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A Nation of Counterfeiters
Stephen Mihm
Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States
Harvard University Press
September 2007
On Sale: September 15, 2007
410 pages
ISBN: 0674026578
EAN: 9780674026575
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
Few of us question the slips of green paper that come and
go in our purses, pockets, and wallets. Yet confidence in
the money supply is a recent phenomenon: prior to the Civil
War, the United States did not have a single, national
currency. Instead, countless banks issued paper money in a
bewildering variety of denominations and designs--more than
ten thousand different kinds by 1860. Counterfeiters
flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of
bogus bills into circulation. Their success, Stephen Mihm reveals, is more than an
entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of
the rise of a country defined by a freewheeling brand of
capitalism over which the federal government exercised
little control. It was an era when responsibility for the
country's currency remained in the hands of capitalists for
whom "making money" was as much a literal as a figurative
undertaking. Mihm's witty tale brims with colorful characters: shady
bankers, corrupt cops, charismatic criminals, and brilliant
engravers. Based on prodigious research, it ranges far and
wide, from New York City's criminal underworld to the gold
fields of California and the battlefields of the Civil War.
We learn how the federal government issued greenbacks for
the first time and began dismantling the older monetary
system and the counterfeit economy it sustained. A Nation of Counterfeiters is a trailblazing work of
history, one that casts the country's capitalist roots in a
startling new light. Readers will recognize the same
get-rich-quick spirit that lives on in the speculative
bubbles and confidence games of the twenty-first century.
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