A Counterfeiter's Paradise (22 page)

On Bennett’s Branch of the Sinnemahoning Creek, not far from where a sawmill harnessed the channel’s fast current to chop logs into lumber, lived Lewis’s mother, Jane. Now seventy years old, she had married for the third and final time and, at an age when she might have sought an
easier life, remained the tough Presbyterian frontierswoman that Lewis’s father had courted more than a half-century earlier. The thinly settled country around the Sinnemahoning looked like the Pennsylvania that Jane remembered from her youth; perhaps more populated places like Bellefonte, which by 1820 still had fewer than five hundred residents, had become too crowded for her. The Bellefonte posse, convinced that Lewis and Connelly would try to hide with Jane, headed straight for her house. It took them three days to reach it, and on the evening of June 29, two of the men went ahead to speak with the old woman. Not only did they find no trace of Lewis, but Jane, loyal to her troublesome son ever since he had deserted from the army, told them nothing.

If she wouldn’t lead them to the robbers, the troop from Bellefonte had little hope of success; adrift in an unfamiliar landscape, they could roam forever without finding the fugitives. The next day, the men marched up Bennett’s Branch to where it joined Driftwood Branch, another tributary of the Sinnemahoning, and continued eastward along the water, swatting the gnats and mosquitoes that clung to their perspiring faces. They were five miles into the trek when they stumbled upon David Brooks, a local who told them he had recently seen someone who fit Lewis’s description. Thrilled, the men enlisted him as a guide. Brooks led them back the way they came, traveling west on the Sinnemahoning and then north up Driftwood Branch as the sun sank steadily in the sky.

About an hour before sunset, they reached a steep bluff. Gunshots rang out below: peering down, they saw a house, with Lewis and Connelly shooting targets outside. The posse couldn’t have hoped for a better setup: concealed from the criminals’ view, they were perfectly positioned to launch a surprise attack. There was only one problem. According to Brooks, there were women and children inside the house who might get hurt in the firefight, and any civilian casualties would spoil the triumph of taking the villains. So, instead of charging down the cliff, the men instructed Brooks to tell another local they spotted nearby, William
Shephard, to walk over to the house and, without tipping off Lewis and Connelly, warn everyone to stay inside.

The plan failed miserably. As soon as Shephard finished talking to Brooks, he went right to the robbers and gave the alarm—perhaps he had been recruited as an accomplice, or sympathized with Lewis. The posse, realizing what had happened, sprinted down the bank, calling Lewis and Connelly by name and demanding their surrender. The criminals answered with threats—Connelly swore that he would blow them all to hell—and opened fire. The Bellefonte men let off a volley and the shootout began: guns crackling, smoke streaming from their barrels, bullets hurtling in all directions. Two of the balls hit Lewis: one pierced his left thigh, the other his right forearm, and with blood pouring from his wounds, the bandit dropped to the ground. Connelly, seeing his partner fall, turned around and ran. He tried to lose his pursuers in a grain field, but they hunted him down. A bullet had punctured his groin and exited through his right thigh, slicing open his lower belly. By the time the men found him, his intestines were bulging from his brawny body.

The posse treated the prisoners’ injuries as best they could, purchased a canoe, and set off in haste toward Bellefonte. Lewis and Connelly lay in the boat, their flesh putrefying in the midsummer heat, while their captors navigated the meandering route home: down Driftwood Branch to the Sinnemahoning and then along the West Branch of the Susquehanna to the site where, a week earlier, the robbers had burned the goods they couldn’t carry. The party landed there on July 2 and, instead of pushing on to Bellefonte, took the prisoners to a tavern and summoned three local doctors. Connelly was too far gone to save; he died that night. Lewis was in better shape. The bullets had wounded his leg and shattered his wrist, but he could travel. So the men, eager to bring him back alive, hauled their crippled captive the thirty remaining miles to Bellefonte and strode into town like conquering heroes.

