Studio portrait of a young man from the late 19th century wearing a long dark coat, vest, and bow tie, standing beside an ornate upholstered chair with one hand resting on it.

Bill Kennoch, ace counterfeit detective

After the Civil War, the Secret Service took on rampant currency fraud.

By Neely Tucker
Historical broadside combining an ornate counterfeit note illustration with a reward poster offering $5,000 for the arrest of Thomas Ballard, a counterfeiter, including descriptive text and a small portrait.
▪ Clockwise from top left: Bill Kennoch, a detective with the U.S. Secret Service; a flyer instructing consumers how to “Instantaneously Detect Counterfeit Paper Money”; and a wanted poster offering a $5,000 reward for counterfeiter Thomas Ballard. Prints and Photographs Division, Manuscript Division
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 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 counterfeiting.

Kennoch took to the gig with gusto, drawing acclaim from his bosses and from newspapers. 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.”

He was near the Canadian border on a different assignment when he tartly wrote Dora: “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, offering a unique window into a tumultuous period of American history, when the country was trying to right itself from the disaster of the Civil War.

Close-up of the reverse side of an early U.S. one-dollar note featuring intricate green ornamental engraving, large “ONE” lettering, and legal tender text.
▪ The back of a post-Civil War $1 bill — a “greenback,” so named for the shade on the reverse side of the note. Manuscript Division
The nation never had a single national currency, but during the war the government started issuing millions of dollars in paper currency to cover its wartime expenses. They were nicknamed greenbacks for the distinctive shade to the back of the bill.

It wasn’t clear how or if they should be used after the war, and they became a volatile political issue. The Greenback Party, which favored the bills’ continued use, won a number of state and congressional elections during the 1870s.

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.

Kennoch excelled at his work but as the years passed, he and Dora had two children. Finances got tight. He went into business with a patented burglar alarm, but the venture didn’t get off the ground.

“I cannot make the same amount of money that I am now making if I remained at home,” he wrote to Dora during a long road trip, ailing and missing his family. “… If I could do so I would leave this business tomorrow.”

He kept working for the Secret Service, though, even while heart disease plagued him. He died at 46. Congress approved a special pension for Dora to help raise the children.

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.

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