Counterfeiting with Thomas Davis in the New United States: Another American Revolution

The beginning of American Revolution was also the beginning of the golden age of counterfeiting paper money. The British Currency Act of 1764 so restricted the circulation of currency that this crime largely disappeared, as colonists listed the lack of liquid capital among their grievances. The Continental Congress and the states, however, needed to pay for their Revolution and returned to printing money from 1775 to the present.

Although the new currency was often disparaged, even America’s “winter soldiers” and the farmers and merchants insisted upon being paid. This means of financing the war spread a badly-needed medium of exchange far and wide, incentivizing enlistment and participation in the American cause when politics proved an insufficient motive.

The career of Thomas Davis from North Carolina is a window into the revolutionary golden age of currency fraud during the new experiment in American democracy, as it shaped the development of its economic and judicial systems. He was one of the most extraordinary counterfeiters in American history.[1]

Davis was born into his career on March 8, 1761, as the son of James Davis, a native of Virginia, who had worked in Williamsburg under William Parks until North Carolina hired him as its first government printer in 1749. Political connections helped James to keep his position despite complaints about his work. A gallows confession, along with other evidence, fueled rumors that he was guilty of illegally printing state currency for his own use. He was never charged and remained in his position until his retirement in 1782.[2]

Advertisement

After serving as a conscript in the militia during the American Revolution, Thomas Davis succeeded his father as the state printer, becoming North Carolina’s third printer in 1782. He relocated his press from New Bern to Halifax, but the state forced him to move it to Hillsborough in May 1782. Davis printed £100,000 for the state in 1783 and again in 1785. Ironically, his twenty-shilling note carried the warning “Counterfeiters Beware.”[3]

In 1785, James Davis died. Thomas inherited the printing equipment, but two years later, he lost his state contract. He became the printer of the Hillsborough Recorder. After the newspaper was discontinued, Davis disappeared from North Carolina in 1786. The following year, however, authorities in Portsmouth, England, arrested Scotsman Robert Muir in a plot to counterfeit North and South Carolina currency. Davis, from Halifax, North Carolina, had printed the counterfeit notes and made the plates Muir carried.[4]

Davis was taken into custody in Charleston, South Carolina, by officials for counterfeiting three-pound notes and ten-shilling bills. Authorities arrested Benjamin and Solomon Stansbury for passing the notes in June 1791. A search through Davis’s belongings and his pocketbook produced notes with obvious errors and equipment for making counterfeit currency. Records of what happened next have not survived.[5]

This crime was seldom successfully prosecuted in early America’s courts, even in Virginia, where it carried the death penalty. Colonial and late state boundaries facilitated escape from arrest, and many people on the cash-strapped, impoverished, debt-ridden frontiers were sympathetic to the counterfeiters. Even the renowned frontier ranger and later Loyalist Robert Rogers was charged with counterfeiting.[6]

Counterfeiting was a dangerous game. Even the work of a skilled engraver like Davis, who had printed legal tender, could be detected. Prominent former Revolutionary War Continental officer Maj. Thomas Washington (born Walsh) attempted to finance his post-war speculations with such paper and was hanged in Charleston on March 23, 1791.[7] Four years later, a jury in Washington County, Georgia, sentenced South Carolina youth Frederick Teller to death for counterfeiting. A jury of his neighbors pleaded for a pardon because of “his having been seduced into error by older offenders.”[8] Davis could have printed the notes that cost Washington and Teller their lives.

By then, Thomas Davis was a watchmaker in Augusta, Georgia. Engravers were clockmakers, silversmiths, and surveyors. He likely also operated a scheme involving a stage line from Augusta to Savannah.[9]

Augusta had been the colonial gateway to the frontier trade and had been a major British outpost in the last months of the American Revolution. After the war, it boomed in the tobacco and then the cotton trade, as well as interstate horse stealing, illegal human trafficking, land schemes, securities fraud, and other crimes. This boom town also became home to several of the new nation’s colorful characters, dreamers, innovators, and misfits, including Revolutionary War submariner David Bushnell, under assumed names, and pioneer balloonist Peter Carnes. Naturalist painter John Abbot lived nearby, as did inventor William Longstreet of Augusta, a steam engine advocate and one of the pre-Whitney inventors of cotton gins, and Zachariah Cox of the infamous grand land schemes of Georgia in that era.[10]

