A Counterfeiter's Paradise

by Ben Tarnoff

  After splitting with Noble, Lewis flitted from one village to the next, trying to change his bogus cash for genuine money at stores and taverns along the way. He used a couple of aliases—David Philips and David Wilson—and avoided anywhere he might be recognized. If someone had plotted his route on a map of Pennsylvania, it would have cut across counties shaped like jigsaw pieces, divided by rivers or mountain ranges, sprinkled with hamlets separated by miles of jagged Allegheny terrain. From the tilled lowlands of Franklin County to the forested ridges of Mifflin County to the slate cliffs of Bedford County, Lewis spent the final few months of 1815 traversing a region almost as varied as the currency flowing through it.

  ON THE LAST DAY of November, morning light filtered through the -window of a shop in Franklin County to rest on the figure of James Shoaff lying in his bed. He awoke to the sound of a customer in his store: from his room he could hear a voice asking the clerk for a pocket comb. The man was insisting on buying it with city paper and wanted western paper in exchange. When Shoaff got up and walked into his shop, he met the stranger, who introduced himself as Philips and looked every bit the traveling gentleman. Philips presented the sleepy proprietor with a $100 bill of the Philadelphia Bank, and Shoaff, taking the note in his hands to examine it, immediately knew he had a problem. He had heard that there were counterfeits of this bank circulating, but Philadelphia paper, the most valuable in the state, would be hard to resist. Hoping to resolve his dilemma, Shoaff took the bill to a nearby tavern. There he got conflicting opinions: one man said to take the money; the other advised against it. Shoaff decided to compromise. Returning to the store, he refused to sell the customer the comb but agreed to change the $100 note for western paper. The shopkeeper added one crucial condition, however: he wouldn’t trade the western bills at their usual discount but only at full face value. For $100 of Philadelphia paper, Shoaff paid out the same amount in western money.

  Whenever currency changed hands, there was an opportunity to reap a profit. You didn’t need to be a seasoned speculator to benefit from a smart exchange; everyone, including small-time vendors like Shoaff, was looking to cash in. When the man who called himself Philips took Shoaff’s offer, the shopkeeper must have felt pretty pleased with himself: after a tough negotiation with a traveler eager to change money, he had gotten city paper cheap. What he couldn’t know was that was exactly how Lewis wanted him to feel. The counterfeiter knew how to set the trap and let his mark’s greed pull him deeper into the snare. He also had the self-possession to sit calmly while his soon-to-be victim scrutinized the bill and asked others for their opinion.

  Sometimes Lewis relied less on charm than on swagger. When buying a black silk handkerchief from Thomas McClellan, a shopkeeper in McConnellsburg, he took a harder tone than usual. Lewis asked McClellan whether he would accept a large bill. “If it suits me,” the merchant saltily replied. He would be glad to get it, Lewis shot back, and revealed one of his $100 notes from the Philadelphia Bank. While McClellan inspected it, Lewis lined up the ruse that would close the deal. He told the shopkeeper that he had better send the bill off to someone whose judgment he trusted. McClellan took the bait: his pride piqued, he declared that he could decide for himself and, after a brief examination, pronounced the money genuine.

  Lewis had a masterful feel for the physics of persuasion: when to apply pressure, when to fall back, which levers to pull. Almost everyone he met at first regarded his money suspiciously but, more often than not, agreed to take it. He could have used a network of passers to circulate his bad bills and kept himself out of sight. But he couldn’t stand to be invisible: he wanted to stand face-to-face with his prey and personally convince him that the note he held in his hands was authentic.

  It was a dangerous approach. When he walked into Hill Wilson’s tav-ern on New Year’s Eve, he had spent so many counterfeits in the past weeks that it was only a matter of time before the law caught up with him. When Wilson and others confronted Lewis about buying a horse with fake money, he decided to drink gin with them for hours before the sheriff arrived. Perhaps he intended to get caught; without his arrest and subsequent trial at Bedford, he would have remained an unknown. The courtroom gave the citizens of central Pennsylvania their first opportunity to learn about Lewis, a local boy who had fled north as an army deserter and returned a moneymaker. The story line was irresistible, and Lewis, on the public stage for the first time, proved himself particularly well suited for the role.

