A Counterfeiter's Paradise

by Ben Tarnoff

  130, Lewis was witnessing

  The Panic of 1819: Murray N. Rothbard, The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007 [1962]), pp. 1–35; Kaplan, The Bank of the United States, pp. 67–75; and Samuel Rezneck, “The Depression of 1819–1822, A Social History,” American Historical Review 39.1 (October 1933), pp. 28–47.

  130–131, This period of false

  Madison’s about-face and the broader shift in Democratic-Republican financial policy: Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 [1957]), pp. 230–241. Still standing today, Carpenters’ Hall headquartered the first Bank from 1791–1797 and the Second Bank from 1817–1821; Robert Smith was the architect who designed Carpenters’ Hall and the Walnut Street Jail, along with a handful of other important colonial-era buildings in Philadelphia. Resumption of specie payments in February 1817: Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, pp. 246–250, and Kaplan, The Bank of the United States, pp. 60–61.

  131, Despite a strong start

  The Bank’s poor management and reasons for its contraction: Rothbard, The Panic of 1819, pp. 10–18; Kaplan, The Bank of the United States, pp. 69–70; and Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, pp. 251–258, 272–276.

  132, This simple request

  Effects of the contraction: Rothbard, The Panic of 1819, pp. 17–24. Urban unem-ployment and plummeting real estate prices: Rezneck, “The Depression of -1819–1822,” pp. 30–34. Panic’s origins: Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Coun-terfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 111–112. Panic’s impact on Ohio, Indiana, and other frontier areas of the Midwest: Mihm, A Nation of Coun-terfeiters, pp. 167–168. Reversion to a barter system: Rothbard, The Panic of 1819, p. 22.

  132–133, Although the Panic

  Agrarian rage provoked by the Panic: Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, pp. 258–259, 279–285.

  133, Perversely, the easiest

  The widespread anger over the spirit of speculation in general and the Bank in particular is evident from the newspapers of the period, particularly Hezekiah Niles’s popular Weekly Register. Anti-Bank sentiment: Samuel Rezneck, “The Depression of 1819–1822, A Social History,” pp. 36–40. Many state legislatures, responding to the outrage, passed taxes on the Bank’s branches, until the Supreme Court, in McCulloch v. Maryland, established the legal precedent shielding the Bank from state taxation.

  133–134, The rising populist

  The social and economic foundations of the outlaw myth: E. J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), pp. 13–49, 72–83, 109–115. Origins of Lewis’s Robin Hood reputation: Mac E. Barrick, “Lewis the Robber in Life and Legend,” Pennsylvania Folklife 17.1 (August 1967), p. 13.

  134, Lewis wasn’t the

  “If I was the witch…”: from a letter by John Adams to Joseph Ward, dated October 24, 1809, quoted in Malcolm Freiberg, “Thomas Hutchinson and the Province Currency,” New England Quarterly 30.2 (June 1957), p. 190. In a later letter to John Taylor, dated March 12, 1819, Adams reminisces about having “seen a paper currency annihilated at a blow in Massachusetts” and discusses the dangers of paper money; see John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, vol. 10, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), pp. 375–377.

  134–135, On a Sunday morning

  McClelland’s story is drawn entirely from two reports in the Bedford Gazette, both reprinted in the American Volunteer, October 14, 1819. The robbery took place on Sunday, October 3, 1819, on the turnpike at Sideling Hill in Bedford County.

  135, At around nine o’clock

  The robbers having their faces blackened: from Governor Findlay’s proclamation of an award for their arrest, found in George Edward Reed, ed., Pennsylvania Archives, Fourth Series, vol. 5 (Harrisburg: State of Pennsylvania, 1900), pp. 148–149.

  135, Just like the backcountry

  Physical description of Connelly: American Volunteer, December 30, 1819; Pittsburgh Gazette, December 24, 1819; and William M. Hall, Reminiscences and Sketches, Historical and Biographical (Harrisburg: Meyers Printing House, 1890), p. 264. Hanson’s height and bloodthirstiness: American Volunteer, October 14, 1819.

  136, It was October 3

  “robbery of the most daring nature…”: Bedford Gazette, reprinted in American Volunteer, October 14, 1819. “The reputation…”: from Findlay’s announcement, included in Reed, Pennsylvania Archives, Fourth Series, vol. 5, pp. 148–149.

  137, The night after

  The taking of Lewis and his cronies: Dugan, The Making of Legends, pp. 37–38; York Recorder, quoted in Frear, Davey Lewis, p. 33.

