the tavern for the night, the men went to bed. In the morning they took the road to Bedford, a nearby town nestled in a valley enclosed almost entirely by the Alleghenies, and locked Lewis into the jail in the county courthouse. The building looked nothing like its prim, redbrick counterparts farther north in New England. It had a more rugged feel, with walls of blue limestone quarried from the nearby mountains—solid enough in their construction, the townsfolk hoped, to confine Lewis until he could stand trial.

LEWIS WAS VIRTUALLY UNKNOWN
when he arrived in Bedford on New Year’s Day. A newspaper report blandly identified the prisoner as “a man calling himself David Lewis.” But as he showed at the tavern the night before, he already possessed the qualities that would make him a legend within the next four years. To the men and women of central Pennsylvania, Lewis looked like he was from another planet. His polished dress and sophisticated affect dazzled them, and he complemented his refined exte-rior with a personality that immediately inclined people to him. Above all, he was a narcissist. Lewis wanted to know what others thought of him; he loved to see his reflection in his admirers’ faces. In less skillful hands, this self-absorption might have been alienating. But Lewis had a politician’s gift for letting other people feel like they owned a piece of him, that even in his most egotistical moments, he understood and represented them. This more than anything else is what would make him a folk hero.