EAS Miscellany sat down recently to talk with Katie Moore about the research for her Spring 2023 EAS article, “To Counterfeit Is Death? Money, Print, and Punishment in the Early American Public Sphere,” which recently won the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article Prize from the American Society for Legal History (ASLH). Congratulations Katie!
Why did you choose to research paper money, counterfeiting, and colonial politics? What interested you about the topic?
Thank you for the questions! I’ve long been interested in the colonial paper currencies of British North America known as bills of public credit (or simply bills of credit), but it wasn’t until I was completing my book, Promise to Pay: The Politics and Power of Money in Early America, that I realized counterfeiting had to be part of the larger story. The sheer number of counterfeits that circulated in the English colonies, the extent and complexity of counterfeiting networks, and local authorities’ inability to suppress the practice made it clear that counterfeit currency was a core part of the early American monetary landscape.
But counterfeits didn’t just bolster the official money supply, they were incorporated into colonial governments’ haphazard efforts to bolster their authority, including the authority to make money; as I write in the article, “counterfeiting authenticated that which was counterfeited.” At several points during the colonial period, royal dictates or economic crises threatened the monetary system (or flush times overwhelmed it), so local governments sought to turn counterfeiting into a force of legitimation. When their power of the purse was weak, they harnessed the power of the press to warn the public about counterfeits and detail harsh punishments for counterfeiters in colonial newspapers. But if these measures helped legitimate colonial legislatures’ paper bills as money, they did little to deter monetary crime. On the contrary, the more people used and trusted paper money, the more likely they were to use and trust counterfeits. This suggests that in British North America, the monetary system turned as much, or even more, on social trust as it did on trust in the authority of the (official) issuer.
What do you think is the most interesting source you looked at as part of your research?
Aside from Joseph Breintnall’s nature prints of leaves (figure 1), which inspired Benjamin Franklin’s nature print currency (figure 2), my favorite source from the article is Abraham Ilive’s affidavit sworn before the secretary of state in London on December 28, 1739. I first came across it while conducting research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania during graduate school; though the source didn’t make it into my dissertation, I rediscovered it when I turned my attention to the topic of counterfeiting. Long story short, a New Jersey sailor named Robert Jenkins had traveled to London to make a deal with Ilive, a Southwark printer, to counterfeit a sum of the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware paper bills. Ilive initially agreed to the plan, but then got cold feet and snitched to the authorities. In his testimony, he revealed that Jenkins was planning to age the false bills by placing them in a bag with shot and riding with them until they appeared “worn & soiled as though they had been in Trade ever since their date [of pretended issue].” It turned out that Jenkins couldn’t be prosecuted in London, so the secretary of state instructed Ilive to finish the job as if everything was normal and made him promise to “make some private mark…to distinguish them by from true ones,” before informing the colonial governors of Jenkins’s activities and anticipated arrival in New York City.
This source is important for two reasons. First, it illustrates the transatlantic scope of colonial counterfeiting operations: many counterfeits were produced in Britain and Ireland and brought into the colonies by sailors, and though the importers were sometimes caught, the counterfeiters operated with virtual impunity. Second, Ilive’s description of how Jenkins planned to age the counterfeits is really telling: what mattered wasn’t the precision of the copied seals or signatures that marked authentic bills; what mattered was that the bills looked and felt used. Their social history, not their officiality, made them money.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading your article?
For early Americanists, there are a few key takeaways: the multiplicity of early American monetary practice, the vastness of counterfeiting networks, the haplessness of colonial governments, and those same governments’ use of the power of the press to make legible their power of the purse. There’s an argument here about how printed artifacts could serve as a vector of the law, from the printed currencies emblazoned with the warning “To Counterfeit Is Death” to colonial newspapers instructing readers on how to distinguish between true and false paper bills.
But in the broadest sense, I hope readers will come away with a deeper appreciation of money as a subject worthy of historical inquiry rather than as something to be left to the economists. The history of money has come into its own in the past few decades, thanks in part to a renewed interest in the history of capitalism (though money predates capitalism and will probably survive it). Recent scholars have demonstrated that money is much more than a unit of account, mode of payment, and medium of exchange; money has been a social circuit, a constitutional project, a tool of imperialism, and more. Money has lived many lives.
Katie A. Moore is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on early American history, the Atlantic World, and the history of money and debt. Her first book, Promise to Pay: The Politics and Power of Money in Early America, was published this year by the University of Chicago Press.