Listen to a short interview with Stephen MihmHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Few of us question the slips of green paper that come and go in our purses, pockets, and wallets. Yet confidence in the money supply is a recent phenomenon: prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have a single, national currency. Instead, countless banks issued paper money in a bewildering variety of denominations and designs--more than ten thousand different kinds by 1860. Counterfeiters flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of bogus bills into circulation.

Their success, Stephen Mihm reveals, is more than an entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of the rise of a country defined by a freewheeling brand of capitalism over which the federal government exercised little control. It was an era when responsibility for the country's currency remained in the hands of capitalists for whom "making money" was as much a literal as a figurative undertaking.

Mihm's witty tale brims with colorful characters: shady bankers, corrupt cops, charismatic criminals, and brilliant engravers. Based on prodigious research, it ranges far and wide, from New York City's criminal underworld to the gold fields of California and the battlefields of the Civil War. We learn how the federal government issued greenbacks for the first time and began dismantling the older monetary system and the counterfeit economy it sustained.

A Nation of Counterfeiters is a trailblazing work of history, one that casts the country's capitalist roots in a startling new light. Readers will recognize the same get-rich-quick spirit that lives on in the speculative bubbles and confidence games of the twenty-first century.

Contents
Prologue: Confidence and the Currency
1. Bordering on Alchemy
2. Cogniac Street Capitalism
3. The Bank Wars
4. The Western Bankers
5. Passing and Detecting
6. Ghosts in the Machine
7. Banking on the Nation
Epilogue: Confidence in the Country
Abbreviations
Notes
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
List of Illustrations
1. Three-dollar note from Merchants Bank in New York, 1816
2. Five-dollar note from Abington Bank, 1859, stamped ¿counterfeit¿
3. Thirty-shilling note, printed in New Jersey, ca. 1764
4. Stephen Burroughs as a young man in the 1790s
5. Stephen Burroughs near the end of his life, early 1830s
6. Cogniac Street, 2001
7. Thousand-dollar note of the Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania, 1840
8. Lyman Parkes, counterfeiter, 1846
9. Counterfeit ten-dollar note, 1835
10. Satirical fifty-cent note, 1837
11. Daniel Brown, ca. 1830
12. Lucy Brown, ca. 1830
13. One-dollar note of the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company, 1837
14. Detail of Kirtland one-dollar note, 1837
15. One-hundred-dollar note of the Bank of Gallipolis, 1839
16. ¿Hard Times¿ token, verso (back) view, 1841
17. ¿Hard Times¿ token, obverse (front) view, 1837
18. James Brown¿s house in 2005
19. ¿Raised note,¿ ca. 1848
20. The Counterfeit Note, 1859
21. Van Court¿s Counterfeit Detector, 1858
22. Thompson¿s Autographical Counterfeit Detector, 1849
23. One-dollar note of the Concord Bank of Massachusetts, ca. 1850s
24. The siderographic process of engraving bank notes, 1852
25. Doctored bank notes, ca. 1848
26. Bank note illustrating Waterman Ormsby¿s ¿unit system,¿ ca. 1851
27. U.S. five-dollar note, ca. 1861
28. U.S. one-dollar note, obverse (front) view, 1862
29. U.S. one-dollar note, verso (back) view, 1862
30. Buying counterfeit Confederate notes, 1863
31. Five-dollar note of the First National Bank of Decatur, Michigan, ca. 1870
32. Five-dollar note of the Stones River National Bank of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, ca. 1872
33. Hanging of Henry Wirz at the Old Capitol Prison, 1865
34. William P. Wood, ca. 1865
35. William Michael Harnett, Still Life: Five Dollar Bill, 1877
36. Ten-dollar Federal Reserve note, obverse (front) view, 1914
37. Ten-dollar Federal Reserve note, verso (back) view, 1914