“And no, there is no archival record anywhere, even private diaries, of any banker (outside the Confederacy) concerned about counterfeiting. “
Maybe you’re just not that good at research.
“The Vermont State Archives has an abundance of resources documenting the long history of forgery and counterfeiting in Vermont. During the American Revolution, Vermont issued bills that could be redeemed for silver, Spanish dollars, or gold. Given their importance to the wartime economy, counterfeiting those specific bills called for the death penalty: the bills themselves were printed with the motto “death to counterfeit.”
Counterfeiting unrelated to the wartime economy still called for extreme punishment. Penalties for counterfeiting included having the perpetrator’s right ear cut off and being branded with the letter “C” prior to being sent to the local jail for life. Counterfeiters who ran away, he could be returned and whipped upon their return.
The Vermont State Prison in Windsor was founded in 1809. This image is from around 1920. When the prison opened more than half of the 24 convicts were counterfeiters. They helped build the prison that would confine them.
In 1850, Vermonters eagerly followed a true-crime story happening right in their home state. The story was reported as far away as Chicago. A big-city criminal named William Warburton, best known as “Bristol Bill,” centered his criminal enterprise in Groton, Vermont. Although Warburton’s gang committed acts of burglary and other crimes, their focus was on counterfeiting.
At that time there were no federal bank bills; the government only minted coins, so banks all over the country would create their own bills of credit. No standard banknote meant that counterfeiting was rampant, with an estimated ten percent of bank bills counterfeit. Given the destabilizing effect on the economy, the penalties were still very steep if a counterfeiter was caught.”
...and apparently the US Government didn’t get your memo about the lack of counterfeiting seeing as the Secret Service was founded to :
“In 1865 United States Secret Service was founded to suppress counterfeiting of currency. Counterfeiting was now prosecuted as a federal offense, so most of the county court cases after that year were forgery-related. Some of those cases included forgery and “defrauding by the use of false tokens, meaning the use of objects in the fraud, typically checks.”
“With a reported one third of the currency in circulation being counterfeit at the time, the Secret Service was created on July 5, 1865 in Washington, D.C., to suppress counterfeit currency. Chief William P. Wood was sworn in by Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch. It was commissioned in Washington, D.C. as the “Secret Service Division” of the Department of the Treasury with the mission of suppressing counterfeiting. The legislation creating the agency was on Abraham Lincoln’s desk the night he was assassinated. At the time, the only other federal law enforcement agencies were the United States Park Police, the U.S. Post Office Department’s Office of Instructions and Mail Depredations (now known as the United States Postal Inspection Service), and the U.S. Marshals Service”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secret_Service#History
Very interesting.
First, there were no private banks save the Bank of North America prior to the Constitution. So your comments about the Revolution are meaningless. They refer to state government notes-—which has nothing to do with my claim that private bankers had few counterfeiting concerns. So, scratch your entire first paragraph. Maybe YOU’RE not that good at research.
Your criminals appear to be guilty of counterfeiting STATE paper money issues (i.e., not issued through a bank), which I didn’t comment on and don’t care about.
But then we have some other problems. Apparently there were no private banks issuing actual banknotes in Vermont in 1809
(See “Peacham: The Story of a Vermont Hill Town” by Bogart, p. 285-87). There was a state bank created in 1806. No private banks were authorized in Vermont until 1818, meaning your counterfeiters were engaged in counterfeiting COINS (again, see “Peacham”)
As for Warburton, it’s not clear if he was counterfeiting coins or paper. There is no source outside a newspaper for the claim that 10% of bank notes were counterfeit. I haven’t seen a scholarly source on this, have you Mr. Researcher?
The U.S. government counterfeiting you are referring to-—again from a newspaper source-—is referring to government war-printed GREENBACKS, not National Bank Notes. These in fact were easy to counterfeit because they were not redeemable in gold. Both the Confederates and the Union during the war used government counterfeiting as a means to undermine the other’s currency, but for the South it only worked on Greenbacks, not the National Bank Notes. Please, keep trying though.