A Counterfeiter's Paradise

by Ben Tarnoff

  It was October 3, less than a month since Lewis’s release from the Walnut Street Jail. The Bedford Gazette, whose publisher must have secretly rejoiced at the criminal’s sensational return after a three-year absence, carried full coverage of the holdup, labeling it a “robbery of the most daring nature”—from the description provided by McClelland, the mastermind could be none other than “the noted David Lewis,” “the celebrated counterfeiter.” People remembered Lewis as a moneymaker, but he had since become more aggressive, and after leaving the Walnut Street Jail, he quit counterfeiting for robbery. The news of his attack on McClelland proved predictably embarrassing to Governor Findlay. The prisoner he had pardoned was running wild across the state terrorizing his constituents, and in Pennsylvania’s fractious political climate, he couldn’t afford to give his enemies more ammunition. But for whatever reason—perhaps the report took a while to reach Harrisburg, or Findlay had more pressing business—the governor didn’t respond until four days after the incident, issuing a strongly worded proclamation that offered a $300 reward for the robbers’ capture. “The reputation of the Government, the peace and security of its citizens, and the obligations of justice and humanity require that the perpetrators of offenses so atrocious should be brought to speedy and condign punishment,” it read. Findlay had blundered again: by the time he made his announcement, the three men were already sitting in the Bedford jail.

  The night after the robbery, a posse of well-armed townsfolk had tracked the gang to a small tavern a couple of miles outside Lewistown, a village on the Juniata River northeast of where they mugged McClelland. Not taking any chances, some of the vigilantes stood guard outside the building while the rest rushed inside. Luckily, the criminals had been sleeping and were taken by surprise, resulting in a bloodless capture; there were three pistols and two knives in their bedroom, which the vigilantes quickly secured. The posse ferried the dazed prisoners to Lewistown to give them a meal before locking them up for the night. Maybe it was the late hour or the satisfaction of a job well done, but one of the vigilantes carelessly left his gun on the table. Lewis, fully awake by now, noticed the pistol. He grabbed the gun—he had presumably been left unchained for dinner—and ran out the door and into the street. His captors followed. When they overtook him, Lewis raised the gun and pulled the trigger. As happened at Hill Wilson’s tavern four years before, the weapon misfired—he tried again, with the same result. If Lewis hadn’t yet killed anyone, it wasn’t for lack of trying. The men knocked him unconscious, chained him in irons, and the next morning took all three prisoners to the Bedford jail.

  Three years earlier, of course, he had been imprisoned in the exact same jail. Its formidable limestone facade housed the court that convicted him and the cell from which he had escaped shortly afterward. Back then he had been a counterfeiter; now he was a thief. Rather than defrauding people of their goods with bogus bills, he relieved them of their possessions at gunpoint. Instead of wheedling wary merchants into changing fake notes for genuine ones, he mugged them. Even though his tactics had grown more extreme, Lewis remained as affable as ever; in fact, he made a greater effort to endear himself to his victims. He wasn’t just after money. In returning some of McClelland’s cash and promising to restore the rest of it, Lewis had his reputation in mind. Whether his benevolence was genuine or affected didn’t matter; the main thing for Lewis was that it made good copy in the local newspapers.

  Just before daybreak on October 25, while Bedford’s citizens slept soundly in their beds, Lewis and four others stood near the town’s outskirts hacking at their shackles with an ax and a cleaver. The robber had languished in jail for three weeks; the group who escaped with him included Connelly, Hanson, and two runaway slaves who had shared their cell. Swinging sharp blades in the dawn’s half-light, they might have severed their limbs instead of their cuffs. A shrill clanging sound rang with each strike, until the manacles finally broke. Their jailbreak had been expertly executed: the prisoners started a fire, first to burn off the fetters fastening them to the floor and then to scorch a large hole in the ground, which they expanded into a tunnel. Digging furiously, they burrowed under the building, came up outside, and sprinted southwest across the valley.