  138, Just before daybreak

  The story of the October 25 escape is drawn entirely from the Bedford Gazette, quoted in Frear, Davey Lewis, pp. 34–36, and the American Volunteer, November 11, 1819.

  138, Winter had drained

  Painful swelling produced by Lewis’s irons: Pittsburgh Gazette, December 24, 1819, and Bedford Gazette, quoted in Frear, Davey Lewis, p. 37.

  138–139, On the horizon

  The elevation of Kinton Knob is 2,642 feet, slightly taller than half a mile (2,640 feet). According to the Bedford Gazette reports, the posse spotted the criminals in the forest near Milligan Cove, a glen southwest of Kinton Knob, around 11:00 a.m. The sun rose in Bedford on October 25, 1819, at 6:35 a.m., according to the U.S. Naval Observatory Astronomical Applications Department, Naval Oceanography Portal, http://www.usno.navy.mil.

  139, If the Bedford authorities

  The December 16 jailbreak: American Volunteer, December 30, 1819.

  139, They couldn’t flee

  “fit to associate…”: Pittsburgh Gazette, January 14, 1820, also reprinted in American Volunteer, January 27, 1820.

  140, Once out of the jail

  Hanson’s recapture and “two of the most…”: American Volunteer, December 30, 1819.

  140, Every Tuesday and Friday

  The Pittsburgh Gazette: J. Cutler Andrews, Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette: “The First Newspaper West of the Alleghenies” (Boston: Chapman & Grimes, 1936), pp. 1, 55–61. Location of the newspaper’s offices: Sarah H. Killikelly, The History of Pittsburgh: Its Rise and Progress (Pittsburgh: B. C. & Gordon Montgomery, 1906), p. 129. Layout of early Pittsburgh: the 1784 Survey & Town Plan by George Woods, http://www.mapsofpa.com/pitts/1784fromhopkins.jpg. The bridge opened in 1818, built of wood and iron and supported by stone piers; see George Thornton Fleming, History of Pittsburgh and Environs, vol. 2 (New York: American Historical Society, 1922), p. 177. Impact of the Panic on Pittsburgh: Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996 [1959]), pp. 161–169.

  140, Founded in 1786

  “silent as Sunday”: Wade, The Urban Frontier, p. 168. Population of Pittsburgh: Joseph F. Rishel, Founding Families of Pittsburgh: The Evolution of a Regional Elite, 1760–1910 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), p. 46.

  140–141, To this town

  The Gazette’s high-minded editors and aversion to sensationalist crime stories: Andrews, Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette, pp. 58–61, 108. “Many little traits…”: Pittsburgh Gazette, January 14, 1820. As Mark Dugan points out in The Making of Legends, p. 40, the Pittsburgh Gazette article, reprinted throughout Pennsylvania, was the first to give Lewis “the mantle of a folk hero/bandit.”

  141, Even journalists who

  “Bow down…”: Weekly Aurora, January 10, 1820. Newly aggressive spirit in business: Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, pp. 177, 252–253.

  142, Newspapers were only

  It’s impossible to know when the folk stories first appeared. Since they don’t appear in the spurious confession published after his death, they must have developed separately, and then passed down through the gene
rations until they found their way into print. When C. D. Rishel reprinted Lewis’s fake confession in 1890, he published a number of the folktales that had been included in the 1853 reprint of the confession; see C. D. Rishel, ed., The Life and Adventures of David Lewis, the Robber and Counterfeiter, the Terror of the Cumberland Valley (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2006 [1890]), pp. 22–32. The widow story is perhaps the best known; Rishel’s version appears on pp. 24–25, although the victim in his account is identified only as an “elderly female, of respectable appearance.” William M. Hall, whose Reminiscences and Sketches also appeared in 1890, gives the story on pp. 250–251, noting that the victim was a “poor widow.” The story proved remarkably durable through the decades. In 1966, Mac E. Barrick interviewed J. Raymond Baer, the owner of a Cumberland County feed mill, who told the widow story as it had been told to him by his father; see Mac E. Barrick, “Lewis the Robber in Life and Legend,” p. 10.

  142–143, Another story involved

  Simmons’s story: Rishel, The Life and Adventures of David Lewis, pp. 27–29.

  143, In January 1820

  Lewis’s in absentia indictment: Dugan, The Making of Legends, p. 40. Text of the indictment: Commonwealth v. David Lewis, John Conley & James Hanson, Court of Oyer and Terminer, Bedford County, Pennsylvania (January Term, 1820), held by the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg.

