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The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters
Penguin
February 2011
On Sale: February 3, 2011
384 pages ISBN: 1594202877 EAN: 9781594202872 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The lively and enthralling tale of three notorious
counterfeiters offers insights into the makings of the
American financial mind. In Moneymakers,
Ben Tarnoff chronicles the lives of three colorful
counterfeiters who flourished in early America, shedding
fresh light on the country's financial coming of age. The
speculative ethos that pervades Wall Street today, Tarnoff
suggests, has its origins in the craft of counterfeiters who
first took advantage of a turbulent American economy.
Few nations have as rich a counterfeiting history as
the United States. Since the colonies suffered from a
chronic shortage of precious metals, they were the first
place in the Western world to use easily forged paper bills.
And until the national currency was standardized in the last
half of the nineteenth century, the United States had a
dizzying variety of banknotes, making early America a
counterfeiter's paradise. In Moneymakers,
Tarnoff recounts how three of America's most successful
counterfeiters-Owen Sullivan, David Lewis, and Samuel Upham-
each cunningly manipulated the political and economic
realities of his day, driven by a desire for fortune and
fame. Irish immigrant Owen Sullivan (c. 1720-1756) owed his
success not just to his hustler's charm and entrepreneurial
spirit, but also to the weak law enforcement and craving for
currency that marked colonial America. The handsome David
Lewis (1788-1820) became an outlaw hero in backwoods
Pennsylvania, infamous for his audacious jailbreaks and
admired as a Robin Hood figure who railed against Eastern
financial elites. Shopkeeper Samuel Upham (1819-1885) sold
fake Confederate bills to his fellow Philadelphians during
the Civil War as "mementos of the rebellion," enraging
Southern leaders when Union soldiers flooded their markets
with the forgeries. Through the tales of these three
memorable counterfeiters, Moneymakers spins the
larger story of America's financial ups and downs during its
infancy and adolescence, tracing its evolution from a
patchwork of colonies to a powerful nation with a single
currency. It was only toward the end of the Civil War that a
strengthened federal government created the Secret Service
to police counterfeiting, finally bringing the
quintessentially American pursuit to an end. But as Tarnoff
suggests in this highly original financial history, the
legacy of early American counterfeiters lives on in the
get-rich-quick culture we see on Wall Street today.
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