  IN THE FIRST COUPLE OF MONTHS OF 1816, horses pulling wagons toward Bedford trudged along frostbitten trails while their breath steamed in the cold air. Past the mountains the prospect opened up to reveal the town in the distance, a modest cluster of houses in the shadow of the Alleghenies, on the banks of a river that ran eastward through the bluffs. If the impression from afar was pleasantly rustic, the mood in Bedford was anything but tranquil. The travelers arrived to find a community whirling with frenzied activity. In a settlement of fewer than eight hundred residents, people walked with the impatient, purposeful stride of city dwellers. Philadelphia, New York, and Boston had never seemed so irrelevant.

  Among its buildings of stone, brick, and timber, one topic alone dominated the conversation: counterfeiting. Since New Year’s Day, David Lewis had sat in his cell at the courthouse jail near the center of town. The structure stood two stories high, built of immense limestone slabs that enclosed a courtyard where convicts were once pilloried and whipped. Despite its imposing stature, the courthouse was notoriously insecure, and every night, watchmen guarded the jail to prevent Lewis from escaping. A handful of other counterfeiters had been caught in the region, and Lewis, as the most conspicuous of the lot, would come to personify the moneymaking menace in the eyes of Bedford’s citizens. The dapper criminal had to be tried before he could find a way to flee, and this was what gave Bedford its sense of urgency, unusual in a town accustomed to a more countrified pace. The newcomers streaming in were witnesses and informers, people who planned to testify against Lewis in court or denounce him in private. “You cannot conceive how busy a place it has been,” noted an observer to a friend.

  The man at the middle of the maelstrom was Samuel Riddle. A local attorney, he had the prestigious job of prosecuting Lewis, a responsibility he clearly enjoyed. Riddle was “in his element,” wrote one resident, “much more busy than all the field marshalls at the battle of Waterloo.” Tall and thin, he exuded tremendous energy; an arched nose protruded conspicuously from his face, lending his features the dignified air of a Roman statesman. Riddle was well liked, not only as a lawyer but also as a successful entrepreneur. He had started the first mines in the nearby Broad Top region, where he chiseled coal out of the seams, pulverized them, and sold the powder—not as fuel but as fertilizer, which he marketed to farmers with promises of richer harvests. One industry wasn’t enough for Riddle; his other ventures included an orchard, a sawmill, and a peach brandy distillery. Perpetually seeking new outlets for his ambition, he never learned to stop taking risks.

  Trying to bring Lewis to justice could easily have been a lost gamble. At first Riddle didn’t have much of a case. Granted, Lewis had been apprehended at Hill Wilson’s tavern for buying a horse with forged money and resisted arrest so violently that he almost killed the sheriff. But at the Bedford jail the prisoner confessed nothing. He claimed to be David Wilson Lewis from Philadelphia, and no evidence linked him to a broader moneymaking enterprise. Fortunately for Riddle, the authorities called someone in to confirm the criminal’s true identity. Then the prosecutor began digging around for accomplices—people who had helped Lewis during his partnership with Noble in the fall of 1815, or during the subsequent months he spent passing the fake cash. The same day Lewis was locked in his cell, officers searched the house of his uncle William Drenning, who lived just south of Bedford. In his stable they found the horse that Lewis had bought with bad bills, as well as three pairs of saddlebags full of expensive goods likely purchased with counterfeit cash. Drenning and one of h
is sons were arrested; another son escaped. Four days later, the sheriff overtook him eleven miles from town.

  As Riddle built his case, the drama surrounding Lewis’s trial mounted. Riddle had a good reason for working as hard as he did. Lewis planned to put up a considerable fight: he hired excellent counsel, using the cash he had earned from exchanging forged bills for genuine notes. When he was arrested, Lewis had $1,900 in good money on him and, according to one report, another $1,500 deposited in the bank at Bedford. This was a sizable amount: in Philadelphia at the time, a gallon of brandy cost $2. The court ruled early on that it couldn’t interfere with the defendant paying his lawyers, so Lewis spent freely: $200 during just his first week in jail.