  CHAPTER SIX

  144, The day after

  Raguet: James M. Willcox, A History of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, 1816–1916 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1916), pp. 11–12; Harold Milton Ellis, Joseph Dennie and His Circle: A Study in American Literature From 1792 to 1812 (Austin: University of Texas, 1915), p. 203; and J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts & Co., 1884), pp. 1136, 1433. Raguet’s articles on Haiti appeared in the Philadelphia-based Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser and the periodical Port Folio. The pamphlet he published in 1815 was An Inquiry into the Causes of the Present State of the Circulating Medium of the United States.

  144–145, No one in Pennsylvania

  Significance of Raguet’s report: Murray N. Rothbard, The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007 [1962]), pp. 100–101. The committee was appointed on December 10, 1819, and its findings, “Report on the Causes and Extent of the Present General Distress,” were read on January 29, 1820. Extracts are available in Appendix H of Condy Raguet, A Treatise on Currency and Banking, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Grigg & Elliot, 1840), pp. 289–306. “inflicted upon the Commonwealth…”: Raguet, A Treatise on Currency and Banking, p. 298. Excerpts from the memorials mailed to Raguet describing the distress in every part of Pennsylvania: Philip Shriver Klein, Pennsylvania Politics, 1817–1832: A Game Without Rules (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1940), p. 108.

  145, Raguet was right

  Chambersburg and its bank: George Patterson Donehoo, A History of the Cumberland Valley in Pennsylvania, vol. 1 (Harrisburg: Susquehanna History Association, 1930), p. 312; the Chambersburg Community Development Committee, Chambersburg: Its Record and Its Prospect (Chambersburg, PA: Chamber of Commerce, 1945), pp. 20–21, 82–85; and Thaddeus Mason Harris, Journal of a Tour into the Territory Northwest of the Alleghany Mountains, vol. 3 of Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1904 [1805]), pp. 368–369. The text of the legislative bill chartering the Bank of Chambersburg along with many others is found in the Lancaster Journal, March 25, 1814. Discount rates: Grotjan’s Philadelphia Public Sale Report, January 10, 1820. Almost a third of Pennsylvania’s banks going bankrupt: Emma Lapsansky, “Building Democratic Communities, 1800–1850,” in Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth, ed. Randal M. Miller and William Pencak (University Park and Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 2002), p. 165. “A gentleman in…”: Carlisle Republican, January 4, 1820.

  145–146, On a Wednesday night

  Jailbreak: American Volunteer, June 1, 1820. The jailbreak occurred on the night of Wednesday, May 24, 1820, and the early morning of Thursday, May 25. Description of the Chambersburg jail: the Chambersburg Community Development Committee, Chambersburg, p. 20. Cost of jail’s construction: Spirit of the Times & Carlisle Gazette, May 4, 1818. Jail’s reputation as strongest in the state: American Volunteer, April 27, 1820.

  146, Lewis had been

  According to the American Volunteer, April 27, 1820, Lewis and Connelly tried to rob a Cumberland County resident named Mr. Beshore on April 19; Lewis was captured but Connelly escaped. “His life has been…”: Franklin Gazette, April 29, 1820. Search for escapees: American Volunteer, June 1, 1820.

  146, Six days later

  The text of Findlay’s proclamation, issued on May 31, 1820: George Edward Reed, ed., Pennsylvania Archives, Fourth Series, vol. 5 (Harrisburg: State of Penn-sylvania, 1900), pp. 218–219. Findlay’s incompetence and his response to the Panic: Klein, Pennsylvania Politics, pp. 96–99.

  146–147, Findlay wasn’t stupid

  Biography of Findlay: William C. Armor, Lives of the Governors of Pennsylvania, with the Incidental History of the State, From 1609 to 1873 (Norwich, CT: T. H. Davis, 1874), pp. 323–332. Pennsylvania’s competing ethnic blocs: Klein, Pennsylvania Politics, pp. 5–13, 26. Election results of 1817: ibid., pp. 95–96. Patronage system established by state constitution of 1790: ibid., pp. 24–25. Findlay’s impeachment proceedings: ibid., pp. 101–104. The inquiry proceeded from December 8, 1819, to February 3, 1820, and on February 16, Findlay was cleared of all charges.

  147–148, As Findlay’s opponents

  Pennsylvania’s partisan press: Klein, Pennsylvania Politics, pp. 59–63.