Thomas Davis fit right in. He put his skills to work in Georgia, in the Pine Barrens Fraud, part of the early national period of deeds and grants for land that did not exist. Georgia at that time comprised 11,000,000 acres, but official grants for 29,912,793 acres were issued; the remaining 1,087,207 acres were signed by corrupt governors.[11] Davis could forge land grant papers and pay taxes on the non-existent land with counterfeit notes, giving the grants false legitimacy. As a surveyor, he falsely mapped 95,000 acres in Franklin County that surely did not exist. He belonged to a partnership involving approximately 102,000 acres of questionable land grants in Washington County, while he also owned 318,000 such acres made to him personally. He represented another 140,000 acres in Montgomery County as the alleged agent for a Philadelphia investor.[12]

Davis had returned to counterfeiting before November 1797, if he had ever stopped, when the Savannah federal circuit court, meeting in Augusta, convicted him of printing fake bank notes under the alias Thomas Dixon. While a prisoner, he boasted in detail about his career and then escaped from Richmond County jail on November 16.[13]

Davis, with his Georgia Mississippi Company, acquired huge but highly dubious land claims from bribed Georgia governors and the legislature for today’s Alabama and Mississippi, in the Yazoo Land Fraud of the same period. Capital for this grand scheme likely came from Davis’s printing press. The United States government eventually purchased these lands, in gold, from Davis and the other Yazoo investors.[14]

Complicated counterfeiting conspiracies became Davis’s future. Most of these organizations operated in the rural North where contempt for banks and government, with a shortage of capital that remains to this day, encouraged counterfeiting. With the help of Thomas Davis, however, the South, too, had such sophisticated crime rings.

Counterfeiting syndicates dated back to before the Revolution, modeled on smuggling, a fundamental element in bringing about the American Revolution. Before his execution by hanging in 1756, Owen Syllavan operated four different gangs that flooded colonial America from Maine to New York with counterfeit currency. Benjamin Woodward also led a counterfeiting syndicate for more than twenty years, despite various arrests, before escaping one last time in 1795 to parts unknown.[15] Richard Brunton of Massachusetts began his criminal career at almost the same time as Davis, but his days in currency crime, paper and coin, ended with his 1807 conviction. In 1832, he died in abject poverty.[16]

In Davis’s time, wealthy entrepreneurs formed and funded these syndicates. They, like seemingly everyone else in early America, lacked the cash needed to conduct transactions or finance their ambitions. As the national economy expanded and transportation increased, with a corresponding need for capital, counterfeit currency spread far and wide.[17]

In 1801 Thomas Logwood, a wealthy planter in Brunswick County, Virginia who had been a major in the Revolution and wounded at the Battle of Guilford Court House, hired printer Samuel Brooks to produce counterfeit notes of higher quality than he was buying from Thomas Davis. He wanted to flood the economy with $2,000,000 in counterfeit notes falsely representing the Boston, Charleston, Norfolk, and Savannah branches of the Bank of the United States. Logwood had a scheme to swap his notes for real currency at a branch of the United States Bank, so that Logwood would have the real notes while the National Bank distributed the forgeries to its branches. State officials arrested the conspirators, and Logwood was sentenced to ten years by the federal court in Richmond, although he was pardoned in 1808.[18]

Wealthy Allen Twitty was Logwood’s supplier at least, if not partner. Born in South Carolina around 1765 but raised in Rutherford County, North Carolina, Twitty became a well-to-do orphan because of a Native American attack that cost his father, Capt. William Twitty, his life while accompanying Daniel Boone on an illegal fur venture in Kentucky in 1775. A group of Loyalist Americans attacked William Graham’s fort in 1780, with Alan Twitty and his mother and sister among the besieged.[19]

Even the local census taker in 1820 took the unusual step of recording Twitty as a counterfeiter. Gen. James Miller knew him almost from birth and described him as a man of deception and intrigue, as did the Rutherford County community.[20] Twitty and his associates likely purchased stolen livestock and enslaved people from criminals like John Murrell of Tennessee, even those who knew that the payment came in fake money.

David Greenlaw confessed on November 1, 1804, about how this gang operated. Thomas Davis, regarded as having an excellent hand, made the printing plates, and Twitty made the specialized paper, including the appropriate watermarks. Abraham and Martin Collins illegally minted gold coins, and Robert Lynn did the same in silver.