  His costly defense team consisted of George Burd and Charles Huston. Burd, known for his round face and affable demeanor, took second string to Huston. The older and more celebrated of the two, Huston ran a highly successful practice in Bellefonte. He had taught Latin and Greek before becoming a lawyer, and still dressed like a slovenly professor: “slouched hat, drab three-caped overcoat, green flannel leggings tied around the legs with black tape, homespun dress coat” was how one contemporary described his attire. In spite of his appearance, Huston awed judges and juries with his courtroom oratory, winning praise that allowed him to command high prices for his services. He belonged to the same postrevolutionary generation as Riddle; in fact, the men were born a month apart in 1771.

  While Riddle and Huston wrangled over the prisoner’s fate, his reputation lay in the ink-stained hands of Charles McDowell, the publisher of the Bedford Gazette. The newspaper’s offices were next door to the courthouse where Lewis was held; inside, McDowell hastily set type for the next issue. He provided lively, detailed accounts of Lewis’s adventures—at Hill Wilson’s tavern, at the mountain campsite—that gave readers their first glimpse of the counterfeiter in action.

  In the pages of the Gazette, Lewis went from being an obscure criminal to a leading culprit in a counterfeiting epidemic sweeping the countryside with such force that even “promising young men, of the most wealthy and respectable families,” fell victim to it by joining the villains’ ranks. According to McDowell’s articles, Lewis belonged to an enormously sophisticated criminal organization with more than a hundred members active in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Virginia. They included expert engravers like Noble, wagon drivers who hauled large loads of forged notes, gamblers who passed bad bills at the betting table, and “affidavit men” paid to perjure themselves by supplying the counterfeiters with false alibis. An invisible army of moneymakers roamed the land, recruiting impressionable youth, funneling fraudulent paper into the pockets of honest Americans from their hidden retreats in the mountains.

  The facts were far less dramatic. Counterfeiting was indeed widespread, but it thrived in diffuse networks, not large, coordinated ventures. A massive interstate conspiracy made up of a hundred criminals simply wasn’t practical; the effort of managing such a gang would easily outweigh the benefits. John Reid, a counterfeiter captured at Hagerstown, gave a more reasonable estimate, putting the number of Noble and Lewis’s network at twenty. But regardless of how many people Lewis and Noble collaborated with, their operation was more like a loose web than a tightly knit group. A little fantasy, however, went a long way in propelling Lewis to fame. Thanks to the sensationalism of McDowell’s reports, the well-mannered moneymaker became known not only in Bedford but throughout Pennsylvania, as newspapers all over the state reprinted the Gazette articles.

  Lewis’s trial was set to begin on February 13, 1816. In fact, the court planned to hold three separate trials, as grand juries indicted the defen-dant on multiple charges of passing counterfeit currency. In the meantime, anticipation grew. Lewis passed the weeks confined in the courthouse jail while the men he had set in motion buzzed around him: Riddle mapped the line of attack, Huston prepared the defense, and McDowell stoked the suspense.

  GETTING TO THE COURTROOM required going up an outdoor staircase that led to the second story of the building where Lewis was imprisoned. Up those steps climbed jurors and witnesses, shivering in the wind that swept across the valley. Inside the chamber sat Judge Jonathan Hoge Walker, who, at six feet four inches, towered over the proceedings but, in the judgment of a later historian, was “more remarkable for his size than for his brains.” Riddle gave an impressive performance. He called twenty-seven witnesses, using their testimony to reconstruct Lewis’s route through Pennsylvania over the past several months. He pieced together a portrait of the wilderness hideout where Lewis, Noble, and their two accomplices had spent weeks printing bogus bills the previous fall. He sketched Lewis’s subsequent spending spree, bringing the victims before the court to talk about being swindled by the defendant. He even presented agents from banks whose bills Lewis had counterfeited to pronounce the notes forgeries.

  The character that emerged from the dozens of statements, while undoubtedly a criminal, had an irrepressible appeal. Even witnesses who spoke against Lewis couldn’t deny his charm: “sociable & good humoured” was how one tavern keeper put it. Lewis’s playfulness was a large part of his allure. He was an inveterate gambler—a “sporting man,” “active in playing cards,” in the words of other witnesses—and he brought a gaming spirit to his counterfeiting career: relishing the risk, hoping to score. He was also generous. One witness, John Little, told the jurors a story about meeting Lewis in Morrison’s Cove, a fertile expanse of lowland north of Bedford, at Christmastime. In the course of their conversation, Little admitted to being in debt and Lewis promptly gave him a forged $20 note as a present. Then they shared drinks and gambled all night until parting ways the following morning.