They had reason to be proud. A dozen men from a small Allegheny
town had done what no one else could, not even the governor in Harrisburg. The
Bellefonte Patriot
surged with hometown pride, praising the “gallant little band” as a model for all Pennsylvanians. “It is surely the duty of every good citizen, and every honest man, to hunt down such monsters,” the
Patriot
wrote. But the townsfolk who got a glimpse of the prisoner could only be disappointed by what they saw. Bruised and broken, Lewis didn’t look like the charismatic populist of myth or the terrifying desperado of recent news reports. And once secured in the town’s jail, he didn’t stage a memorable spectacle or attempt one of his daring jailbreaks. He sat in his filthy cell, refusing to make a statement of any kind, while his wounded arm grew black with gangrene. A doctor demanded that the limb be amputated, but Lewis resisted, and the gangrene spread. On July 12, he died in his cell. The Presbyterian minister who attended Lewis said he spent his painful last moments pleading with God to let him live.

NEWSPAPERS THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY
wrote about Lewis’s capture and death. People in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston read about it; so did people living in smaller towns in Virginia, New Jersey, and South Carolina. Almost a thousand miles from Bellefonte, residents of Cahawba, Alabama’s newly laid-out state capital, learned about Lewis’s fate in the pages of the
Alabama Watchman
. Even for those who had never heard of the bandit, the showdown on the Sinnemahoning made for engaging reading. The only thing missing was a dramatic finish. Rather than dying defiantly on the battlefield, Lewis ended his life in a grimy cell, killed by a gruesome wound. Worst of all, he seemed to have lost the swagger that had made him a fascinating figure from his early career as a counterfeiter to his later days as a robber. His vicious thieving streak in the summer of 1820 had hurt his Robin Hood reputation, and he made no effort at the end of his life to restore his stature. For someone who had spent years cultivating his image, he went to the grave apparently indifferent to his legacy.

On August 1, 1820, twenty days after Lewis died, a curious notice appeared on page 3 of McFarland’s
Carlisle Republican
. Before his death the prisoner suddenly became “very communicative,” the editor said, and dictated the story of his life to a gentleman who visited him in jail. The
Republican
had gotten hold of the manuscript—“a true and correct statement of Lewis’s own words”—and ran an excerpt, promising to print more in future issues. In the next couple of months, McFarland published another seven installments. He eventually put them together, in slightly edited and expanded form, into a sixty-page pamphlet that sold for fifty cents, entitled
The Confession or Narrative, of David Lewis
.

People familiar with the particulars weren’t fooled. The idea that a prisoner dying of gangrene would narrate a lengthy memoir in fewer than ten days, and that his hastily transcribed words—scribbled on “several detached sheets in a hand writing somewhat difficult to read,” McFarland noted—would turn up in a newspaper a hundred miles away, was pretty far-fetched. “David Lewis never uttered one sentence, word, or syllable of this forged confession,” declared a letter published in the
American Volunteer
in September that refuted many of the narrative’s claims. The next week’s
Volunteer
reprinted a statement that had first appeared in the
Bellefonte Patriot
, cosigned by the county sheriff and town jailer, affirming that Lewis made no statement aside from the few words he had with the Presbyterian minister shortly before his death. The officials denounced McFarland’s document as a “sheer fabrication.”

The confession was a counterfeit, and McFarland—who may have written it, but more likely commissioned and edited it—knew that it wouldn’t deceive everyone. Nonetheless its author tried to give the story a realistic touch by including a handful of events that contemporary readers would have recognized as factual, like Lewis’s desertion from the army and his robbing spree with Connelly. The bulk, however, is total fantasy. Lewis speaks in florid, literary prose, recounting scenes with dazzling amounts of descriptive detail. He plays the quintessential picaresque hero: a
charming rogue whose “rambling disposition” puts him on the path to becoming a counterfeiter and a thief at an early age. His adventures span several states and range from the plausible—cardsharping at Princeton—to the fantastic—swiping Mrs. John Jacob Astor’s unattended purse at a Manhattan auction house.

Lewis’s character is deeply emotional. He often launches into tearful interludes about how guilt-ridden and homesick he felt as an outlaw, regretting his criminal career almost as soon as it began. Toward the end of the story, he returns to his birthplace and, lamenting his lost innocence, starts sobbing: “This gentle fluid of humanity, while it ran from my inflamed eyes, only scalded my cheeks without relieving my bursting heart.” Lewis’s sentimentality, even in its most mawkish moments, is also what makes him sympathetic. Tormented by shame, he tries to soothe his conscience by striving to be as moral a criminal as possible. He checks the violent impulses of his rougher colleagues, rescuing a girl about to be raped in a dark alley by a thug named Bob Brimstone and intervening whenever Connelly wants to start killing people. But he can never bring himself to abandon his life of crime, and he concludes his confession in the Bellefonte jail, imploring the anonymous visitor transcribing his words to take a lock of his hair to his beloved mother, cut from her dying son’s “unfortunate, but repentant” head.

