This Week In History 5 July 1865 Us Secret Service Created
It all came down to money.
It all came down to money.
Even though the Secret Service is best known today for protecting presidents, their families and presidential candidates, the original mission of the agency was to investigate the counterfeiting of US currency-specifically, in its infancy, coinage.
The Secret Service was once a part of the Treasury Department, which had its earliest incarnation during the Revolutionary War in July of 1775. In June of that year, the Continental Congress had authorized the printing of two million dollars to finance the war effort; at the end of July the Second Continental Congress designated two Joint Continental Treasurers, George Clymer and Michael Hillegas, and gave them the responsibility of administering the finances of the new government. Hillegas became known officially as the first Secretary of the Treasury in May of 1777, and he presided over a period when that first batch of US currency devalued rapidly.
While that first money was in the form of notes redeemable for coin, coinage unique to the US would not follow until years later. In 1782, then-Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris asked and received of Congress the authority to establish the infant country's first mint. No real action was taken, however, till the passage of the Mint Act in 1792, which gave some meaning to the establishment of the decimal coin system that actually had been devised in 1785 and the order to establish the country's first mint in Philadelphia in 1786.
Still, it was not till the Department of the Treasury was officially created in September of 1789, and Alexander Hamilton took the oath of office as its first Secretary days later, that things really started to take shape for the dollar. In November of 1792 the first coins of the new nation were finally struck. In 1793, those first half-dimes were followed with half-cent pieces. In the interim, some forms of foreign coinage were approved for use in the US as currency, since the country still had so little coinage of its own.
Over the next decades, denominations of paper and coin money would come and go, and both forms of money were counterfeited-a problem with money since its earliest days. The problem became so severe that by Lincoln's time, as much as a third of the money circulating in the US was estimated to be fake.
And that, ironically, is where the Secret Service came in. In its early form, it was originally a division of the Department of the Treasury and was an outgrowth of the act of June 23, 1860-which provided for suppression of the counterfeiting of US coins. That act, although the actual formation of the agency was still a few years in the future, was the true birth of the Secret Service-an agency that would later see its mission broaden to encompass not just the legitimacy of currency, but also the investigation of any fraud against the US and, eventually, the protection of presidents.
The US Secret Service as it originally came into existence was actually the a result of a move by Abraham Lincoln, who, as one of his last official acts, approved the plan of then-Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch to create an anti-counterfeiting unit within Treasury. The Secret Service thus began its life as a body that would, unlikely as it may seem, work to investigate and stop the making of counterfeit currency.
Ironically, Lincoln approved the early mission of the Secret Service on April 14, 1865, and in fact the legislation to bring it into being was on his desk at the White House on the very night he was shot at Ford's Theater. However, it was not until the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 that the Secret Service was tasked with protecting presidents. Before that, it had a very different job.
The agency received its official commission on July 5 of 1865, and soon its mission expanded from the pursuit of counterfeiters to include the investigation of everything from bootleg distillers to Klu Klux Klan members to mail and land fraud and drug traffickng-any fraud against the country.
One of those later responsibilities is the linchpin in L. Ron Hubbard's The Carnival of Death, in which undercover agent Bob Clark is working as a carnival detective, pursuing just such an investigation-looking for illicit drugs-when he comes up against murder. Despite two attempts on his life, Clark must keep his official status hidden as he searches for ways to uncover the truth about what is going on at Shreve's Mammoth Carnival. But later in the tale, when he shows his credentials to a state police captain, Clark is revealed as a Treasury Department employee and agent of the Secret Service.
by: Lee Barwood
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