  Lewis’s years with Noble had taught him to avoid certain pitfalls. A tavern keeper testified that he once observed the defendant trying to persuade an old traveler from Kentucky to trade a large pile of silver for banknotes. The man declared he would only accept the bills if Lewis endorsed them by hand. The counterfeiter refused, saying he had injured his hand so badly he couldn’t hold a pen, and the Kentuckian, dissatisfied by this answer, walked away. Although it cost him a bundle of silver, Lewis made the right decision. Signing a counterfeit note to verify its authenticity was perjury, and he didn’t need another indictment on top of everything else.

  Drawing on more than a month of hard work, Riddle produced definitive proof of Lewis’s guilt. Huston couldn’t hope to dispute such a substantial body of evidence with conflicting testimony, and in any case, he found only four witnesses to testify on Lewis’s behalf. He nonetheless gave a spirited defense, using technicalities to try to dodge Riddle’s well-supported accusations. He contested the court’s jurisdiction, complained about irregularities in the spelling of a witness’s name, and even cited English legal opinion in an unsuccessful effort to convince the judge that someone whose name had been forged couldn’t be admitted as a witness. But the lawyer, for all his persistence, failed to clear his client. On February 13 and February 17, the jurors convicted Lewis on two of the three indictments for passing counterfeit money.

  By protesting that a bank had been misnamed in the text of the indictment, Huston managed to get the first sentence reduced to a small fine and ten hours in the Bedford jail. The second, however, stuck. Lewis faced another fine and, far worse, six years in the Philadelphia penitentiary. The court specified that Lewis be transferred to the city prison “with all convenient speed under safe & secure conduct,” no doubt fearing that the prisoner, after losing his bid for freedom, would take matters into his own hands.

  About an hour after the sun rose on February 27, Lewis broke out of the Bedford jail. He had been locked inside for almost a full two months, and given the building’s poor security, it’s surprising he didn’t make his getaway sooner. “He could easily have escaped,” opined a Bedford attorney familiar with the affair, “but his lawyers assured him of an acquittal, and as he did not want to lose the fifteen hundred dollars in the bank, he stood trial.” News of Lewi
s’s flight had a predictably explosive effect on the town. After Riddle’s artfully orchestrated conviction, the counterfeiter had vanished before the drama could come to its conclusion.

  The Bedford Gazette was outraged. It accused Lewis’s jailers of freeing him, presumably for a bribe, and blamed the state’s “penny-wise Commissioners” for neglecting to build a better jail. “For the last five or six years we have not heard of any person detained in our prison, contrary to his wish,” the newspaper fumed. The sheriff posted a $300 reward for Lewis, and personally led a fruitless attempt to find him. The Gazette demanded an official investigation into how Lewis escaped, and who, if anyone, abetted the criminal. The counterfeiter remained at large for months. In mid-May, the authorities caught him in Ohio, only to have him slip through their fingers again. Around the first of June, he was finally captured in New York and taken in chains to Philadelphia.

  LEWIS ARRIVED IN PHILADELPHIA on June 8, 1816, just as the city was experiencing the worst cold wave in American memory. Three days before, a strong wind had come in from the northwest, driving the temperature down almost thirty degrees overnight. By the time Lewis got there, ice was so plentiful that fishermen brought chilled fish to summer market. The bizarre weather beset the entire country: farther north, snow fell throughout New England, reaching twelve inches in many places. The year as a whole was so frigid that Americans everywhere dubbed it “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.” Some blamed sunspots, earthquakes, and a lunar eclipse for bringing on the cold; others prayed and fasted, begging God for forgiveness. Thousands of miles from Philadelphia, on the shores of Lake Geneva, the unusual climate kept Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin indoors, reading ghost tales by the fire with her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and other friends. When they decided to write their own stories to pass the time, she produced the idea for her novel Frankenstein.