Jesse Cobb gave a deposition about visiting Twitty in 1805. He witnessed genuine currency made with special paper from Philadelphia being churned for Davis to print as higher-value notes to pass in Pittsburgh and New England.[21]

Abraham Collins, Davis’s and Twitty’s longtime partner, could engrave plates but preferred making coins. He was reputed to have made counterfeit silver and gold coins of higher precious-metal content than legitimate United States coins. The Collins family reportedly had secret mines and even lost treasure. The U.S. Constitution forbids minting coins except by Congress; therefore, privately minted coins are illegal. They could, when passed on with counterfeit notes, give the paper false legitimacy.

Collins was born in 1757 in North Carolina and had large tracts of land on Buffalo Creek in Cleveland County. He had been a Loyalist or Tory during the American Revolution and had served at the battle of Kings Mountain. Some writers have identified the Collins family as Melungeon, a mysterious people claimed to be of mixed North African and Portuguese origins.^[22]

Collins was arrested in 1805 for counterfeiting but was released on a technicality. As late as 1825, Gov. Hutchins G. Burton ordered the arrest of Abraham Collins for counterfeiting Spanish milled dollars. He died around 1830, a free man and local legend, although in poverty. Newspaper reports claimed his gang was still active as late as 1837.^[23]

Witnesses from Rutherford County gave almost glowing testimony to what Davis, Twitty, and their compatriots and family members did, as their counterfeiting operation was a major local employer. Almost no one in the area could be trusted not to be involved in the Twitty syndicate. The gang’s product spread far and wide. U. S. Attorney R. B. Gilchrist wrote that Twitty’s paper came from Philadelphia for printing in Greenville, South Carolina, and for passing in Canada. Prosecutor Waddy Thompson Jr. wrote that Twitty’s gang operated from South Carolina to Detroit. The gang bought enslaved African-Americans in Augusta, Georgia, with bogus paper money.[24] On December 19, 1806, a Lexington, Kentucky, newspaper warned its fellow citizens to watch out for Twitty’s passers moving through the state with $30,000 in counterfeit money, bound for Pittsburgh. A newspaper report in late 1817 warned that the gang had moved their illicit operations to the Hightower River in the Eastern Cherokee nation, near today’s Cartersville, Georgia. They had “formed a sort of Banking Establishment,” making notes that appeared in nearby Franklin and Jackson counties in Georgia.[25]

Twitty, Collins, Davis, and their associates were charged with and sometimes tried for counterfeiting in state and federal courts in North Carolina from 1805 to 1815, but without any convictions, suggesting that political and family connections avoided prosecution. Betrayal, bribery, legal maneuvers to delay, and witness tampering were common in these trials. In 1810, for example, the federal court dismissed a case against Collins because the trial dragged on for so long that the original indictment had disintegrated. The counterfeit bill was too damaged to serve as evidence.[26]

The State of North Carolina arrested Twitty in Burke County in 1819 and then tried him at the state circuit’s next session in Mecklenburg County. Twitty’s attorneys successfully petitioned for a later trial, which was finally convened in Lincoln County in 1822. The court found Twitty guilty in 1825 and sentenced him to thirty-nine lashes on his bare back, to stand in the pillory for several hours, to pay a fine of twenty-five hundred dollars, and to serve three years in prison. He received a pardon from the governor in 1827.[27]

Deep in debt, his wife and son David accused of attempting to murder prosecutor Joseph Wilson, Allen Twitty moved to Greenville County, South Carolina, where, in 1834, the federal court convicted him and his son, David, of counterfeiting and forging checks. Allen was sentenced to six years of solitary confinement in Columbia, South Carolina, jail, and a $1,000 fine. His son received the same for six years and the same fine.[28] Allen’s old acquaintance, President Andrew Jackson, pardoned him, citing Twitty’s advanced years. David died in prison in 1836.[29]

By 1840, Twitty had recovered a measure of his wealth and lived on until at least 1850. By then, and back in Rutherford County and blind, he had become a celebrity. In 1828, geologist Elisha Mitchell sought Twitty’s advice on finding local gold. Famed novelist William Gilmore Simms visited the old man in 1847 and would write the novel Voltmeier in 1868-1869 based upon Twitty’s life.[30]

