A Counterfeiter's Paradise

by Ben Tarnoff

  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 n
ot 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.

  WITHIN A YEAR OF HIS INAUGURATION, Governor Hiester had good news to report. In his annual address to the state legislature, he announced that the “pauperism” that plagued Pennsylvania in recent years was on the decline. By 1821, the country had begun a full economic recovery. Credit started to flow, the value of banknotes stabilized, and prices rose. Foreign exports and domestic manufacturing slowly revived. The Second Bank of the United States, after years of mismanagement, had finally found its footing under the stern stewardship of Langdon Cheves, who assumed the presidency in 1819. Cheves fired inept employees, curbed salaries and expenses, and, most important, overhauled the Bank’s balance sheets. He restored its capital by demanding that state banks pay their balances and redeem their notes, and limited its liabilities by steadily reducing the number of the Bank’s bills in circulation. Anchored by Cheves’s sober leadership, the American economy looked as if it might grow at a more measured, manageable pace and avoid the pitfalls that produced the Panic.

  But there were warning signs ahead. The factors that produced the banking boom in the first few decades of the Republic’s existence only intensified in the coming years. Immigrants poured in, settlers pushed west, and the Industrial Revolution vastly expanded the scope of manufacturing and transportation. As the country accelerated in new directions, the materialism that had always been present in American life became dominant. The wise men of the eighteenth century—Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, among others—were now seen as quaint; their thrift and restraint no longer seemed relevant in the aggressively acquisitive, steam-powered America of the future. The new economy, however, needed old-fashioned fuel: paper credit. The same tool that made it possible for colonists to trade goods and pay taxes in the seventeenth century would be used to build canals and textile mills in the nineteenth. But like steam, credit had to be handled carefully. In the right proportions, it could be a tremendous source of energy; too much, on the other hand, could set off an explosion.

  Nicholas Biddle, who succeeded Cheves as the Bank’s president in 1823, was not an obvious choice for the position. A lively, candid man with a round face and curly hair, Biddle belonged to a distinguished Philadelphia family but had little business experience to recommend him for the job. No one doubted his intelligence, however. Biddle had edited the authoritative version of Lewis and Clark’s journey, served in the Pennsylvania legislature, and traveled throughout Europe, where he had devoted months to examining Greek and Roman ruins. Once, when attending a dinner party at Cambridge University with James Monroe, then the American minister to Britain, he delivered an eloquent disquisition on the differences between ancient and modern Greek. Monroe loved watching the young American put the Cambridge dons to shame. He remembered it twelve years later when, as president of the United States, he nominated Biddle to the Bank’s governing board and later endorsed him for its presidency.

  Biddle proved a fast learner. As the chief executive of the country’s biggest corporation, he applied his considerable brainpower to mastering every aspect of the Bank’s affairs. From the start he wanted the Bank to play a strong role in regulating the nation’s currency. Like Cheves, he regularly redeemed the notes of state banks that ended up in the Bank’s vaults. This had a dual effect: it forced the banks to keep enough coin in their coffers to back their bills and it steadily withdrew their paper from circulation. At the same time, Biddle increased the number of the Bank’s notes, so that his bills gradually supplanted those of the state banks—and, crucially, preserved enough capital to ensure that his notes held their value.

  In his first three years, Biddle had more than doubled the Bank’s circulation, and by the late 1820s, his bills made up as much as a quarter of the country’s total. The result was overwhelmingly positive: America’s paper money became the most stable it had been in decades. In fact, the Bank’s notes were so strong that they attracted a broad campaign by counterfeiters eager to cash in. Moneymaking gangs surfaced everywhere from Philadelphia to New Orleans to Matamoros, Mexico. Biddle called on the authorities to intervene, but the maze of different jurisdictions and inept law enforcement made it difficult to stem the tide of bad bills. By the end of 1827, the situation had gotten so bad that Biddle recalled all $20 and $100 notes to replace them with designs he hoped would be harder to forge.

  Although counterfeiters posed a serious threat to the Bank, a graver menace would be the state banks and the array of interests that supported them. They came from prosperous states like New York as well as the wilder frontier regions of the South and West. What united them was their desire for looser credit. They resented Biddle’s supervision of the economy; they wanted their local banks to be able to extend loans and print money without the Bank breathing down their necks. As the nation’s rapid growth created new opportunities for investment and communities everywhere clamored for capital, the hostility toward Philadelphia’s restraining influence grew. The rising entrepreneurial class needed to find a way to pry Biddle’s fingers from the helm. They needed someone who could rally public opinion against the Bank and marshal its many enemies in a coordinated assault.

  General Andrew Jackson was the man for the job. Culturally, he and Biddle couldn’t have been more different. Unlike Biddle, Jackson enjoyed none of the benefits of a privileged upbringing. Born to Scotch-Irish immigrants in the backwoods of the Carolinas, he fought hard for his success. He became a national hero for defeating the British at New Orleans during the War of 1812, and his tactical finesse made him a
formidable politician. After stints as a frontier lawyer, cotton planter, and senator, he mounted a bid for the presidency. Jackson’s victory in 1828 marked a major realignment in American politics. He was the first president who hadn’t been born in either Massachusetts or Virginia, and he brought a radically new spirit to the White House, defined by the whiskey-soaked individualism of the old Southwest. His admirers hailed him as the “People’s President,” a crusader for the common man against the ruling elite; his adversaries vilified him as “King Mob,” a demagogue of the illiterate rabble. And while he drew support from the lower classes, he also found allies among the wealthy: southern slaveholders, western entrepreneurs, and many former Federalists.

  Jackson’s rise to power reflected the convergence of a number of forces working to upend the old order. As America evolved from a small patrician republic along the eastern seaboard into a boisterous democracy reaching deeper into the continent’s interior, the nation now had a leader who knew the hardships of the West firsthand, a self-made man who could speak di-rectly to the masses in a language they could understand.

  Among Jackson’s supporters was John McFarland, who had left the Carlisle Republican after Findlay’s defeat and ended up at the Allegheny Democrat in Pittsburgh. As editor of the Democrat he campaigned for Jackson with typical zeal, at one point even inciting a crowd to burn an effigy of one of the general’s foremost political foes, Henry Clay. McFarland’s advocacy of Jackson was hardly surprising. Jackson was popular among the state’s heavily Scotch-Irish western and mountain counties. And he shared certain traits with another of McFarland’s favorites, David Lewis. The populist outlaw from the folktales and the fake confession exhibited many Jacksonian features: he championed the plight of the -dispossessed and fought the moneyed interests, a story line that played well among Pennsylvanians deeply distrustful of the establishment. Like Jackson, Lewis represented the righteous struggle of people against power, although in both cases, their personal myths masked a much messier reality.