  Winter had drained the landscape of color, casting the region’s jagged topography in stark relief. Deep snow coated the earth, and on the forested slopes in the distance, the trees made black shapes against the white ground. If they wanted to get away, Lewis and his men needed to drag their aching bodies as far as they could over those slopes before the town awoke. Their legs were swollen and sore from almost a month in chains. The snow presented another obstacle, slowing them down and leaving footprints that would be clearly visible to anyone following them.

  On the horizon ahead was Kinton Knob, a mountain that stood half a mile high. The five fugitives scaled the precipitous incline, pushing onward to the wooded glen on the opposite side, and then scurried downhill to take cover among the trees. By now they had been running for four and a half hours but didn’t dare stop—especially once they heard the thundering hooves of the Bedford posse approaching. Hoping to hold off the vigilantes, Lewis loudly threatened to shoot; when that didn’t work, the escapees dashed down a stream and up another ridge, with their pursuers close behind. The black runaways were caught first. Hanson, whose short legs weren’t built for racing over rough terrain, fell next. “I don’t give a damn for you or your militia!” the criminal yelled when one of the men ordered him to stop, but he was soon forced to surrender. Connelly, whose husky frame had taken him a long way but couldn’t carry him any farther, climbed onto a steep ledge and refused to come down. One of the vigilantes crawled up the bluff and knocked him down with a club. Lewis had outpaced everyone else. But now, as the men with rifles rushed toward him in the snow, he decided to give up. He was exhausted, his clothes were shredded, and if he ran, he risked getting a bullet in the back. It was better to return to jail and bide his time until the next opportunity.

  If the Bedford authorities had been smart, they would have tried Lewis quickly and shipped him off under heavy guard to Philadelphia. Instead, they appointed two watchmen to guard the courthouse building every night, as if this meager gesture would be enough to hold him. Lewis had become an escape artist, as notorious for his jailbreaks as for his crimes. So on the night of December 16, 1819, when the alarm went out through Bedford and the townsfolk convened by torchlight to find out what had happened, it couldn’t have come as a surprise to learn that the prisoner had pulled off his second getaway in as many months. That morning, Connelly had found a way to pry off the latch that chained him to the floor using his handcuffs; once he had freed himself, he did the same for Lewis, Hanson, and the cell’s other inmates.

  They couldn’t flee in broad daylight, so they had waited patiently until, near sunset, one of the guards arrived to serve supper. Connelly leaped to his feet and, wielding his cuffed hands as weapons, threatened to bash out the man’s brains. Lewis took charge and the criminals seized control of the jail, finding a pair of pistols as well as an ax that they used to chop off the shackles on their wrists. Before fleeing, Lewis locked the guard and the head jailer and his family into the cell. He also forced one prisoner to remain in jail—a man named McCurdy, who had been imprisoned for stealing from a poor widow. Anyone depraved enough to commit such a crime, Lewis reportedly declared, wasn’t “fit to associate with gentlemen.”

  Once out of the jail, the inmates scattered. Not all of them got away. Among those recaptured was Hanson, discovered the next morning within a mile of town, hobbling painfully because his feet had been injured in removing the irons. Lewis and Connelly had vanished, leaving their crippled colleague behind. In reporting the escape, one central Pennsylvania newspaper called the men “two of the most dangerous characters that perhaps ever were let loose on society,” and included a description of Lewis so that readers might recognize him: “about 6 feet high, square shouldered, strait and well-made, reddish hair, lately cut—s
peaks quick & has a fierce look.”

  EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY, Pittsburgh’s postmaster loaded stacks of the Pittsburgh Gazette into a stagecoach that delivered the four-page publication to subscribers who each paid $3 a year. It was printed across the street, within sight of the stone piers that buttressed a newly built bridge over the Monongahela River.

  Founded in 1786 as the first newspaper west of the Alleghenies, the Gazette had seen Pittsburgh evolve from a cluster of cabins to a trading and manufacturing hub of more than seven thousand people. By 1820, however, the town had fallen on hard times. Local industries, already hurting from a flood of cheap British imports, virtually collapsed in the aftermath of the Panic; the familiar clattering of the iron foundries, glassworks, and steam engine factories became barely audible, and the once cacophonous city center was, in the words of one Gazette contributor, “silent as Sunday.” The Gazette itself was struggling. It had borrowed $4,000 to stay afloat, a burden that weighed heavily as the economic outlook darkened.

