by Ben Tarnoff
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.
ON 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 said he had no arms, when I asked him. Put my hand in his pocket and pulled out a dirk. He pulled out a pistol, said, “Y’r life is mine!” and snapped the pistol. We could not get him down. Fletcher struck him 2 or 3 times on the head with a stick. Mr. Wilson came in and caught him by the back of the neck and pulled him down…He said afterward he w’d have been sorry to have killed me but he was determined to kill any person who would attempt to take him.
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.
Despite his apparent gentility, Lewis didn’t come from an eastern city or a southern plantation. He was a native of central Pennsylvania, the youngest son of Lewis Lewis, a Welsh immigrant who then lived about a hundred miles north of Bedford, on the banks of a stream that runs alongside a ridge of the Alleghenies. His father settled in Pennsylvania before the Revolution and became a surveyor, dividing up parcels of land in a region still bloodily contested by Indians and whites. Pennsylvanians had a reputation for being particularly ruthless colonizers. In 1763, a band of white vigilantes who massacred natives on the Pennsylvania frontier became so powerful that they marched on Philadelphia five hundred strong, hoping to kill every Indian in the colony. Benjamin Franklin and others talked them down, but white rage continued to simmer as settlers pushed farther west into Indian territory. Another war broke out in 1774, this time sparked by colonists moving aggressively into the Ohio River country. The conflict began when the governor of Virginia sent land -surveyors to explore the disputed area, inviting attacks by Shawnee raiding parties.
Surveying was a risky business: it involved spending considerable time in rugged, unsettled places and eluding Indians who were often enraged at the sight of a white man measuring land that didn’t belong to him. Surveyors made easy targets because their task required precision. They used a magnetic compass and a chain of one hundred iron links totaling twenty-two yards to mark out a property’s boundaries, and the process could take time. When surveying along the steep flanks of Pennsylvania’s Juniata and Susquehanna rivers, Lewis Lewis must have kept a close eye on his surroundings, just in case a group of Indians charged down the valley to ambush him.
Despite the danger, land surveying was prestigious. It was considered a profession of the propertied class; rich Virginia planters like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both knew how to survey. It also paid well, either in money or in acreage. Lewis Lewis made a good living, earning land grants from the government in exchange for his services and becoming a landowner in at least three counties. When he died, his possessions included enough household items to fill a few homes: rugs, chairs, trunks, teacups, gold ware, spinning wheels, and hundreds of other articles. He also left his compass and chain, the two indispensable tools of his trade.
Lewis Lewis’s background suited his distinguished occupation. He didn’t come to America as a poor country laborer but as an Oxford University graduate with a proud pedigree; his descendants later claimed George Washington and Meriwether Lewis as relatives. It’s not clear why, but after four years as a student at Christ Church college, he left its vaulted halls and manicured gardens for the American colonies. Being the only Oxford-educated land surveyor in central Pennsylvania presumably helped attract clients. It also came in handy when, at the age of thirty-three, he courted a nineteen-year-old girl named Jane Dill. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Dill was famous for her fearless horsemanship and stern Presbyterianism. She fell for the Welshman, and the two married. Together they traveled throughout Pennsylvania, surveying one plot after another.
By the time Jane gave birth to David, the last of their eight children, in 1788, hostilities between Indians and whites had cooled. Although Pennsylvania saw skirmishes until the last decade of the eighteenth century, the frontier line had shifted farther west and so had the battlegrounds. Locals commemorated the bloodshed with place-names that recalled the region’s violent past. Lewis’s birthplace, Bald Eagle Creek, took its name from one of two Indians, both known as Bald Eagle, who were murdered by whites in the 1770s. Bloody Run, where Lewis almost escaped arrest, had allegedly been the site of an Indian ambush decades earlier. The natives descended on a trading convoy, killing enough men to dye the nearby stream red with the slaughter. The name Bloody Run remained until 1873, when residents decided to rechristen the town with a less sanguinary and more respectable name. They chose Everett, after Edward Everett, the famous orator who delivered the two-hour speech before Lincoln’s two-minute address at Gettysburg.
Lewis never had a chance to hear his father’s stories about the Indian wars, since the Welshman died when his son was still an infant. Jane remarried an old Dutch widower named Frederick Leathers, who no doubt offered fewer opportunities for adventure than her last husband. But their relationship, cut short by Leathers’s death four years later, was happy; in his will, the Dutchman left all his property to his “loving wife, Jane.” With enough money to bring up her children, Lewis’s mother decided to live on her own for a bit. Around 1800, she moved to the town of Clearfield and, then in her fifties, started a distillery.
Lewis’s childhood couldn’t have been dull.
Raised by a widow turned entrepreneur with a reputation for spirited horseback riding, he grew up in the valleys of the Alleghenies, roaming the landscape that his father had spent years surveying. As a boy he lived comfortably, and as a young man he could have easily chosen to become a respectable citizen. Instead, he counterfeited money and robbed members of the communities that Lewis Lewis had helped map out decades earlier. He learned the terrain as well as his father, but with a different end in mind: not as open land to be carved up and claimed, but as a tangle of camps, hideouts, and trails to transport forged currency or stolen goods.
IN THE FALL OF 1812, a few years before Lewis’s arrest on New Year’s Eve, General Isaac Brock paced the ramparts of Fort George, a British garrison on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Niagara River. Over six feet tall and heavily built, he was well liked by his men and admired for his military prowess throughout Canada. Brock loved war: he joined the army at fifteen and remained a soldier—and a bachelor—his entire life. Until recently, however, he had been desperate to leave his post. Eager for action, Brock seethed at being stuck in the colonies while the British fought Napoléon’s troops thousands of miles away. But in 1812, as the conflict between Britain and the United States heated up, he chose to stay, hoping to make a name for himself when the fighting began. As the governor of Upper Canada—a colony that comprised present-day Ontario—and the commander of its armed forces, he would soon have his chance. Only a couple of months after war was declared in the summer of 1812, Brock dealt a humiliating defeat to the Americans at Detroit, a victory that earned him the nickname the “Hero of Upper Canada.” By October he had moved farther up the Great Lakes to the Niagara River, the strait that divided British Canada from New York.
