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The lively and enthralling tale of three notorious counterfeiters offers insights into the makings of the American financial mind.

In Moneymakers, Ben Tarnoff chronicles the lives of three colorful counterfeiters who flourished in early America, shedding fresh light on the country's financial coming of age. The speculative ethos that pervades Wall Street today, Tarnoff suggests, has its origins in the craft of counterfeiters who first took advantage of a turbulent American economy.

Few nations have as rich a counterfeiting history as the United States. Since the colonies suffered from a chronic shortage of precious metals, they were the first place in the Western world ! to use easily forged paper bills. And until the national currency was standardized in the last half of the nineteenth century, the United States had a dizzying variety of banknotes, making early America a counterfeiter's paradise.

In Moneymakers, Tarnoff recounts how three of America's most successful counterfeiters-Owen Sullivan, David Lewis, and Samuel Upham- each cunningly manipulated the political and economic realities of his day, driven by a desire for fortune and fame. Irish immigrant Owen Sullivan (c. 1720-1756) owed his success not just to his hustler's charm and entrepreneurial spirit, but also to the weak law enforcement and craving for currency that marked colonial America. The handsome David Lewis (1788-1820) became an outlaw hero in backwoods Pennsylvania, infamous for his audacious jailbreaks and admired as a Robin Hood figure who railed against Eastern financial elites. Shopkeeper Samuel Upham (1819-1885) sold fake Confederate bills to his fe! llow Philadelphians during the Civil War as "mementos of the r! ebellion ," enraging Southern leaders when Union soldiers flooded their markets with the forgeries.

Through the tales of these three memorable counterfeiters, Moneymakers spins the larger story of America's financial ups and downs during its infancy and adolescence, tracing its evolution from a patchwork of colonies to a powerful nation with a single currency. It was only toward the end of the Civil War that a strengthened federal government created the Secret Service to police counterfeiting, finally bringing the quintessentially American pursuit to an end. But as Tarnoff suggests in this highly original financial history, the legacy of early American counterfeiters lives on in the get-rich-quick culture we see on Wall Street today.

Author Q&A with Ben Tarnoff

Q: Can you explain the significance of the title Moneymakers?

A: â€œMoneymakerâ€ was the colonial word for counterfeiter. When Owen Sullivan, the first counterfeiter profiled in my book, gets into a drunken fight with his wife in Boston in 1749, she calls him a â€œforty-thousand-pound moneymaker.â€ The neighbors overhear this remark and tell the police, who discover fake bills and printing materials at Sullivanâ€™s house and arrest him. I liked the word â€œmoneymakerâ€ because itâ€™s so literal: of all the ways to acquire money, only â€œmoneymakingâ€ involved actually manufacturing it. A disgruntled silversmith could disappear for a week and return richer than the cityâ€™s wealthiest merchant. Getting rich quick inspired as much awe and envy back then as it does today. For those riches to be fabricated by hand, and not earned the old-fashioned way, made counterfeiting seem like magic. Itâ€™s easy t! o see why counterfeiters became the outlaw celebrities of thei! r day. T hey embodied the enduring fantasy of instant wealth. Their fortunes were, in every sense, self-made.

Q: What initially drew you to the topic of counterfeiting?

A: When I started reading about the subject, I became fascinated with the stories of the individual counterfeiters. Very few began as professional criminals. Most started out as craftsmen: silversmiths or engravers, usually. Creating a plate for printing counterfeit bills required tremendous dexterity. The success of an entire operation essentially rested on one pair of hands. So counterfeiters tended to be talented artistsâ€"but they were also aggressively entrepreneurial. They needed to think on several levels: quality of the craftsmanship wasnâ€™t the only factor determining the success of a counterfeiting enterprise. There was the sale of the notes themselves, whether to regional distributors or to gangs of â€œpassers.â€ There was the geographical question of which communities t! o target. Perhaps most importantly, counterfeiters had to elude law enforcement and, as their notoriety grew, the prospect of lifetime imprisonment or execution. For these reasons they came to understand the political and economic landscape of early America far better than most criminals of the era.

Q: Do you think your book has special relevance today?

A: The financial crisis reminded us how rapidly wealth can evaporate. It reminded us that, despite huge advances in technology, we still live in a very precarious system. What Moneymakers brings into focus is that financial volatility hasnâ€™t been the exception in American history: itâ€™s been the rule. Itâ€™s tempting to think of our economic trajectory as one continuous ascent since the 18th century. But Americaâ€™s path to prosperity has been anything but linear: itâ€™s run from boom and bust, through wars and political upheavals, and impoverished people at least as often as itâ€™! s enriched them. Men and women two hundred years ago were not ! substant ially different from us. They were just as delusional about the prospect of inexhaustible growth in the 19th century as we were in the early part of the 21stâ€"and just as shocked and angry when those delusions gave way. Of course, many specific circumstances have changed since then. Counterfeiters were once ubiquitous in American life; today, theyâ€™ve virtually disappeared. Until the final decades of the 19th century, counterfeiters provided a significant portion of the nationâ€™s money supply, feeding Americaâ€™s addiction to paper credit with fresh infusions of fake currency. These days, counterfeit bills account for a negligible portion of the total in circulation. But though physical counterfeiting has declined, the spirit of counterfeiting endures. Counterfeitersâ€™ core insight was that confidence creates value. If a paper rectangle carried the right marks in the right places, and the person holding it appeared trustworthy, then it became valuable. Much of todayâ€™! s financial trickery proceeds from the same principle.

