Southern Scoundrels

Reviewed by: Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker Frank W. Garmon Jr. (bio) Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Cloth, $40.00.) Writing the history of rogues and grifters is difficult work. By their very nature scoundrels do not want to be caught. Many of the characters described in this work would have preferred their misdeeds to have remained hidden from the historical record. The authors of the ten essays that comprise this edited volume have succeeded in capturing the lives of their targets. The ruthless men who fill these essays illuminate the Civil War era with fresh perspectives. Jeff Forret and Bruce Baker have framed the essays in conversation with the new history of capitalism literature. They emphasize that “slavery and violence laid a foundation” for the southern economy that made the region’s particular form of capitalism unique (3). Within this ecosystem the editors argue that swindlers served an essential function. Criminal activity tested the limits and exposed the flaws of the capitalist system. By uncovering capitalism’s weak points, scoundrels revealed how the market operated in everyday practice. Consequently, the editors do not view these men as outliers of an economic theory working toward equilibrium. Rather, they view them as representatives of an exploitative system who wielded what little power they had to take advantage of the powerless and the powerful alike. The editors present con artists as coldhearted capitalists who acted entrepreneurially to further their own selfish interests. One theme that emerges prominently in the essays is the importance of law in creating opportunities for deceit. Scoundrels are adept at discovering loopholes and thrive amid legal uncertainty. Court records offer voluminous testimony of illicit activity. Maria Montalvo’s fascinating essay follows the suits against a slave trader who exploited a Louisiana law designed to discourage misrepresentations in private sales by extending warranties to buyers against defective products. When applied to the slave trade, the [End Page 587] law offered buyers recourse in the event that sellers misrepresented an enslaved person’s medical history or previous escape attempts. The devious trader realized the law placed the burden of proof on the injured party, who needed to present evidence of the slave’s preexisting condition, thus allowing the trader to routinely sell enslaved people with false guarantees to unsuspecting buyers. The upheaval of the Civil War created additional opportunities for fraud. Jimmy Bryan Jr. solves the mystery of William Cheeney, who was rumored to have produced a working submarine three years before the H. L. Hunley. By reconstructing Cheeney’s past life as a burglar and a printer with no naval experience, Bryan exposes the submarine experiments as a scheme to bilk money from the Confederate government. Wartime confiscation presented further avenues for graft, as Rodney Steward and Jeff Strickland’s essays reveal. Steward examines Confederate judges who took advantage of sequestration laws to seize the property of those suspected of disloyalty, and who sometimes lined their own pockets with the proceeds of illicit sales. Strickland considers how a single case of wartime confiscation led to an effort to defraud the United States government years later. Bank drafts seized by Benjamin Butler on the outskirts of New Orleans in 1862 set in motion a series of suits after the war that hinged on competing claims of loyalty. When the plaintiff in the first suit lost in federal court, his brother attempted to relitigate a decade later using false evidence. Other essays explore the networks that facilitated the market economy. John Lindbeck describes how imposters posing as itinerant preachers undermined trust at a time when regional credit arrangements depended on ministers to vouch for strangers’ creditworthiness. Alexandra Finley and Jeff Forret each document the connections between slave traders and antebellum banking. Whereas Finley follows the business connections of a slave-trading family, Forret follows the money issued by a failed Chesapeake wildcat bank to highlight the importance of slave traders in distributing the suspect currency far and wide. Bruce Baker dissects the underground economy for stolen goods in

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