The downfall of Thomas Davis stemmed from his attempt to establish his own operation. On June 10, 1816, he escaped from jail after being convicted of passing counterfeit banknotes in Warren County, Georgia. He was described as “about six feet high, rawboned, pale, thin visage, dark hair & eyes, & blinks a little, has the tellers ID marked on one of his hands, provable with a needle & thread dipped in wet gunpowder, is upwards of sixty years of age.” The usually invisible tattoo served as a form of identification among his gang members. He had also used the alias of Thomas Dixon.[31]

Davis appeared in the 1816 census of Monroe County, in the soon-to-be state of Alabama, as living alone.[32] Two years later, officials in Pulaski, Tennessee, arrested Joseph Moore of the Twitty gang, using the alias of Dixon, trying to pass counterfeit money, with George Shawley and James Vineyard. The printing was done in a cave in Franklin County, Alabama, for Allen Twitty, likely by Davis.

Moore obtained release for want of evidence, but the authorities had Shawley and Vineyard branded and sentenced to receive thirty-nine lashes. Vineyard survived and escaped from a Huntsville, Alabama, jail on April 4, 1822. He walked into Washington, Georgia, on July 24 and then received a mortal wound while trying to steal a horse. Vineyard confessed to his crimes and gave local authorities detailed information about the Davis-Twitty operation.

Despite his injuries, Vineyard stole another horse and escaped again, as did other members of the gang named Henderson (aliases Owen and Smith), Robert Cressup, and John Allsop. Newspapers reported that they set out to pass counterfeit money totaling $40,000 or more in Augusta, Charleston, and Savannah.[33]

By 1816, Thomas Davis had moved his operation to the sparsely settled but major Huntsville thoroughfare of Brown’s Valley in Alabama. From there, he resumed printing under the name of Scott near the ruins of the mixed Cherokee-Creek village of Bear Meat Cabin, today’s Blountsville.[34]

In the spring of 1822, officials in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, arrested Smith Randall for passing Davis’s counterfeit notes. An armed posse of some dozen men, organized under Major James Childress, found the operation at Falls City, Alabama.

The party arrested Solomon Bingham, platemaker; Thomas Davis, alias Thomas Jones, and Thomas Dixon, described as a celebrated engraver; John Goodman; John Reed; and others. Seized were a paper mill, plates, a press, and thousands of dollars in counterfeit notes, along with plates for private bank currencies in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee.[35]

The state circuit court in Tuscaloosa tried, convicted, and sentenced Davis in September 1822, and the governor denied his appeal. A newspaper report described him as “in a declining state of health—it is thought he will not recover.” The state of Georgia sought his extradition.

Davis earned a postponement by offering to write a full confession covering his entire career. In the text of the last paragraph, the only part known to survive, he included a plea to young people not to follow his example, for “I have lived a vicious life, and faced but little pleasure therein.” He claimed to have printed a face value of $600,000 to $1,000,000, in a time when the average man made $300 per year, that passed into almost every state in the Union, over a thirty-eight-year period, including practically all that was printed in the South.[36]

Thomas Davis was hanged in Tuscaloosa on October 11, 1822. After the hanging, his head was displayed. He was the next-to-last person in America executed for counterfeiting. His platemaker, Solomon Bingham, was hung in Shelbyville, Alabama, in 1823.[37]

Thomas Davis might have somehow made still another escape, but old and sick, he instead wrote the last chapter of his life. Like many career criminals, he found himself hiding with piles of money he could not spend. Davis did not die alone in a cave but was publicly recognized for his achievements. Changing times had caught up with another pioneer.

[1] See, for example, Bob McCabe, Counterfeiting and Technology: A History of the Long Struggle Between Paper-Money Counterfeiters and Security Printing (Atlanta, GA: Whitman-CDN Publishing, 2016) and Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters, Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

[2] Alan D. Watson, “Counterfeiting in Colonial North Carolina: A Reassessment,” North Carolina Historical Review 79 (April 2002): 194-196; Mary Lindsay Thornton, “Public Printing in North Carolina, 1749-1815,” ibid, 21 (June 1944): 183-192.