Q: What surprised you most while researching and writing?

A: There was a lot that surprised me. Maybe the most surprising single fact was how many different private paper currencies circulated in the United States before the Civil War. Iâ€™d thought weâ€™d always had a single federal currency, but it wasnâ€™t until the 1860s that it became politically possible for Congress to phase out the bills of some sixteen hundred state banks and replace them with national notes. More surprising than this, however, was how long the American people enduredâ€"and in many cases, endorsedâ€"a system with so many evident flaws. From the Revolution until the Civil War, they dealt with hundreds, and eventually thousands, of different banknotes, each fluctuating in value. They were victimized by predatory lenders, speculators, and a banking sector that swung from prosperity to panic, with devastating effect! s. The federal government couldâ€™ve stepped in to simplify an! d stabil ize this state of affairs. But the American people generally resisted the idea of a federal government powerful enough to make meaningful interventions in the economy and the currency, even if it would be to their benefit. The resistance to federal power was rooted in a particular interpretation of the Constitution and a long legacy of limited government. It led people to act against their economic self-interest, en masse and for long periods of time. Outdated notions of proper governance proved remarkably persistent, even when modern circumstances demanded something very different.

Q: Your book focuses on three counterfeiters. What made you decide on these people in particular?

A: With this subject thereâ€™s no shortage of colorful characters and engaging anecdotes. But I wanted to focus on people who, in some way, illustrated the story of Americaâ€™s financial evolution. These three men stood out because they intersected with the broader cu! rrents of their respective eras in exceptionally interesting ways. They were each active at moments of major change in the American monetary landscape. For example, Owen Sullivan launched his counterfeiting career in 1749, the same year that the Massachusetts legislature passed a highly controversial bill phasing out the colonyâ€™s paper currency within the next two years. Decades later, David Lewis picked a similarly momentous time: just as the rapid proliferation of note-issuing banks flooded the early United States with new bills, with obvious benefits for counterfeiters. Samuel Upham took advantage of the unique circumstances brought about by the Civil War. He forged Confederate money with impunity from the safety of Philadelphia, peddling his fakes openly to soldiers and smugglers headed South. Sullivan, Lewis, and Upham gave me a way to connect the story of American counterfeiting with the story of America as a whole.

Q: What did you learn about Amer! ica through writing this book? What did you learn about Americ! ans?

A: When you write history, you begin to see a lot of common ground between the past and the present. Almost every day, I would encounter a fact or a story that called to mind current events. America may look a lot different in 2010 than it did in 1690-1865, which is roughly the period covered by my book. But there are certain resonances. One theme that seems to have persisted, despite the major realignments of the last century, is the notion of getting â€œsomething for nothing.â€ Americaâ€™s first settlers thought of this country as a blank: â€œvacuum domicilium,â€ in John Winthropâ€™s words, or vacant land. This was a fantasy, of course: the land wasnâ€™t vacant, and clearing it involved a centuries-long struggle. But the idea of forging value in a void remained a powerful one.

Paper money belongs to this tradition. It makes something out of nothing by investing an otherwise worthless material with monetary value typically reserved for gold or ! silver. In fact, the American colonies were the first governments in the Western world to print paper currency. The notes first appeared in 1690 in response to the severe shortage of precious metals that plagued colonial life. Faced with a scarcity of coin, colonial America needed a way to fund wars and collect taxes and conduct trade: more broadly, it needed a way to convert the ambitions of its inhabitants into real economic growth. Paper currency met that need. It provided a country with few natural resources and little political or economic leverage the fuel to colonize an entire continent. Our economy ran on paper promises that, in many cases, couldnâ€™t be keptâ€"yet our collective faith in these promises helped produce real things, like canals and railroads. By postponing the present in anticipation of the future, paper promises helped America grow.

Q: Did you develop a new appreciation or understanding of the American economy through writing this book! ?

A: Our economy has grown so much in scale an! d sophis tication that itâ€™s hard to draw exact parallels. But there are certain patterns that feel very familiar. In the book I write a lot about confidence. It sustains the economy by underpinning the value of our currency; it also enriched counterfeiters over the centuries, who grew very adept at cultivating it. In the period covered by the book, Americans tended to have a confidence problem: they either had too much of it, taking risks as everything surged, or too little, fleeing the market as everything crumbled. As long as everyone believed something had valueâ€"whether a piece of colonial money or a stock certificateâ€"it did. But when that faith faltered, mistrust spread throughout the system, triggering a panic. The essential features of our most recent crisis would be familiar to people living through the Panics of 1819 or 1837 or any of the several subsequent disruptions in the following decades. The issue of how crises are created is very contentious, and Iâ€™ve tried to! be careful about not drawing unfair comparisons. Without diminishing the complexity of the debate, though, there are fascinating convergences between past and present when it comes to Americaâ€™s turbulent finances.

Q: What do you hope readers take away?

A: I think the most exciting thing about history is that itâ€™s filled with real people. They felt pain when they lost their life savings in financial panics. They argued bitterly about the role of government in the economy, just as bitterly as we do today. The more time I spend reading about the past, the more Iâ€™m reminded of people I know today. The correspondences arenâ€™t perfect, but enough of them exist to suggest human that nature hasnâ€™t changed much in the last three centuries. If thereâ€™s a larger lesson to the book, that might be it.

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Clothes Evening Dress

Monday, November 14, 2011

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