appeared in response to the severe shortage of precious metals that was a persistent
problem of colonial life. In 1690, colonial
Massachusetts began printing “bills of
credit” to pay its expenses from a war with
French colonists. The crude quality of
these notes made forging them fairly easy.
Soon other colonies followed suit with
their own notes.
After the Revolution, paper money
became even more pervasive. Although
the Constitution forbade individual states
from producing currency, the states evaded
this restriction by chartering private banks
to print it for them. As the number of these
banks increased, so did the quantity and
variety of their bills. In 1800, there were 29
banks in the United States; 16 years later,
the number had soared to 250. The nation’s
mushrooming financial sector benefited
counterfeiters enormously. The dizzying
diversity of American paper currency gave
them an array of bills to forge. And with
too many kinds of paper changing hands
for the average American to be familiar
with all of it, it became even easier to pass
off a fake note undetected. By the 1850s,
there were more than 10,000 different
kinds of notes circulating in the US.
The arrival of the Civil War created a
new kind of counterfeiter: someone who
could forge currency without breaking the
law. This paradox of a profession was perfect for Upham, whose own personality
contained more conflicts and contradictions than would have been apparent to
those who knew him only as a middle-aged
shopkeeper. Only a few months after he
started printing his “facsimiles,” his name
had become notorious in the Confederate capital of Richmond. The $5 bills he
copied from the Inquirer surfaced there as
early as April 1862, and caused a sensation
at the Confederate Treasury Department.
A Treasury officer 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.
Upham provoked such vitriol because
he enabled people to undermine the Confederacy’s authority. The South was prepared to send its citizens to the most
gruesome deaths imaginable to secure its
sovereignty. Its paper notes were symbols
of that sovereignty, rectangles emblazoned
with images that reminded people from
tiny towns in Georgia or North Carolina
that they were part of a proud, powerful
country. “The attempt to pass a counterfeit Confederate note is certainly an
act of hostility against our government,”
said the Daily Richmond Examiner. The
fact that Upham challenged the Confederacy so openly — that he was brazen
enough to put his name and address on
his counterfeits — made Southerners even
angrier. At 403 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, a shopkeeper was selling stacks of
fake Southern cash, and the Confederates
couldn’t do anything about it.
While Upham owed his success partly
to the quality of his imitations, what really
distinguished him was his skill as a salesman. Thanks to the Civil War, he could
treat counterfeiting like a legitimate business. While steadily enlarging his catalog
of Confederate currency, Upham attracted
new customers by placing full-page advertisements in various Northern publications. As his business ev