Customer Reviews

A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States

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What I had thought the book was going to be about was how the chaos of currency--thousands of banks, railroads, etc issuing banknotes and a veritable horde of countereiters--in the antebellum days evolved into a unified national currency (the "making of the United States" in the book's title). But the emphasis is on the counterfeiters themselves rather than on the evolution and finance. To visualize the overall financial situation, imagine trying to drive in a current-day New York City or Los Angeles with no stop signs, traffic lights, or traffic police.

To appreciate the situation, imagine it's 1855 and you're a customer or the shopkeeper of a small store in rural Alabama. You're looking at a $5 banknote--payment by the customer or as change on a $10 banknote paid by the customer. The banknote is on the Citizens' Bank of Wartburg, Tennessee. Is this valid? Is there a Wartburg, Tennessee [there is]. Is there a Citizens' Bank [no idea]. Let's look at the possibilities:
1) The bank exists, the note is genuine, the bank has funds to back the note. The note is not being discounted to, say, $2 by the customer or shopkeeper. This is the ideal situation--and as the book notes, not all that common.
2) The bank exists, the note is genuine, but the bank (as was frequently the case) has insufficient funds to back the note. The book mentions one bank that issued a million dollars in banknotes, but only had $45 in assets. This is not exactly counterfeiting, but as the book notes, what's the difference?
3)The bank exists, the note is genuine, but it is actually a $1 note altered to $5--this is also not exactly counterfeiting, but it's close.
4)The bank exists, but the note is counterfeit. Shopkeepers often had publications showing the latest in counterfeited bills (these publications were often counterfeited to show counterfeit bills as genuine). With thousands of different banknotes in circulation, for anyone to be familiar with more than a small number was uncommon.
5) The bank no longer exists.
6) The bank never existed: the banknote is fake. This is not exactly counterfeiting either.
It was certainly a situation where counterfeiters could flourish, and the wonder is how the country actually managed to get along for so long under the circumstances.

It's hard to imagine anyone--other than counterfeiters--being happy with the situation, but Andrew Jackson as president and many others fought hard to prevent a national currency, and it was only in the early 1860's that things started to change rapidly. With a national currency, people were much more familiar with the appearance of the banknotes: counterfeiters had to do more detailed and sophisticated work, and counterfeiting went into a slow decline.

For me, the larger picture is the most interesting--the evolution to a national currency: detailed life histories of counterfeiters are interesting only to point. So the book, while not perfect, certainly helps to fill a gap, and thus makes worthwhile reading.

Stephen Mihm has explored an area that many historians have not previously deeply delved into - that of counterfeit money and the history of banking (primarily) in 19th century America.

His thesis that counterfeiting was a major player in the evolution of the market economy is a far cry from anything that I have ever previously read; we've all heard about corn, wheat, etc. being traded in this new "market economy", but the idea that funny money was printed and sold as a commodity is something new to me. I commend Mihm's efforts at tying this underground economy in with the overall trend towards the market economy in early 19th century America.

Other reviewers have commented on the length of the book, or the lack of a diversity of characters; I couldn't disagree more - the characters, though largely revolving around several central people, are well rounded and diverse. We see both genders and many social classes in the book; Mihm does not focus exclusively on those who benefited from counterfeiting, but he also introduces us to the "pushers" (those that actually introduced the counterfeit bills into circulation) or the unlucky recipients of counterfeits as change.

Mihm also delves into the nationalization of banks - at first, I thought that he was off on a tangent here, but then he tied it nicely back into the world of counterfeiting by explaining how this led to the demise of the wholesale counterfeiters in America.

Overall, this book is tremendous & is well worth reading. Mihm has taken many sources that have been largely overlooked by historians and crafted an enthralling narrative that grips the reader. After reading this book, I would speculate that many readers would not even realize that this is an academic text published by Harvard University Press.

The subject matter at issue in this volume -- the concurrent rise of a stable currency in the early US, and the rise of counterfeiting practice -- is quite interesting. Mihm enlivens what might otherwise have been a dry academic tome with colorful biographical sketches of the most notorious early counterfeiters. As the stuff of popular history, his book makes for entertaining and somewhat illuminating reading. I, for one, would have preferred a little more emphasis on theory and analysis, a little less on biographical details. My guess is that ANoC began life as a dissertation manuscript that the author thought (or that he was advised by his literary agent) to water down in the interests of reaching a wider readership. My own feeling: he watered too much. Even so, ANoC sheds light on an aspect of US history I had never considered before. Mihm raises many compelling questions. After reading his book, I am interested in exploring this topic further. Kudos to Mihm for sparking my interest. I would definitely read him again in future.

Not many people realize that the familiar old greenback that they have in their pocket does not date back all the way to the beginning of the republic. Instead, early on, the United States allowed many different banks to print their own money. This resulted in a plethora of pretty and quite interesting bills, a real joy to the collector. However, it also resulted in a plethora of broken bills (from banks that went out of business, making their dollars worthless) and counterfeit currency.

