A Nation of Counterfeiters

A Nation of Counterfeiters
Author: Stephen Mihm 2007 374 pp
My rating: 2.5*
Started February 25 2008, Finished February 28 2008

This rather academic history of the development of a standard US currency seemed to me much longer than it should have been – perhaps an expansive magazine article would have been a better format – and consequently didn’t really hold my interest. Prior to the Civil War the US had no standard currency with money almost entirely printed by private banks many of which were of dubious solvency and permanence, a situation which created a ripe environment for counterfeiting and created much friction in commerce of all sorts. However as specie, gold and silver, was in short supply and some form of currency was needed to conduct day to day business, counterfeiters were considered by many to be performing a necessary public service, “increasing the amount of money in circulation in a part of the world where demand invariably outstripped supply.” An interesting offshoot of this situation is that people tended to prefer a good counterfeit of notes from a reliable bank to an authentic bill from an unknown bank. Also of note to me: the first great American counterfeiter, Stephen Burroughs, attended Dartmouth in that college’s early years and might have been the foremost criminal produced by that school until Michael Corleone ruled the (fictional) American mafia almost 200 years later.