(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[B]y all accounts, Christian Meadows was a decent fellow — hardworking, respectful and generally honest. Why, then, did he make such an unfortunate career decision? Why did he forsake his work as an engraver and silversmith to take up with a band of thieves?
Meadows abruptly changed careers and became perhaps Vermont’s most famous counterfeiter. In the case of a counterfeiter, fame is not necessarily a good thing. It is far safer to remain unknown or, best of all, undetected. Sadly for Meadows, he was neither.
When Meadows took up counterfeiting in 1850, he was following a long, if not proud, tradition in Vermont. Since before Vermont declared its independence in 1777, the region had been awash in counterfeit bills. The federal government wasn’t the only one printing currency. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress had created a paper currency because it didn’t have sufficient precious metal on hand to mint enough coins to pay the nascent nation’s debts.
But the British started printing and circulating knockoffs of the notes in hopes of devaluing the new currency.
After the war, the Bank of the United States printed its own currency, but so did the numerous state and private banks that sprang up.
The abundance of currencies made life easy for counterfeiters. With so many types circulating through the economy, citizens were hard pressed to spot a fake. All governments could do was threaten dire consequences to anyone caught printing forged money. Some early currency bore the warning “Death to counterfeiters.” Governments, including Vermont’s, backed up that threat by including death among the possible penalties for counterfeiters.
The Legislature, however, dropped death from the list of penalties in a counterfeiting law passed in 1797. This was mostly a formality — no one was ever executed for counterfeiting in Vermont.
Still, the government showed no signs of going soft on counterfeiting. In addition to heavy fines and imprisonment, the new law said a counterfeiter could be forced to stand in the pillory in the public square, be whipped as many 100 times, and have his or her ear, or ears, nailed to a board and cut off.
Despite the risks, the confusion over currencies was too much for some to resist. One notorious counterfeiter was Stephen Burroughs, who was as famous in his day as Meadows would be in his own.
Born the son of a minister in 1765 in Hanover, New Hampshire, Burroughs seldom found honest employment if a dishonest alternative presented itself. He left home for Massachusetts and set himself up as a minister, delivering sermons he had stolen from his father.
Burroughs eventually fell into counterfeiting, setting up shop in Canada, near the Vermont border. There he led a group of counterfeiters that inundated New England with forged banknotes purportedly from financial institutions throughout the region.
Orange County Sheriff Micah Barron tracked down Burroughs in 1806 and with the consent of Canadian authorities transported him back to Vermont for trial. Barron thought Burroughs might be hanged. Instead he was granted bail and fled, returning to Canada and his trade.
Not a foolproof plan
Meadows arrived on the scene almost a half-century later. Unlike Burroughs, Meadows seems to have known how to live on the straight and narrow, at least for a while. But that changed in about 1849, when the aptly named Ephraim Low, a failed store owner from Groton, talked him into joining an illicit plot. Meadows, an Englishman who was then working as an engraver for a Boston print shop, was the linchpin in the scheme. He had the skills the plotters needed.
He also had access to the dies needed to cut banknotes in the printing process. The dies disappeared one day from the print shop. Meadows disappeared soon after.
Meadows reappeared in Groton as part of an odd assortment of characters that descended on the small town over the course of several days during the winter of 1849-50. As writer Stephen Greene explained in the book “Mischief in the Mountains,” Meadows was one of three men with British accents who suddenly appeared in town.
Meadows was soon joined by his wife, who arrived with their baby in tow. They moved into a farmhouse Low owned outside the village. Another of the Brits was joined by his “wife,” who dressed in a showy urban style, quite different from the farmwife’s life she was supposedly adopting in Groton.
The gang clearly picked Groton because it was a backwater, far from nosy authorities. How they thought they would go unnoticed in a small town is less obvious.
