Book Alert / A Nation of Counterfeiters

A Nation of Counterfeiters -- Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Mihm, Harvard '07, $29.95, 457 pages, ISBN #0-674-02657-8.  Index, a note on sources, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The financial requirements of the Civil War, explains the author, ended a loosely-conceived system of state-authorized currency production marked by rampant counterfeiting and exploitation. Under the old system, thousands of banks would print their own bank notes that became media of exchange, so that currency one carried in one's pocket might have emanated from numerous different banks and differed widely in appearance. At the time of the Civil War, says the University of Georgia historian, more than 10,000 different kinds of bills were in circulation.

Mihm sketches for his readers what life was like under such a system, whose players included "charismatic counterfeiters, aristocratic bankers, scheming bounty hunters, corrupt cops, and struggling bank note engravers, as well as the working-class men and women who relied on the counterfeit economy to make ends meet."

With the Civil War, however, came the greenback and the felt need for citizens to be able to rely on the legitimacy of currency. "As the currency became a symbol of the nation state," Mihm says, "counterfeiting became an intolerable infringement of federal economic sovereignty. Long tolerated, counterfeiters soon found themselves at the receiving end of a ruthless campaign of federal law enforcement."