True Crime: William Kennoch, The Ace Counterfeit Detective

-Research by Micah Messenheimer in the Prints and Photographs Division and Jake Bozza, formerly of the Manuscript Division, contributed to this report.

It turns out that William “Bill” Kennoch, one of the nation’s top counterfeit detectives in the chaotic post-Civil War era, didn’t have any nifty nicknames, such as “Dollar” or “Wild.”

He was a rather somber native New Yorker who spent most of the Civil War in what is now the Coast Guard, then got busted on a Havana steamer in 1870 with contraband Cuban cigars. The arresting agent spotted something in the 29-year-old, though. Instead of charging him with a crime, he offered Kennoch a badge and a career with the U.S. Secret Service, the agency created in 1865 to combat counterfeit enforcement.

Kennoch took to the gig with gusto. He traveled undercover, used aliases, staked out sleazy houses, hung out in bars. Tools of his trade included a long thin knife in a leather sleeve (some of his suspects were violent) and a brass loupe to inspect bills.

“I’ve just arrived at this place and have just got on the scent of my man,” he wrote his wife, Dora, on Aug. 9, 1871, from Tyrone, Pennsylvania, a small town about 100 miles east of Pittsburgh. “I have only got a description of him from five years ago when he shot Marshal Butter and Van Vleet. He is somewhere within a 2.5 mile radius of this place in a perfect wilderness.”

His territory also ranged to upstate New York. He once wrote Dora that he was “going north toward the Canadian border between Vermont-New Hampshire … keep this note secret and do not tell anyone where I am.” He was mentioning his location, he wrote, so that in case anything should happen to him, she would know where to start looking. He tartly added: “It is very cold here – it would freeze a brass monkey’s bollocks.” .

Kennoch’s papers – diaries, letters, work reports, photographs of more than 1,200 criminals – are preserved at the Library. His adventures and office drudgery are well documented. He filed daily reports, including what time he got to work at his New York office, where he went, who he met with and for how long, what he spent and what time he went home. More expansive are his personal diaries and those letters to Dora. (He begins them all, “Dear wife.…”)

He was good at it, too. Hiram Whitley, the head of the Secret Service for the first years of Kennoch’s career, described him as “one of my ablest agents.” A newspaper described him as “better acquainted with counterfeiters, their ways and haunts than any other detective in the country.”

His work also gives a personal window into a tumultuous period of American history, when the country was trying to right itself from the disaster of the Civil War. Amid the ugly battles over Reconstruction, there was the cornerstone issue of rebuilding the economy.

This was complicated in some very fundamental ways. The nation never had a single national currency but after the Civil War broke out, the government started issuing millions of dollars in various notes and designs of paper currency, nicknamed greenbacks for the distinctive shade to the back of the bill, to cover its wartime expenses.

These were not backed by gold reserves. It wasn’t clear how or if they should be used after the war. There were also gold and silver coins in circulation. The currency situation was so profound that the Greenback Party, which favored the national bills’ continued use, won a number of state and congressional elections during the 1870s.

Further, the Panic of 1873 turned markets upside down, closed the stock market for more than a week and then settled into a yearslong downturn. It known as the Great Depression until the 1930s came along.

It was in this chaotic and often violent maelstrom that Kennoch and fellow agents fanned out across the country to track down legions of counterfeiters – the Secret Service estimated that one in every three bills in circulation was fake.

Dudley Vaught, he of desultory expression, worn clothes and a magnificent handlebar moustache, was out on bail for homicide when he was arrested as one of the “Lincoln County counterfeiters” in Milledgeville, Kentucky, on Feb. 12, 1884. He was sentenced to five years at hard labor for the counterfeiting, with the homicide trial still to come.

In 1871 New York,the Secret Service offered a whopping $5,000 reward for arrest of counterfeiter Thomas Ballard after he escaped from a local jail. The wanted poster describes him as blue-eyed, brown-haired man standing 5 feet, 9 inches tall, with features “small, regular and effeminate, stoops slightly, has a downcast and uneasy look.”

Kennoch excelled at his work but as the years passed, he and Dora had two children. Finances were tight. An enterprising sort, he went into business with a patented burglar alarm of his own creation, but the venture didn’t get off the ground.

By the winter of 1880, nine years after excitedly getting on the scent of a suspect hiding in a “perfect wilderness,” he was still out in the field, slogging 12 miles on foot through the snow in rural Pennsylvania to meet five suspected counterfeiters. Taking a horse and sleigh, he wrote home to Dora, would have tipped them off that he had too much money on him.

If all this undercover work once had been an adventure, that day had passed. He was pushing 40, financially strapped, missing his family and tired of it all.

“I cannot make the same amount of money that I am now making if I remained at home,” he wrote to Dora, “and as we must live what else am I to do but stick it out…If I could do so I would leave this business tomorrow.”

He never did, though.

Seven years later, still working for the Secret Service, Bill Kennoch endured months of ill health before dying of heart disease. He was 46.

Dora was so destitute that Congress approved a special pension for her, citing a long-ago foot injury to Kennoch during his Civil War service. It was $12 per month, and she and the children carried on. The nation’s currency changed and settled and massive counterfeiting waned. Kennoch’s name, and his time as a lawman on the nation’s financial frontier, passed into a drama that would be preserved in the Library’s collections.

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