  148, John McFarland, the

  The era’s rowdy newspapermen: ibid. McFarland: William H. Burkhart, Cumberland Valley Chronicles: A Bicentennial History (Shippensburg, PA: Shippensburg Historical Society/The News-Chronicle Company, 1976), pp. 154–155, and David Wilson Thompson, Early Publications of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1785–1835 (Carlisle, PA: Sentinel, 1932), pp. 67–68. “neck to heel”: from the text of the indictment, quoted in Thompson, Early Publications of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, -pp. 67–68.

  148, Like many of the

  The Lancaster Weekly Journal, June 4, 1817, claimed that Findlay’s followers bought the Chambersburg newspaper after McFarland decided to support Findlay’s opponent in the 1817 election; the Weekly Aurora, July 14, 1817, seconded this, adding that John Findlay, the governor’s brother, was the one who had arranged the purchase. The American Telegraph, August 20, 1817, claimed that McFarland turned against Findlay because he hadn’t been appointed the county treasurer when Findlay was state treasurer.

  148–149, McFarland hammered Findlay

  “We have fallen…”: Carlisle Republican, April 25, 1820. “his respects…”: Carlisle Republican, May 2, 1820. “the trouble of signing…”: Carlisle Republican, May 30, 1820. The suggestion that Findlay collaborated with Lewis: Carlisle Republican, July 4, 1820. The Free Press, June 1, 1820, contests the claim that Findlay visited the Chambersburg jail, writing that the governor, during his trip to the town, hadn’t come “within one square” of the building. “I laugh in my…”: Carlisle Republican, June 13, 1820.

  149, Lewis was only

  Doubling Gap: H. H. Hain, History of Perry County, Pennsylvania, Including Descriptions of Indian and Pioneer Life from the Time of Earliest Settlement (Harrisburg: Hain-Moore Company, 1922), pp. 26–27, and C. D. Rishel, ed., The Life and Adventures of David Lewis, the Robber and Counterfeiter, the Terror of the Cumberland Valley (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2006 [1890]), pp. 16–21.

  149–150, By this point

  Criminals’ camp and lifestyle: Bedford Gazette, quoted in Ned Frear, Davey Lewis (Frear Publications, 1999), p. 39, and reprinted in Free Press, June 29, 1820; and Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, July 1, 1820. “Lewis was a great…”: reproduced in
a footnote in Rishel, The Life and Adventures of David Lewis, p. 69. The statement is attributed to “R.M.”; according to Frear, Davey Lewis, pp. 38–39, this “R.M.” was the same Robert Moffitt whose tavern stood near the Doubling Gap hideout.

  150–151, If Robert had

  Rodney’s escape and the “yellow fellow”: Free Press, June 29, 1820; Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, July 1, 1820; and American Volunteer, June 29, 1820. Rodney’s returning home to his wife: Baltimore Patriot & Mercantile Advertiser, June 30, 1820, and Frear, Davey Lewis, p. 42. “The cage was found…”: Franklin Repository, June 27, 1820; “Caesar had described everything correctly,” the Repository noted. “We have been told…”: American Volunteer, June 29, 1820.

  151, The few weeks

  Lewis and his band had fled the Doubling Gap camp by June 17, 1820, when they unsuccessfully tried to rob Eberly’s home in Cumberland County; see Harrisburg Chronicle, June 24, 1820, quoted in Mark Dugan, The Making of Legends: More Stories of Frontier America (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1997), pp. 46–47. The Eberly robbery attempt set off a spree that continued until roughly Sunday, June 25; see Dugan, The Making of Legends, pp. 46–48. Springhouses: Byron D. Halsted, ed., Barns and Outbuildings and How to Build Them, 2nd ed. (Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2008 [1881]), pp. 170–176.

  151–152, Lewis’s newly aggressive

  “The country is kept…”: Harrisburg Chronicle, June 24, 1820, quoted in Dugan, The Making of Legends, p. 46. “the daily accounts…”: Carlisle Republican, July 4, 1820.

  152, As Lewis stepped

  Bonfire: American Volunteer, July 20, 1820. The Volunteer article seems to have been based in whole or in part on an article from the Bellefonte Patriot, July 8, 1820.

  152, Lewis, Connelly, and McGuire

  The robbery and the journey up Bald Eagle Creek: American Volunteer, July 20, 1820, and John Blair Linn, History of Centre and Clinton Counties, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1883), p. 61. Cost of stolen goods: Frear, Davey Lewis, p. 47.