A Counterfeiter's Paradise (20 page)

If the Bedford authorities had been smart, they would have tried Lewis quickly and shipped him off under heavy guard to Philadelphia. Instead, they appointed two watchmen to guard the courthouse building every night, as if this meager gesture would be enough to hold him. Lewis had become an escape artist, as notorious for his jailbreaks as for his crimes. So on the night of December 16, 1819, when the alarm went out through Bedford and the townsfolk convened by torchlight to find out what had happened, it couldn’t have come as a surprise to learn that the prisoner had pulled off his second getaway in as many months. That morning, Connelly had found a way to pry off the latch that chained him to the floor using his handcuffs; once he had freed himself, he did the same for Lewis, Hanson, and the cell’s other inmates.

They couldn’t flee in broad daylight, so they had waited patiently until, near sunset, one of the guards arrived to serve supper. Connelly leaped to his feet and, wielding his cuffed hands as weapons, threatened to bash out the man’s brains. Lewis took charge and the criminals seized control of the jail, finding a pair of pistols as well as an ax that they used to chop off the shackles on their wrists. Before fleeing, Lewis locked the guard and the head jailer and his family into the cell. He also forced one prisoner to remain in jail—a man named McCurdy, who had been imprisoned for stealing from a poor widow. Anyone depraved enough to commit such a crime, Lewis reportedly declared, wasn’t “fit to associate with gentlemen.”

Once out of the jail, the inmates scattered. Not all of them got away. Among those recaptured was Hanson, discovered the next morning within a mile of town, hobbling painfully because his feet had been injured in removing the irons. Lewis and Connelly had vanished, leaving their crippled colleague behind. In reporting the escape, one central Pennsylvania newspaper called the men “two of the most dangerous characters that perhaps ever were let loose on society,” and included a description of Lewis so that readers might recognize him: “about 6 feet high, square shouldered, strait and well-made, reddish hair, lately cut—speaks quick & has a fierce look.”

EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY,
Pittsburgh’s postmaster loaded stacks of the
Pittsburgh Gazette
into a stagecoach that delivered the four-page publication to subscribers who each paid $3 a year. It was printed across the street, within sight of the stone piers that buttressed a newly built bridge over the Monongahela River.

Founded in 1786 as the first newspaper west of the Alleghenies, the
Gazette
had seen Pittsburgh evolve from a cluster of cabins to a trading and manufacturing hub of more than seven thousand people. By 1820, however, the town had fallen on hard times. Local industries, already hurting from a flood of cheap British imports, virtually collapsed in the aftermath of the Panic; the familiar clattering of the iron foundries, glassworks, and steam engine factories became barely audible, and the once cacophonous city center was, in the words of one
Gazette
contributor, “silent as Sunday.” The
Gazette
itself was struggling. It had borrowed $4,000 to stay afloat, a burden that weighed heavily as the economic outlook darkened.

To this town of soup kitchens, insolvent debtors, and shuttered homes came stories of Lewis, brought over the road from the Alleghenies and told and retold in taverns until they reached the building on Front Street where the
Gazette
had its offices. The editors, high-minded men who shunned
the sensationalist crime writing popular among most provincial papers, nonetheless found Lewis fascinating. “Many little traits in the character of Lewis are spoken of, and prove him to be a man of no common order,” they wrote in January 1820, a month after his flight from Bedford. “With all his villainy, there is something magnanimous in his conduct.” The
Ga-zette
praised him for sparing McClelland’s life and spoke glowingly of his refusal to let McCurdy the widow-robber escape with the other inmates.

Even journalists who prided themselves on abstaining from breathless accounts of banditry couldn’t help but admire Lewis. The gratifying spectacle of punishing someone who had stolen from a widow stirred everyone’s sympathies. Widows and orphans had traditionally been the most helpless members of society, and during the depression, they suffered acutely. But they also became bywords for something that everyone endured to some degree: the misery caused by the ruthlessness of American capitalism. The same month that the
Pittsburgh Gazette
ran its report on Lewis, the Philadelphia-based
Weekly Aurora
published a letter addressed to the country’s most despised financier, Langdon Cheves, the president of the Bank of the United States. “Bow down, and worship,” its pseudonymous author wrote, “the great high priest of your tabernacle—the temple of Plutus, consecrated to deeds, which cause the widow’s heart to mourn, the orphan’s wants to go unsatisfied.”