As devised by Low, the plan called for Meadows to take authentic banknotes, erase the denominations from them and print higher denominations in their place. The two other British men, William Warburton (known as Bristol Bill for a bank heist he once committed) and George Green, a burglar and onetime boxer, were to pass the altered notes.
Low’s job, in addition to recruiting gang members, was to gather the printing equipment needed. But Meadows soon learned that Low was no better a counterfeiter than he had been a store owner. The press lacked crucial parts.
While the other members waited, Low hustled back to Boston to obtain the missing pieces. Warburton grew impatient, so he used his time to attempt a few burglaries.
When Warburton learned that state bank commissioners were visiting St. Johnsbury to collect deposits for the new Passumpsic Bank, Warburton took his supposed wife, former cabaret singer Margaret O’Connor, with him. The couple entered the Hull Curtis Hotel, where the commissioners were staying. O’Connor immediately took over the parlor piano and launched into song. While she entertained the bank officials, Warburton slipped upstairs and rifled through their things but found nothing of value.
Warburton met similar failure when he attempted to rob banks in Montpelier, Danville, Chelsea, Irasburg and across the border in Stanstead, Quebec. All proved better guarded than he had expected.
Vermont soon proved less hospitable than gang members had hoped. On a tip from Meadows’ former employer, who had tracked him to Goshen, police arrested Warburton, O’Connor, Meadows and Meadows’ wife, along with Low and two local men. They also seized burglar tools, a pair of presses, a store of dies and one banknote that had had its denomination chemically removed.
After their arrests, gang members met different fates. Officials dismissed charges against the two women. Two local accomplices testified for the state and were treated leniently. Low died of pleurisy, a swelling of the linings of the lungs, before his trial.
Meadows and Warburton were tried together and convicted. When the judge ordered them both to serve 10 years’ hard labor at the state prison in Windsor, Meadows sat in shock, comforted by his wife. As the state attorney, Bliss Davis, leaned over to speak with Meadows, an outraged Warburton drew a hidden knife and stabbed Davis in the neck. Miraculously, Davis survived, the knife having missed his jugular.
Meadows and Warburton were taken off to prison to begin serving their sentences. Warburton would return to face trial for his brutal attack.
A new man
Once at Windsor, Meadows sought to regain his respectability. Prison officials let him resume work as an engraver, and word of his prowess soon spread in the surrounding community.
Dartmouth College hired him to execute an engraving of the campus, and the New Hampshire State Agricultural Society asked him to engrave the seal it would place on its diplomas. The superintendent at the Windsor prison was nothing if not obliging.
Meadows’ talent — he was considered by some to be the finest engraver in New England — and his unassuming nature soon prompted scores of citizens to band together to petition for his release.
But it was Meadows’ job working on the seal for the agricultural society that did the trick. When officers for the society first approached him, he told them he was more interested in their help obtaining a pardon than in getting paid. The officers were so pleased with his work that they wrote on his behalf to Vermont Gov. Charles Williams.
Meadows had another important ally, former U.S. Sen. Daniel Webster, of New Hampshire, who loved the seal Meadows created for the society. His reasons were personal. At its center was an old elm that stood at Webster’s childhood home.
“This is a true resemblance of the tree at my birthplace,” he wrote the society. “Who is the engraver that has done this?” Told it was a convict, Webster responded by asking, “Why do you bury your best talents in your state prisons?”
Webster, who was then serving as U.S. secretary of state, wrote Gov. Williams in late 1851, asking him to pardon Meadows. If the great engraver were released, Webster would try to arrange a job for Meadows engraving maps for the State Department.
Williams refused to release Meadows. But when Erastus Fairbanks became governor the next year, he reopened Meadows’ file and was won over by the pleas for help. In 1853, Fairbanks pardoned the engraver and even donated $100 to help the Meadowses buy a home in Vermont.
They settled in Windsor. The offer to work for the State Department had died when Webster had in 1852. The would-be counterfeiter returned to life as an honest engraver, apparently convinced that there were better ways to make money than making money.
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