In this fascinating book, author and Assistant Professor of History at University of Georgia, Stephen Mihm, looks at the history of the counterfeiters who made their living off of the early banknotes, exploiting a weakness in the economy, but also helping to expand the economy. Along the way, the reader is treated to stories of many counterfeiters, lawmen, crooks, capitalists, and...well, the whole economy of pre-Civil War America.

Overall, I found this to be a fascinating book. The author did a great job of presenting the phenomenon of early banknotes and their counterfeiters in an interesting and highly informative manner. I, for example, was aware of the old banknotes, but this book really went a long way towards enlightening me on how they came about and how they worked.

I really enjoyed this book, and certainly recommend it to everyone!

. . . on a subject most people don't even consider!

I'm a big history buff. I'm even reasonably proficient on some of the monetary battles which have taken place throughout American history. But the material presented in this book was truly new to me.

Although a history book, the author is a good storyteller while relating the accounts of various counterfeiters operating at different points in American history. One also learns a great deal about the early banking practices in the US, as well as the chartering (and demise) of the First and Second Banks of the United States.

One thing marred this book for me, just a little, and that is the use of the word "capitalist" in between "counterfeiters" and "con men" -- a tendency which continued throughout the book. While certainly the counterfeiters exercised, shall we say, "creative" capitalism, one should not lump all capitalists with crooks!

"A Nation of Counterfeiters" examines the monetary system in the United States between the Revolutionary and Civil wars, when the responsibility for printing money was in the hands of hundreds of private state-charted banks that produced over 10,000 different kinds of bank notes. Counterfeiters thrived in this environment, where, amid shortages of paper money, free-wheeling banks, and legitimate bank notes that fluctuated in value, counterfeit cash was tolerated and even welcomed to buoy the burgeoning industrial economy. The public often couldn't distinguish between a real note and a counterfeit one, a banker and a criminal, and had little reason to want to. This is the story of the people and forces that created this fascinating, anarchic money supply.

Stephen Mihm follows the underground economic chain from counterfeiters, to couriers, to wholesalers, to retailers, to shovers, who put the funny money on the streets. He chronicles the colorful careers of the elite of counterfeiting gangs in the early 19th century who operated just north of the disputed Vermont-Canadian border, on Cogniac Street in Dunham -hence the term "coniaker"- and then along the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. Engravers, who often found themselves working for both legitimate banks and counterfeiting clients, are discussed, along with the evolving technology of printing plates, whose interchangeable dies made operations both more efficient and more imitable by counterfeiters who could produce high-quality, elaborate paper.

The organization of "A Nation of Counterfeiters" is generally chronological, though a chapter on the crusade by President Andrew Jackson against the Second Bank of the United States in the 1830s is placed somewhat awkwardly among chapters on various players in the counterfeit economy. A chapter on "passing and detecting" is particularly entertaining, as it shows us the deception and exasperation that the average person experienced in making any cash transaction in the early 19th century, when working class people might make a living eking out small profits on counterfeit notes, and shopkeepers might subscribe to "Thompson's Bank Note Reporter" to assist them in spotting bad money, though the publication did more to help counterfeiters than the public.

"A Nation of Counterfeiters" concludes with the surprisingly fast transition to a uniform, federally guaranteed paper currency during the 1860s, when the Union needed to fund the Civil War. The tables turned on counterfeiters quickly, as their crime was now against a government determined to guard the confidence in its money supply. The parallel stories of the Union "greenbacks" and Confederate "graybacks" are an interesting aspect of the War. Stephen Mihm's recurring observation that there was little difference between a counterfeiter and a banker, or between a counterfeit bill and one issued by a defunct or faltering bank becomes repetitive after a while. But the point is well-taken, and this is a generally well-written history of the chaos and unusual opportunities of emerging capitalism. There are some nice illustrations of the bank notes in question as well.

I am remiss to pan a writer's first book---particularly a young writer who is as enthusiastic about his subject matter as Stephen Mihm is about counterfeiters in America. But as a history buff myself, with a lifelong interest in numismatics, "A Nation of Counterfeiters" was a distinct disappointment to me.

To my mind, there is way too much detail in this book about individual counterfeiters: their exploits, their families, the towns they lived in, the clothes they wore, the jails they were incarcerated in, and so on. The author puts forward an interesting hypothesis---that counterfeiters in 18th and early 19th-century America served a similar function to bankers, in that they contributed much-needed "money" to an ever-expanding economy. Sadly, he feels the need to state this premise over and over again, to the point where you pretty much know what his next sentence is going to be. With all the research that went into Mihm's work, it has the makings of a very successful doctoral thesis. But as a book for the general public, or even the general history-reading public, I would not recommend it.

The previous reviewer talks about "skimming" the book, and I would agree. There's some great material here; but it could easily be distilled from 374 pages of actual text down to a third of that number, without losing anything of importance. The resulting 125 pages would then make some interesting, engaging reading.

