Samuel C. (Samuel Curtis) Upham

author

Samuel C. (Samuel Curtis) Upham

1819–1885

Best remembered as the Philadelphia shopkeeper who flooded the South with imitation Confederate banknotes, he led a life full of reinventions before becoming a Civil War curiosity. His story mixes journalism, entrepreneurship, and one of the strangest forms of wartime sabotage in American history.

1 Audiobook

Florida: Past and present together with notes from Sunland, on the Manatee River, Gulf Coast of South Florida: its climate, soil, and productions

Florida: Past and present together with notes from Sunland, on the Manatee River, Gulf Coast of South Florida: its climate, soil, and productions

by Samuel C. (Samuel Curtis) Upham

About the author

Born in Vermont in 1819, Samuel Curtis Upham worked a remarkable range of jobs over his lifetime, including clerk, merchant, journalist, sailor, and gold seeker. By the time of the Civil War, he was running a stationery and variety shop in Philadelphia, where his knack for spotting public demand would make him unexpectedly famous.

In 1862, after seeing intense interest in Confederate money reproduced in a newspaper, he began printing and selling copies from his shop. He advertised them as souvenirs and facsimiles, but many were trimmed and passed into circulation in the South as counterfeit currency. That made Upham one of the most notorious civilian figures connected to the Confederate money crisis, even as he cultivated the nickname "Honest Sam."

Upham later returned to more ordinary business pursuits, but his reputation stayed tied to those counterfeit notes. Today he is remembered less as a conventional author or publisher than as an inventive and controversial American original whose printed paper briefly became part of the Civil War itself.