To Counterfeit Is Death? Money, Print, and Punishment in the Early American Public Sphere

Abstract

This article contributes to recent scholarship on early American money by exploring the role of print and the public sphere in making local paper currencies meaningful. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, elected assemblies and paper money advocates produced currencies, legislation, and discourse to incite belief in paper money and foster confidence in the fiscal promise that underpinned its value. With the spread of the press and the rise of counterfeiting, colonial governments and established printers turned monetary crime into a force of legitimation, distinguishing genuine monetary tokens from their fraudulent counterparts to authenticate "real" paper money. At a time when threats to the monetary system came less from counterfeiters than from political and economic factors, the authorities used the power of the press to legitimate paper as money and to demonstrate stewardship over the market relations paper money shaped. By the mid-eighteenth century, printers were putting variations of the phrase "To Counterfeit Is Death" on colonial currencies and detailing harsh punishments for counterfeiters in their newspapers, rendering colonial state power visible to abstract subjects. The political basis of paper money's value—the power of the purse—was in the process hidden from public view.