A Counterfeiter's Paradise by Ben Tarnoff

Author:Ben Tarnoff [Tarnoff, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101574836
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

THE PRISONERS BEGAN ARRIVING AT FOUR in the morning, the ones who weren’t too wounded to walk. It was June 28, 1862, the day after a decisive Southern victory at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, outside Richmond. That summer the Union army tried to take the Confederate capital and failed; the war, it seemed, would go on much longer than anyone had thought. Thousands of Yankees now filed into Richmond, not as conquerors but as captives, columns of exhausted men in ragged blue uniforms. Women heckled them as they passed. “This is another way to take Richmond,” yelled one. The soldiers were headed for Libby Prison, a sprawling former warehouse overlooking the James River. They lined up in front, entering the clerk’s office four at a time to be processed and then corralled into one of eight large, lice-infested cells.

Waiting outside with the others was Private Robert Holliday, Company F, Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves. Holliday was hungry, and he knew he couldn’t expect to eat well in prison. So he decided to buy some food. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a $10 Confederate note and called over a boy named James Ballou. Handing Ballou the bill, Holliday sent him to a nearby bakery to get bread.

An onlooker caught the exchange and, intercepting the boy, demanded to look at the note. It was one of Upham’s fakes—“a counterfeit of the Philadelphia manufacture,” declared the Daily Richmond Examiner in its indignant report of the incident. Only a few months since he started printing his “facsimiles,” the Philadelphia forger had become notorious in Richmond. The $5 bills he copied from the Philadelphia Inquirer had surfaced there as early as April, and caused a sensation at the Confederate Treasury Department. One of Treasury Secretary Christopher Memminger’s men persuaded the editors of the Richmond Daily Dispatch, the most popular of the town’s papers, to spread the word about the new counterfeits. “This note is well calculated to deceive, and in nearly every particular is a fac-simile of the original,” they wrote, condemning the forgeries as “Yankee scoundrelism.” As more of Upham’s bills poured in, their outrage grew.

In May, the editors found an Upham reproduction with the bottom margin bearing his name and address still attached. “Who is this man Upham?” they asked. “A knave swindler, and forger of the most depraved and despicable sort.” Within a couple of days, they came up with a better answer, having researched the mysterious counterfeiter’s background. Upham, a name already “well known to many Virginians,” had edited the Sunday Mercury, “in which profession he failed, owing to his lack of brains and low standing in society.” Too stupid to make an honest living, Upham had since “taken to all sorts of low thieving and mean rascality.”

The venom of these attacks reflected how much had changed in the past year. Before the Civil War, counterfeiters had been, at worst, nuisances to the banks whose notes they forged and, at best, heroes to those too poor or isolated to acquire genuine bills.

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