As Americans knew too well, there was more than one way to rob a widow. McCurdy’s method happened to be illegal, but it merited as much moral outrage as the perfectly lawful heists perpetrated by savvier operators. People everywhere were being deprived of their livelihood and savings: landlords evicted tenants, stockbrokers fleeced shareholders, and creditors had debtors jailed if they couldn’t pay. In such a world, an outlaw with a conscience exerted a powerful appeal. He could follow a higher code of conduct, one that valued the civility and decorum that had been conspicuously absent from a society overrun by profiteers. In the minds of his admirers, Lewis recalled a kinder, simpler era in American life, before
a new generation started demolishing traditional notions of decency in its zeal to get rich at any cost.

Newspapers were only one way that his legend grew; the other route to fame was the spoken word. Folktales passed from one person to the next, the details varying slightly with each storyteller, until someone years later committed to print whatever version had survived. One day, Lewis came to the home of a destitute widow. She didn’t have a single dollar to pay her rent, the woman confessed, so the constable would soon seize her cow, her last means of support. “I don’t know what to do without her,” she fretted. Lewis asked how much she owed, promptly handed over the exact amount, and then hid nearby. When the official arrived, the widow offered up the money and, satisfied, he continued on his way until Lewis appeared in his path and put a gun in his face. The robber retrieved the bills he lent the widow along with the rest of the cash the constable had on him, making a nice profit. His act of charity, Lewis allegedly declared, proved to be one of his smartest investments. More valuable than the money he stole from the constable, however, was the story of his benevolence toward the widow, which would help solidify his stature as a folk hero. Many of the people who heard the tale undoubtedly had experienced similar run-ins with merciless creditors; they could only hope that Lewis would miraculously emerge to deliver them from their debts.

Another story involved a German immigrant named Simmons, who one evening crossed a mountain path with a few hundred dollars in his pocket. As dusk fell, Simmons began to feel frightened. He knew that Lewis and his associates preyed on people who traveled the region’s roads, and he feared they would stage an ambush under the cover of darkness. In his terror, every sound became the footstep of a pursuing robber, every shadow the silhouette of his attacker. When he came across a cabin by the side of the road, Simmons decided to stop and ask for lodging. The finely attired man who answered the door invited him inside, where a few other men sat smoking near a cheery fire. The cozy cottage set the German at ease,
and warming himself at the hearth, he spilled his whole story: he revealed how much money he was carrying and explained his fear of being robbed. Before turning in for the night, his new friends treated him to a lavish dinner, and in the morning, gave him breakfast. Grateful for the hospitality, he asked his dapper host what he owed. “Nothing, sir,” the man replied, “but you can inform your friends that you stopped with Robber Lewis and his colleagues!” This was how Lewis wanted his beneficiaries to repay their debt: by spreading stories of his generosity.

In January 1820, the Bedford court finally indicted Lewis
in absentia
for robbery and escaping from jail. When his name had last appeared in the Bedford docket four years earlier, it was for counterfeiting. Lewis had begun forging money as Pennsylvania’s banks grew; he became a highwayman in a depression brought on by their overexpansion. Few people adapted so well to the mood swings of the American economy, and in 1820, while Pennsylvanians watched their economy disintegrate, he entered the final and most lucrative phase of his career.