[4] R. Neil Fulgham, “Hugh Walker and North Carolina’s ‘Smallpox Currency’ of 1779,” The Colonial Newsletter (December 2005): 2910, 2913-2915, 2917; Thomas A. Bowers, “Thomas Davis,” in William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 6 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979-1993), 2: 40-41; Thornton, “Public Printing in North Carolina,” 193; “England” Vermont Gazette (Bennington, VA), August 13, 1787, 1.

[5] No title, The City Gazette or the Daily Advertiser (Charleston, South Carolina), July 1, 1797, 3.

[6] James Corbett David, Dunmore’s New World: The Extraordinary Life of a Royal Governor in Revolutionary America—with Jacobites, Counterfeiters, Land Schemes, Shipwrecks, Scalping, Indian Politics, Runaway Slaves, and Two illegal Royal Weddings (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 46-51.

[7] Gordon B. Smith, Morningstars of Liberty: The Revolutionary War in Georgia, 1775-1783, 2 vols. (Milledgeville, GA: Boyd Publishing, 2011 and 2014), 2: 245; “Columbia,” Vermont Gazette (Burlington), March 21, 1791, 2; “Extract of a Letter from Charleston,” Concord (New Hampshire) Herald, April 27, 1791, 3; Caroline T. Moore, comp., Abstracts of Wills Charleston District South Carolina and Other Wills Recorded in the District, 1783-1800 (Columbia, SC: The Author, 1974), 245.

[8] “A Washington County Petition, 1795,” Georgia Genealogical Society Quarterly 26 (spring 1990): 28-29.

[9] Judy Swaim Kratovil, comp., Georgia Governor’s Journals 1789-1798 County, State and Militia Officers (Atlanta, GA: The Author, 2000), 368; “Caution” and “Notice,” Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle and Gazette of the State, September 8, 1798, 4. For counterfeiters as clockmakers, watchmakers, and silversmiths, see examples in George B. Cutten, The Silversmiths of Georgia, Together with Watchmakers and Jewelers, 1733-1850 (Savannah, GA: Pigeonhole Press, 1958) and Catherine B. Hollan, Virginia Silversmiths, Jewelers, Clock- and Watchmakers, 1607-1860, Their Lives and Marks (Alexandria, VA: Hollan Press, 2010).

[10] Edward J. Cashin, The Story of Augusta (Augusta, 1980), 39-40; Gordon B. Smith, History of the Georgia Militia, 1783-1861, 4 vols. (Milledgeville, GA: Boyd Publishing, 2000), 2: 117-118.

[11] Farris W. Cadle, Georgia Land Surveying History and Law (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 85-97.

[12] Joseph Wheelwright vs. Patrick Crookshank, John Karr, and Thomas Davis, Mixed Case Files, 1790-1860, File A-10, box 6, U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of Georgia, Savannah Division, Record Group 21, Records of the District Courts of the United States, National Archives at Atlanta, Morrow (hereafter NAAA); Philip Moses mortgage, July 2, 1794, Charlestown County Deed Book N6 (1794-1795), 304-307, microfilm roll E201, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia. Sparsely populated Montgomery County, Georgia, was created in 1796 to facilitate land grant fraud. Davis is likely the major in the local militia in 1798-1799. Thomas Davis, File II Names, Georgia Archives, Morrow.

[13] [no title], Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State (Augusta, GA), November 18, 1797, 3; United States of America v. Thomas Davis, Mixed Cases, 1790-1860, U.S. Circuit Court for Savannah, A-19, Record Group 21, Records of District Courts of the United States, NAAA.

[14] Helen Clark, The Yazoo Land Fraud (Louisville, GA: The Author, 2009), 42, 166; Brenden Kennedy, “`Not Worth a Pinch of Snuff’: The 1789 Yazoo Land Sale and Sovereignty in the Old Southwest,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 101 (Autumn, 2017): 198-223.

[15] Daniel E. Williams, Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives (Madison, WI: Rowman & Pittsfield, 1993), 14-17; Ben Tarnoff, Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 56-57.

[16] See Deborah M. Child, Soldier, Engraver, Forger: Richard Brunton’s Life on the Fringe in America’s Early Republic (Boston, MA: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2015) and Kenneth Scott, Counterfeiting in Colonial America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957).

[17] “The Paper System,” Niles’ Register (Baltimore, MD), April 24, 1819, 147-148; “Counterfeiters,” The Halcyon and Tombeckbe Advertiser (St. Stephens, AL), August 17, 1822, 1; “A Voice from the Grave,” Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, GA), December 12, 1822, 6.