McFarland printed the fake memoir to hurt Findlay. He timed its publication to inflict as much damage as possible on the incumbent’s reelection chances; the final installment appeared in the
Carlisle Republican
on October 6, 1820, just four days before Pennsylvanians went to the polls. Given McFarland’s bludgeoning editorial style, the confession’s criticism of Findlay is surprisingly subtle. It only includes one specific reference to the governor, a derisive remark about “the weak side of Governor Findlay in favoring applications” from convicts seeking pardons. But it’s full of angry diatribes against the Pennsylvania establishment that Findlay represents: an immoral political culture that lets the state’s
officeholders—appointed by the governor, of course—demand bribes and embezzle funds, and empowers predatory bankers to victimize unsuspecting country folk. When the Pennsylvania legislature charters forty-one new banks in March 1814, Lewis condemns the financial craze as “a legalized system of fraud, robbery and swindling”—although, as he himself admits, it’s a boon for counterfeiters like him. Lewis never once mentions Findlay’s name in these harangues, although the rampant venality he rails against reflects extremely poorly on the man sitting in the governor’s seat in Harrisburg. And this was no doubt McFarland’s intention: to disguise his personal attack on Findlay as a righteous call for reform.

By staying silent during his final days in jail, Lewis let McFarland’s spurious confession speak for him. The narrative’s fictional Lewis is much more virtuous than the historical Lewis ever was: he’s a social crusader, a devoted son, an affectionate husband. The confession ascribes the less palatable parts of Lewis’s career, like the ferocious string of robberies he committed just before his capture, to the influence of Connelly. The burly Irishman, whom Lewis calls his “evil genius,” plays the role of a remorseless tough—a counterpoint to Lewis’s idealism. And Lewis is not only the populist avenger familiar from the folktales; he’s also a shrewd social critic, someone who understands the political and economic forces at work in the Pennsylvania countryside.

While contemporaries exposed McFarland’s confession as a forgery, later generations weren’t as discriminating. In fact, the document eventually came to be accepted as genuine: the pamphlet appeared in new editions in 1853 and 1890, and excerpts were reprinted in newspapers. Lewis became a fixture of Pennsylvania lore: decades later, local historians wrote hagiographies of the old outlaw. A “man of fine physique” and “a born leader,” read one; “quite an Adonis,” raved another. His posthumous celebrity proved remarkably persistent. Lewis was said to have buried a pile of gold somewhere in the Alleghenies during his lifetime, and almost a century after his death, people were still trying to find the treasure. As late
as 1966, an owner of a Cumberland County feed mill named J. Raymond Baer remembered enough about Lewis to recount stories of the bandit’s beneficence. “My father knew of him and thought he saw him one time,” he said.

What’s harder to gauge is McFarland’s immediate impact on Findlay. The vitriol that characterized the contest in 1817 returned with a vengeance in 1820. The same candidates were running: the incumbent was William Findlay and the challenger was Joseph Hiester, a Revolutionary War hero. Neither represented a particular platform; all that distinguished them were the different political factions that backed them, motley coalitions vying for control of the Harrisburg patronage machine. The Panic had intensified the popular desire for reform, but instead of building their campaigns around specific policies, each side devoted its resources to denouncing the other as more corrupt. Mudslinging dominated the newspapers, leaving little room for real debate.

As if all the charges and countercharges weren’t disorienting enough, the election also saw the disintegration of the party system. Findlay ostensibly belonged to Pennsylvania’s ruling party, the Democratic-Republicans, but many members of his party defected to a rival camp, the Independent-Republicans, to support Hiester. The Federalists, who had almost disappeared on the national scene but still held pockets of Pennsylvania, split into pro-Findlay and pro-Hiester wings. And in each county, these groups splintered into smaller cliques with no particular party allegiance, cutting deals with one another to get their man elected to a local office. Lewis’s confession, as another voice in this noisy carnival, may not have made much of a difference. But McFarland got what he wanted. Hiester won by fewer than two thousand votes.