  To this town of soup kitchens, insolvent debtors, and shuttered homes came stories of Lewis, brought over the road from the Alleghenies and told and retold in taverns until they reached the building on Front Street where the Gazette had its offices. The editors, high-minded men who shunned the sensationalist crime writing popular among most provincial papers, nonetheless found Lewis fascinating. “Many little traits in the character of Lewis are spoken of, and prove him to be a man of no common order,” they wrote in January 1820, a month after his flight from Bedford. “With all his villainy, there is something magnanimous in his conduct.” The Ga-zette praised him for sparing McClelland’s life and spoke glowingly of his refusal to let McCurdy the widow-robber escape with the other inmates.

  Even journalists who prided themselves on abstaining from breathless accounts of banditry couldn’t help but admire Lewis. The gratifying spectacle of punishing someone who had stolen from a widow stirred everyone’s sympathies. Widows and orphans had traditionally been the most helpless members of society, and during the depression, they suffered acutely. But they also became bywords for something that everyone endured to some degree: the misery caused by the ruthlessness of American capitalism. The same month that the Pittsburgh Gazette ran its report on Lewis, the Philadelphia-based Weekly Aurora published a letter addressed to the country’s most despised financier, Langdon Cheves, the president of the Bank of the United States. “Bow down, and worship,” its pseudonymous author wrote, “the great high priest of your tabernacle—the temple of Plutus, consecrated to deeds, which cause the widow’s heart to mourn, the orphan’s wants to go unsatisfied.”

  As Americans knew too well, there was more than one way to rob a widow. McCurdy’s method happened to be illegal, but it merited as much moral outrage as the perfectly lawful heists perpetrated by savvier operators. People everywhere were being deprived of their livelihood and savings: landlords evicted tenants, stockbrokers fleeced shareholders, and creditors had debtors jailed if they couldn’t pay. In such a world, an outlaw with a conscience exerted a powerful appeal. He could follow a higher code of conduct, one that valued the civility and decorum that had been conspicuously absent from a society overrun by profiteers. In the minds of his admirers, Lewis recalled a kinder, simpler era in American life, before a new generation started demolishing traditional notions of decency in its zeal to get rich at any cost.

  Newspapers were only one way that his legend grew; the other route to fame was the spoken word. Folktales passed from one person to the next, the details varying slightly with each storyteller, until someone years later committed to print whatever version had survived. One day, Lewis came to the home of a destitute widow. She didn’t have a single dollar to pay her rent, the woman confessed, so the constable would soon seize her cow, her last means of support. “I don’t know what to do without her,” she fretted. Lewis asked how much she owed, promptly handed over the exact amount, and then hid nearby. When the official arrived, the widow offered up the money and, satisfied, he continued on his way until Lewis appeared in his path and put a gun in his face. The robber retrieved the bills he lent the widow along with the rest of the cash the constable had on him, making a nice profit. His act of charity, Lewis allegedly declared, proved to be one of his smartest investments. More valuable than the money he stole from the constable, however, was the story of his benevolence toward the widow, which would help solidify his stature as a folk hero. Many of the people who heard the tale undoubtedly had experienced similar run-ins with merciless creditors; they could only hope that Lewis would miraculously emerge to deliver them from their debts.

  Another story involved a German immigrant named Simmons, who one evening crossed a mountain path with a few hundred dollars in his pocket. As dusk fell, Simmons began to feel frightened. He knew that Lewis and his associates preyed on people who traveled the region’s roads, and he feared they would stage an ambush under the cover of darkness. In his terror, every sound became the footstep of a pursuing robber, every shadow the silhouette of his attacker. When he came across a cabin by the side of the road, Simmons decided to stop and ask for lodging. The finely attired man who answered the door invited him inside, where a few other men sat smoking near a cheery fire. The cozy cottage set the German at ease, and warming himself at the hearth, he spilled his whole story: he revealed how much money he was carrying and explained his fear of being robbed. Before turning in for the night, his new friends treated him to a lavish dinner, and in the morning, gave him breakfast. Grateful for the hospitality, he asked his dapper host what he owed. “Nothing, sir,” the man replied, “but you can inform your friends that you stopped with Robber Lewis and his colleagues!” This was how Lewis wanted his beneficiaries to repay their debt: by spreading stories of his generosity.