[18] Hollan, Virginia Silversmiths, 34-35, 151, 230, 383, 400, 423, 518-519, 626, 634, 697, 735, 749-750, 785, 837; George B. Cutten, “Outwitting and Counterfeiters a True Story of Early Richmond,” manuscript 2864, folder 1803-1804, box W/2818, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; John Page to Thomas Jefferson, November 3, 1804, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington; James Holland to Thomas Jefferson, September 27, 1806, Record Group 59, General Pardon Records, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD; “Affray and Murder,” Richmond (Virginia) Enquirer, September 5, 1820, 2. Logwood was stabbed to death in Huntsville, Alabama, on August 7, 1820, in an argument with a disreputable business partner, Reuben Turner. The latter may have been part of the escape involving James Vineyard. Nancy Rohr, “The News from Huntsville,” Huntsville Historical Review 26 (Winter-Spring 1991): 3, 6-8.

[19] Matthew Pearl, The Taking of Jemima Boone: The True story of the Kidnap and Rescue that Shaped America (New York: Harper, 2021), 16-18; Proclamation of William Moultrie, November 13, 1794, City Gazette & Daily Advertiser (Charleston, SC), November 15, 1794, 2.

[20] Deposition of General James Miller, May 2, 1812, United States v. Allen Twitty and Abraham Collins, Raleigh, North Carolina, Circuit Court Criminal Case Files, 1790-1860, Box 4, Records of District Courts of the United States, Record Group 21, NAAA; Rutherford County, North Carolina, p. 349, Fourth Census of the United States (1820), (National Archives microfilm M33, roll 80), Record Group 29 Records, of the United States Census, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington (hereafter NARA).

[21] Deposition of Jesse Cobb, October 10, 1805, and Daniel McKissick, October 23, 1805, Governors Papers Box 28, pp. 74-78, 80, North Carolina Archives, Raleigh; Mark Smith, Lifting High The Cross for 200 Years St. John’s Lutheran Church (Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 1998), 128; “A Nest of Counterfeiters Broken Up,” Raleigh Register and North-Carolina Gazette, August 23, 1823, 2.

[22] J. R. Logan to Lyman C. Draper, January 28, 1880, Tennessee and King’s Mountain Papers, 6DD31, Lyman C. Draper Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison; Lyman C. Draper, King’s Mountain and Its Heroes: History of King’s Mountain October 7^th, 1780, and the Events Which Led to It (Cincinnati, Oh: Peter G. Thomson, 1881), 202; “A Nest of Counterfeiters Broken Up,” Raleigh Register and North-Carolina Gazette (Raleigh, NC), August 15, 1823, 2.

[23] “Counterfeiters Detected,” New-York Commercial Advertiser, April 22, 1805; Governor Hutchins G. Burton letter book, volume 23 (1824-1827), p. 3-4, Governors Papers, North Carolina Archives, Raleigh; “Collins Afresh,” Adams Centinel (Gettysburg, PA), January 8, 1837, 2.

[24] B. Gilchrist to Andrew Jackson, June 19, 1835, and Waddy Thomson to same, June 4, 1835, Allen Twitty pardon case #1315, Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State, NARA.

[25] “Counterfeiting,” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), January 6, 1817, 2.

[26] Kenneth Spears, “Counterfeiting in Rutherford and Lincoln Counties,” Bulletin of the Genealogical Society of Old Tryon County 16 (1) (February 1988): 3-15, (2) (May 1988): 70-82; John Hayward to John Steele, June 25, 1806, in John Steele, The Papers of John Steele, ed. H. M. Wagstaff, 2 vols. (Raleigh, NC: 1924), 1: 453-54, 2: 477-78; “Domestic Articles,” New-England Palladium (Boston, MA), March 4, 1806, 2; [no title], Weekly Raleigh Register, September 8, 1806, 2; “Raleigh,” Raleigh (North Carolina) Minerva, November 15, 1810, 2.

[27] State v. Allen Twitty, 1128 (1823), Rutherford County Court Case Files, North Carolina Archives, Raleigh; North Carolina Reports Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of North Carolina During the Years 1822 and 1823 (Raleigh, 1824), 8-10; Rutherford County, North Carolina, p. 349, Fourth Census of the United States (1820), (National Archives microfilm M33, roll 80), Record Group 29, Records, of the United States Census, NARA; “Allen Twitty” and [no title], Raleigh Register and North-Carolina Gazette (Raleigh, NC), November 15, 1822, May 9, 1823, 3.

