One Nation Under a Grift

“It is good to be shifty in a new country” was the advice offered by Captain Simon Suggs. Created by the Southwestern humor writer Johnson Jones Hooper in the 1840s, the fictional Captain Suggs personified a type that would become familiar in antebellum American writing: a confidence man. Suggs traversed the Alabama frontier in pursuit of a wide variety of schemes designed to separate his neighbors from their money.

Suggs’ motto reflected what was a constant reality for people living in the early United States. It was a new country, characterized by a vast geographic scale and extremely high levels of mobility compared to most countries in Europe. People often found themselves dealing with individuals they had never met, with no social context to determine whether shopkeepers or ministers or teachers were on the up and up. They bought plots of land they had never seen. They relied on strangers to manage their business affairs and keep track of their money. This lack of certainty regarding identity could serve as a ladder for the ambitious and unscrupulous. The person we know today as the General Baron von Steuben—the Prussian military officer credited with introducing training methods that turned the Continental Army into a professional fighting force during the Revolutionary War—was not a general, nor was he really a baron. But he was introduced as such to Benjamin Franklin in Paris, who wrote “General Baron” von Steuben a letter of introduction to George Washington, and that was that.

The pages of early American writing—both in manuscript and print—are filled with widespread unease about frauds, swindles, grifts, counterfeits, and outright theft. This anxiety was fully justified in an era when, to take one example, anywhere between ten and fifty percent of the paper currency in circulation was counterfeit. The proliferation of state banks in the antebellum decades flooded the market with thousands of banknotes in endless designs and denominations. People tried to verify whether their notes were worth anything, often with the help of regularly published counterfeit detectors. But at some level it didn’t matter. In an economy where actual gold and silver were extremely scarce, people needed paper money to make daily economic activity possible, whether that currency was real or fake.

Some items in the Clements Library’s collection are remarkably forthright in providing guidance for how to put one over on an unsuspecting public. One such recent acquisition is The Bordeaux Wine and Liquor Dealer’s Guide: A Treatise on the Manufacture and Adulteration of Liquors, (New York, 1857). The anonymous author frames his work as being primarily concerned with consumers’ safety, explaining that all the countries of Europe combined do not produce enough pure brandy “to supply the natural trade of New York City alone.” Therefore, the author wishes to “introduce an entirely new system of manufacturing and adulterating liquors, by which the use of poisons and poisonous compounds are avoided . . . .” Readers were intended to be comforted by the fact that while all the liquor they bought was fake, at least it wouldn’t kill them.

Visitors to the United States often remarked on the widespread public acceptance of deception. Charles Dickens, in his 1842 American Notes for General Circulation, expressed astonishment at how people who would elsewhere have been imprisoned as swindlers were instead praised for their “smart dealing.” Dickens wrote: “The following dialogue  I have held a hundred times: ‘Is it not a very disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be tolerated and abetted by your Citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he not?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘A convicted liar?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘He has been kicked, and cuffed, and caned?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘And he is utterly dishonourable, debased, and profligate?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘In the name of wonder, then, what is his merit?’ ‘Well, sir, he is a smart man.’”