  In January 1820, the Bedford court finally indicted Lewis in absentia for robbery and escaping from jail. When his name had last appeared in the Bedford docket four years earlier, it was for counterfeiting. Lewis had begun forging money as Pennsylvania’s banks grew; he became a highwayman in a depression brought on by their overexpansion. Few people adapted so well to the mood swings of the American economy, and in 1820, while Pennsylvanians watched their economy disintegrate, he entered the final and most lucrative phase of his career.

  THE DAY AFTER HIS THIRTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY, Condy Raguet rose from his chair to deliver an address on the floor of the Pennsylvania Senate. It was January 29, 1820, and the most important moment of the young state senator’s career. His path to Harrisburg had been unorthodox: he spent his early twenties in Haiti during the revolution, watching blacks and whites butcher each other and chronicling the bloody scenes for American publications. He later joined the army, where he reached the rank of colonel in the War of 1812. Raguet’s real passion, however, wasn’t journalism or soldiering but economics. He published a pamphlet about currency in 1815, the same year he won a seat in the state legislature. Now, standing in front of his colleagues in the Senate, he had his long-awaited chance to speak about his favorite subject.

  No one in Pennsylvania understood the financial crisis better than Raguet. As the chairman of a special legislative committee charged with investigating the depression, he had pored over every shred of relevant data: unemployment figures, bankruptcy statistics, records from sheriffs’ sales of foreclosed properties. He distilled this clutter of facts into an incisive report that detailed the downturn’s effects and pinpointed its origins. Raguet was ruthlessly honest. Instead of reiterating popular tirades against the federal Bank in Philadelphia, which had become a punching bag for politicians everywhere, he put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Pennsylvania’s legislators. The bill they passed in March 1814 chartering forty-one new banks had “inflicted upon the Commonwealth an evil of a more disastrous nature than has ever been experienced by its citizens,” Raguet declared. The new financiers had persuaded Americans of all trades “to abandon the dull pursuits of a laborious life, for the golden dreams of an artificial fortune.”
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  Raguet was right. The spirit of speculation that thrived during the boom years had caused a lot of damage, and the state’s politicians bore a large share of the guilt. But not all of the banks they legislated into exis-tence had joined the craze for cheap credit. Among the more responsible was the Bank of Chambersburg, a one-room operation that occupied an office in the president’s home, overlooking two dirt streets that intersected at right angles to form the bustling town square. By 1820, when almost one-third of Pennsylvania’s banks had gone bust, Chambersburg’s bills passed at a discount of only 3 percent. By contrast, one county over in Carlisle, the Pennsylvania Agricultural and Manufacturing Bank saw its money marked down a full 45 percent. It wasn’t just Chambersburg’s bank that enjoyed a good reputation; the community as a whole was well respected. “A gentleman in conversation the other day remarked that he had visited nearly all the towns in Pennsylvania,” reported a Carlisle newspaper, “but amongst the whole he would recommend Chambersburg for steady habits.”

  On a Wednesday night in late May 1820, a fight broke out in downtown Chambersburg. It happened near the jail, a brick building erected a couple of years earlier at great public expense and reputed to be the state’s strongest. The jailer was locking the prisoners into their cells for the night when he heard his wife yelling: one of his employees had gotten into a scuffle with someone outside. He didn’t have time to properly bolt the door, so he left the key in the latch, planning to return later to retrieve it. In his haste, the jailer failed to notice the strand of waxed string the inmates had threaded through the bars. Once he left, they lowered the cord and swung the slipknot tied on its end over the latch, unlocking it. Picking up the key, they rushed to the cell where the jail’s most prized prisoner sat chained in irons: David Lewis, the notorious robber and counterfeiter.