T
HE DAY AFTER HIS THIRTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY,
Condy Raguet rose from his chair to deliver an address on the floor of the Pennsylvania Senate. It was January 29, 1820, and the most important moment of the young state senator’s career. His path to Harrisburg had been unorthodox: he spent his early twenties in Haiti during the revolution, watching blacks and whites butcher each other and chronicling the bloody scenes for American publications. He later joined the army, where he reached the rank of colonel in the War of 1812. Raguet’s real passion, however, wasn’t journalism or soldiering but economics. He published a pamphlet about currency in 1815, the same year he won a seat in the state legislature. Now, standing in front of his colleagues in the Senate, he had his long-awaited chance to speak about his favorite subject.

No one in Pennsylvania understood the financial crisis better than Raguet. As the chairman of a special legislative committee charged with investigating the depression, he had pored over every shred of relevant data: unemployment figures, bankruptcy statistics, records from sheriffs’ sales of foreclosed properties. He distilled this clutter of facts into an incisive report that detailed the downturn’s effects and pinpointed its origins. Raguet was ruthlessly honest. Instead of reiterating popular tirades against the federal Bank in Philadelphia, which had become a punching
bag for politicians everywhere, he put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Pennsylvania’s legislators. The bill they passed in March 1814 chartering forty-one new banks had “inflicted upon the Commonwealth an evil of a more disastrous nature than has ever been experienced by its citizens,” Raguet declared. The new financiers had persuaded Americans of all trades “to abandon the dull pursuits of a laborious life, for the golden dreams of an artificial fortune.”

Raguet was right. The spirit of speculation that thrived during the boom years had caused a lot of damage, and the state’s politicians bore a large share of the guilt. But not all of the banks they legislated into exis-tence had joined the craze for cheap credit. Among the more responsible was the Bank of Chambersburg, a one-room operation that occupied an office in the president’s home, overlooking two dirt streets that intersected at right angles to form the bustling town square. By 1820, when almost one-third of Pennsylvania’s banks had gone bust, Chambersburg’s bills passed at a discount of only 3 percent. By contrast, one county over in Carlisle, the Pennsylvania Agricultural and Manufacturing Bank saw its money marked down a full 45 percent. It wasn’t just Chambersburg’s bank that enjoyed a good reputation; the community as a whole was well respected. “A gentleman in conversation the other day remarked that he had visited nearly all the towns in Pennsylvania,” reported a Carlisle newspaper, “but amongst the whole he would recommend Chambersburg for
steady habits
.”

On a Wednesday night in late May 1820, a fight broke out in downtown Chambersburg. It happened near the jail, a brick building erected a couple of years earlier at great public expense and reputed to be the state’s strongest. The jailer was locking the prisoners into their cells for the night when he heard his wife yelling: one of his employees had gotten into a scuffle with someone outside. He didn’t have time to properly bolt the door, so he left the key in the latch, planning to return later to retrieve it. In his haste, the jailer failed to notice the strand of waxed string the inmates
had threaded through the bars. Once he left, they lowered the cord and swung the slipknot tied on its end over the latch, unlocking it. Picking up the key, they rushed to the cell where the jail’s most prized prisoner sat chained in irons: David Lewis, the notorious robber and counterfeiter.

Lewis had been there since April. After escaping from Bedford, he and Connelly ran free for months until a botched robbery attempt landed him in jail; Connelly fled, eluding arrest. Lewis’s capture returned his name to newsprint after a brief lull. “His life has been so characterized with bold and daring acts of crime, that he has acquired a certain celebrity among persons of his own stamp,” gushed the Philadelphia-based
Franklin Ga-zette
. He “has never embrued his hands in blood,” it continued, “and in many instances he has exhibited a generosity not uncommon among bandits.” The newspapers would have an even better story once Lewis broke jail. The version that appeared in Carlisle’s
American Volunteer
reported that after the inmates freed Lewis, they picked the lock of the door to the women’s quarters, and from there slipped into the courtyard and out to the street. By three in the morning, the courthouse bell was ringing and Chambersburg’s citizens were awake. Shortly after daybreak, in a pine grove half a mile from town, a search party discovered Lewis’s shackles and the chisel and ax he used to cut them off. They looked all day and night but found nothing else. Lewis had disappeared.