Lincoln’s Counterfeiters

Review of Lincoln’s Counterfeiters: The Wisconsin Gang that Funded the Union and Started the Chicago Mob (History Press, 2025) by Andrea Nolen.

In the late 19th century and through the 20th there was a widespread impression that the Democratic Party operated corrupt big city machines and the Republican politicians were respectably sober and honest.

This author makes clear, chapter and verse, that mass corruption began with Lincoln and Grant’s Republicans. Ms. Nolen started with an interest in the local history of her little Wisconsin town of Monroe. She soon found that the town was a major center for counterfeiting of U.S. banknotes. And the crimes were carried out by “respectable” prominent locals, all of them Radical Republicans and abolitionists and members of local groups that suppressed antiwar people. Most of them were born in New England, including a Unitarian clergyman.

The counterfeiting business got even better when the Republicans passed the National Bank Act in 1863, allowing rich Republicans to establish “national banks,” which increased the opportunities of counterfeiting.

“The Union waged war to free the poor suffering black people of the South.” That’s the story told these days. It is a lie. The Republican Party, a minority of the American electorate, got control of the federal government and carried out a cruel invasion and conquest of the South, followed by a decade of military occupation, in order to maintain their economic control of the continent.

Ohio Senate John Sherman, brother of General Sherman, declared frankly that establishing a National Bank system was more important than emancipating the slaves. The blacks were always marginal to the Republican program, except where they might be used to advantage.

The U.S. government was quite restrained at the time in investigation of the crooks. After all, they were good Radicals. Secret Service men were pressured to weaken their reports. It would seem that Lincoln’s incompetent foreign spymaster Pinkerton was part of this.

A number of cities harbored Republican crooks. One group, from Louisville, moved into Chicago and established a corrupt machine that flourished in the 1860s and 1870s under Lincoln and Grant. They engaged in every sort of gang criminality including prostitution.

Democratic machines rose up in opposition to Republican corruption. The economic crimes and crony capitalism carried out by the Republican party are still with us to this day. There is an abundance of ignored documentation that supports this. Lincoln’s Counterfeiters is a valuable contribution to the truth.

Originally published at Reckonin.com.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

Clyde Wilson

Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews and is co-publisher of www.shotwellpublishing.com, a source for unreconstructed Southern books.