This seems to be two very different books, both interesting. The first six chapters cover the period from 1790 to the Civil War with little-known material gathered from primary sources. The remainder of the book, including the prologue and epilogue, discuss the transition to a national paper currency that began in 1861. In this part, the author reinterprets familiar material. It seems more like a cultural economic essay than a history. Not only is the style distinct, but we are reintroduced to characters like William Wood, John Thompson, Waterman Ormsby and the American Bank Note Company without mention that they have been profiled extensively in earlier chapters. On page 333 a quote is attributed to Senator Sherman almost identical to one on page 242 which is attributed to Wheeler Gillet. The discrepancies between the two sections plus the repetitions and style change, make them seem as if they were written by different people, or at least independently for different purposes.

The post-Civil War portion is well-written and entertaining, with some provocative speculations about currency and nation-building. However I was much more interested in the earlier period and the information turned up by the author's exhaustive searching of old periodicals, court records, memoirs and other sources. This is mostly straight history, although some Marxist-flavored comments pop up at odd times, usually including the word "inevitably." For example, rather that saying "engravers thrown out of work by mechanization sometimes turned to counterfeiting," we get, "They lived in an economy that commoditized their labor, and inevitably acceded to its demands, selling their skills to the highest bidder." Or rather than the noncontroversial statement that criminals motivated by profit do social harm, we get an attack on the nature of Capitalism, "This was free-market capitalism at its most radical, and the inevitable consequence--rampant counterfeiting--belied claims that private economic interests inevitably contributed to the public good." This is not frequent or heavy-handed enough to be annoying, but neither is it clear enough to be informative.

What is annoying is the author mentions every few pages that counterfeiting is not all that different from banking, and it seems to surprise him each time. Not once does the book mention than printing notes is an inessential byproduct of banking, real banks make loans and clear payments. Several times the author seems to imply that any bank issuing more notes than it can redeem from gold and silver in the vault is counterfeiting. When banks either suspend redemption in specie or fail, it is never discussed that noteholders can hope to get some or all of their money back from the good loans. The difference between an honest bank with real assets, whose founders lose money if it fails, and a dishonest bank or a group of counterfeiters, with no assets to back notes and whose failure is planned from the beginning, is not so faint as this book constantly claims.

On the other hand, the author never mentions that a note, real or counterfeit, can stimulate economic activity far in excess of its value. That's why people often use money of no intrinsic value, accepting it only because others will take it from them. No one holds a large stock of such money, it is used only as a medium of exchange. The losses from occasionally being stuck with money no one wants acts like a sales tax on retail transactions with strangers. We are not treated to any estimate of the amount of this tax. The wholesale payment system is ignored in this book, making a minor inconvenience for shopkeepers seem like a threat to the entire economy.

One frustrating thing is the author never asks what happened to the money made by counterfeiters. We read about many people who seem to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars, at a time when that could make a dozen men wealthy for life, who seem to spend their lives exposing themselves to legal danger by carrying large amounts of counterfeit currency, or passing small amounts where the risk seems to greatly outweigh the gains. Why didn't they use the profits from a year in the business to go legitimate? There are some related questions like why were their organizations so large and sophisticated? Smaller cells, organized on a need-to-know-basis present much less danger of informers. Why was the production of notes centralized geographically, making it easier for prosecutors to locate criminals? Why did these people write memoirs and become folk heros?

A tantalizing suggestion is these counterfeiters were running a genuine underground economy, with a nationwide network sharing the benefits. That explains the centralization and complex organization, the populist support and the limited earnings of the people doing the printing. You can't fault the author for focusing on the facts and avoiding broader speculations, but I would rather have had some discussion of these questions than read the abstruse inevitabilities of Capitalism.

This is a tremendous job of historical research, packed with information. Each part is good on its own. The first part could have been great, either by stripping out the ill-explained opinions, or by developing them into something intelligible.

Full to the brim with endless examples of early 19th century Americana, this book falls into a relatively rare group of works about the nation's fiscal policies and the nature of frontier banking even an average reader can approach. In these days of failing major banks it's rather charming to note how trust and deception regarding the issuance of money and the establishing of secure credit were always constants, ongoing fundamentals to any country's economic well being!

The author does not write as well as might be wished, and tend to dwell much to long on the same examples. The book also needs tightening up, and most importantly - break up the huge central chapter.

That said, this is a good book and one anyone interested in the beginnings of our banking might well peruse with profit of a different kind than the many and various fly by night operators who added to the color of early Americana at the dawn of our Republic.

The book was interesting, but a bit of a slog to read. Seems like the story of one counterfeiter over another, and somehow it just doesn't capture my imagination and entertain me as some history does. The book also focuses mainly on counterfeiting, rather than banking. I'd thought there might be more over the banks that issued the notes, and there is some on this subject, but it seems more like the history of one counterfeiter after another. If this subject is interesting to you, this book is a great resource, but if you are reading this out of general history interest, and a desire to be entertained, this book may not be the best bang for your buck (whether a counterfeit buck or not!).