[28] “South Carolina,” Fayetteville (North Carolina), December 9, 1824, 2; [no title], Raleigh Register and North-Carolina Gazette (Raleigh, NC), November 4, 1822, 3; “State of North-Carolina Rutherford County,” The Journal (Salisbury, NC), December 2, 1828, 3; Circuit Court Minute Book, volume 2 (1821-1836), pp. 404, 405, 410, 411, 434, 438, 439, 421, Minutes, Circuit and District Courts, District of South Carolina and Index to Judgments, Circuit and District Courts, 1792-1874, Record Group 21, Records of District Courts of the United States, NAAA.

[29] B. Gilchrist to Andrew Jackson, June 19, 1835, and Waddy Thomson to same, June 4, 1835, Allen Twitty pardon case #1315, Petitions for Pardons, Entry 895, Box 24, Record Group 59 General Records of the Department of State and bill for funeral expenses of David Twitty, March 17, 1836, image 285, “Miscellaneous Treasury Accounts,” of the General Accounting Office, 1790-1894” (National Archives microfilm M235, roll 890), Records of the Accounting Officers of the Treasury Department, Records Group 217, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (also available on the free website National Archives Catalog).

[30] Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina (Lexington, KY, 1992), 193; Helen Mason Lu and Gwen B. Neumann, eds. North Carolina Spectator and Western Advertiser (1830-1835) Rutherford County, North Carolina Abstracts (Dallas, TX: The Authors, 1982), 54, 65, 87; Elisha Mitchell, Diary of a Geological Tour by Dr. Elisha Mitchell in 1827 and 1828 with Introduction and Notes, ed. by Kemp P. Battle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1905)72; John C. Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 312-13, 412 n. 14; William Gilmore Simms, The Writings of William Gilmore Simms Centennial Edition, 16 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969-1975), 1: xix, xx, 433, 435. Henry Junius Nott also mentioned Abram Collins and Allen Twitty as characters in a short story published in Twitty’s lifetime. Nott, Novellettes of a Traveler: Or, Odds and Ends from the Knapsack of Thomas Singularity, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834), 2: 148.

[31] [no title], Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC) October 10, 1815, n. p.; Fred R. Hartz and Emily K. Hartz, comps., Genealogical Abstracts from the Georgia Journal (Milledgeville) Newspapers, 1809-1840, 8 vols. (Savannah, Vidalia, GA: The Authors, 1990-2000), 1: 67, 81, 93, 94, 393, 511, 577, 633, 640; “Items of News,” Rhode-Island American & General Advertiser (Providence), October 20, 1815, 2; [no title], Essex Register (Salem, MA), October 25, 1815, 2.

[32] Jean Strickland and Patricia N. Edwards, comps., Residents of the Southeastern Mississippi Territory: Census, tax Rolls, and Petitions Book One (Moss Point, MS: The Authors, 1995), 140.

[33] “More Counterfeiters” and “Counterfeiters,” The National Advocate (London, UK), August 20, 1818, October 26, 1818, 2; “Washington (Geo),” Connecticut Courant (Hartford), October 13, 1822, 2.

[34] George Powell, “A Description and History of Blount County,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 27 (Spring-Summer, 1965): 95-132.

[35] “A Good Haul,” Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer, July 5, 1822, 2; “Trial of the Counterfeiters,” Republican Banner (Nashville, TN), October 18, 1822, 3; Miriam Rogers Fowler, “Alabama Counterfeiters,” Quarterly [Shelby County Historical Society] 1 (December 2011): 6-10.

[36] “A Voice from the Grave,” Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle, December 12, 1822, 6.

[37] [no title], Cahawba (Alabama) Press and Alabama Intelligence, October 26, 1822, 3; “Smith Randal,” The Halcyon and Tombeckbe Advertiser (St. Stephens, AL), June 29, 1822, 1; John Clark to Andrew Pickens, July 27, 1822, Extradition Files 1821-1824, Alabama Governor (1821-1825: Pickens), Alabama Governor’s Papers (1821-1824), 1821-1825, SGO24838, reel 23, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery.