A Counterfeiter's Paradise (6 page)

Remarkably, though, the siege succeeded. On June 26, exhausted by more than a month of fighting, Louisbourg’s forces surrendered. The report of the fort’s capture had an electrifying effect on New England. This was their victory: it was the colonials who had defeated the French, not those pompous “lobster backs,” the red-coated British regulars. The reality, of course, was more complicated, since British soldiers had fought alongside the militias and a Royal Navy blockade played a key role in the victory. But in the jubilant outpouring of Yankee pride that swept Massachusetts in the summer of 1745, the finer points were lost. Americans of all classes took part in the festivities, toasting the triumph with copious quantities of liquor while fireworks burst against New England’s night sky. “The churl and niggard became generous and even the poor forgot their poverty,” reported the
Boston Evening-Post
.

Not everyone greeted the fall of Louisbourg with joy. The news en-raged the pro-French Indian tribes in the woods near the St. George River. One day in the middle of July, Bradbury’s men heard the crackling report of gunfire followed by the shrill sounds of a woman screaming. They looked out and saw a woman running toward the garrison: she was bleeding from a bullet wound in her shoulder, with some seventy Indians in pursuit. The soldiers fired on the natives, slowing them down long enough for her to sprint to safety within the fort’s gates. When the battle was over, Bradbury found that the Indians had killed around sixty of the settlers’ cattle and taken a man prisoner; they discovered his scalped corpse about a week later.

Sullivan witnessed the attack, and the several that followed, before leaving the fort in 1746. After serving Bradbury for two years, he chose to enlist in an infantry regiment bound for Louisbourg, departing for the newly captured town about a year later than most New Englanders. While Sullivan still had three years left on his indenture, servants were allowed to enroll in the military, albeit with the provision that their wages went to their masters. Sullivan’s enlistment proved decisive for his future as a
counterfeiter, since in Louisbourg he became his regiment’s armorer, a position that taught him the metalworking techniques he would later use in engraving plates for forging currency. He seems to have enjoyed his time in the military, recording in his memoir that he “took great Delight in the Discipline, which pleased my Officers exceedingly.”

Perhaps for someone so impetuous, the rigor of martial life was a relief, a forced vacation from his capricious nature. But if that was the case, he joined the wrong army. The wildness that the New England militiamen had displayed during the siege didn’t disappear in the months after they took Louisbourg; if anything, it worsened. Tensions between the American colonials and the British regulars, pervasive before, now threatened to erupt into outright revolt. The royal troops hoarded the plunder for themselves, enraging the Americans, many of whom had signed on to the expedition exclusively for the spoils. Bad housing and poor sanitation, combined with Louisbourg’s damp climate and brutal winters, produced epidemics among the soldiers; by the summer of 1746, an estimated twelve hundred soldiers had died of sickness. The expedition’s commander in chief, William Pepperrell, increased the rum ration to tamp down discontent, and the men drank heavily to numb themselves to the cold and forget their frustrations. The Louisbourg that Sullivan saw didn’t look like the thriving Atlantic seaport that had been so prized by New France and so coveted by New England. It was a foggy, isolated outpost that held within its walls a volatile mix of mutinous Americans, supercilious redcoats, and defeated, demoralized French.

During the two years Sullivan spent there, he honed his metalworking skills, got married, and became a drunk. Nothing is known about his wife other than the unflattering description he provides in his confession, and after their loud fight in Boston, they seem to have permanently parted ways. “I unhappily Married a Wife, which proved a Torment to me, and made my Life uncomfortable,” Sullivan says, “and she was given to take a Cup too much, and I for my Part took to the same.” His drinking took
its toll on his work in Louisbourg, and his behavior worsened to such a degree that his superiors demoted him. Provoked by his wife’s “aggravating Tongue,” Sullivan squandered his privileged position as an armorer and had to serve out the rest of his time as a common soldier.

Fortunately for Sullivan, Louisbourg didn’t remain in British hands much longer. On October 18, 1748, after months of preliminaries, delegates from the major European powers met in Aix-la-Chapelle to end the war that had begun eight years earlier with Charles VI’s deadly dish of mushrooms. They agreed to restore the map to the prewar boundaries, which meant among other things that England had to return Louisbourg to France. When news of the treaty’s terms reached New England’s shores in early 1749, people were livid. After mounting a successful siege against almost impossible odds, after enduring the frigid Louisbourg winter, a savage epidemic, and the condescension of British officers, the Americans now had to pick up and leave the fortress they fought so hard to capture. Partly in the hopes of calming the Americans’ anger, Parliament agreed to reimburse the New England colonies for their role in the expedition, and Massachusetts was slated to receive the lion’s share: more than £183,000, mostly in silver. Thomas Hutchinson planned to devote the sum entirely to retiring the colony’s paper money by exchanging everyone’s notes for coin, thereby putting enough silver into circulation to end Massachusetts’s dependence on bills of credit.

While the windfall delighted hard-money advocates like Hutchinson, who saw Louisbourg as a long-awaited opportunity to finish off the specter of paper currency, it was the final insult for the men who actually went to war—farmers and laborers who relied on paper to trade goods and pay taxes. If any of the soldiers at Louisbourg had a twisted-enough sense of humor, it would have made a good joke: England’s payment for the war, rather than being used to reward the men who fought it, would eventually deprive them of the currency they needed in their everyday lives. The incensed militiamen stationed at Louisbourg took a souvenir with them
back to Massachusetts, a last bit of booty to commemorate their voided victory: the wrought-iron cross adorned with fleurs-de-lis that stood in the citadel’s Catholic chapel. The cross remained in Massachusetts for centuries, and hung on the walls at Harvard University before it was returned to Canada in 1995 on the 250th anniversary of the siege.

Sullivan returned in 1748 or 1749 to Boston, a city he had last visited as a half-starved Irish immigrant waiting to be sold to the highest bidder. Now he was a free man with a marketable skill set, namely, a talent for metal engraving that he had perfected in the military. Sullivan found work as a silversmith but soon discovered a more lucrative outlet for his expertise: counterfeiting Massachusetts money. After his arrest in 1749 and his conviction and punishment the following year, he could have stopped forging notes and returned to the life of a craftsman. Instead, he resolved to become a moneymaker, and left Boston for Providence, Rhode Island, to start building his counterfeiting empire. Sullivan’s reasons weren’t complicated. He didn’t think of himself as an alchemist infusing worthless paper with the value of precious metals, or as a class warrior trying to unseat colonial elites with a flood of cheap currency. He didn’t counterfeit out of a metaphysical conviction or an allegiance to a particular social group. His reasons were simple. “I thought it was an easy Way of getting Money,” he explains in his confession, a sentence that reflects how deeply American Sullivan had become during his seven years on the continent.

O
N A SUMMER DAY IN 1752,
two fugitives galloped through the dirt streets of Providence. The hooves of their horses struck the earth as they rode past the wharves and warehouses that stood along the river, past the taverns where tradesmen chugged tumblers of rum and the market where hawkers cried the contents of their carts. The horsemen didn’t stop until they were in the meadowlands a few miles outside town. They dismounted while nearby cows grazed behind stone walls, and took out a pile of paper money that they began dividing up between them. Against such a bucolic backdrop, the man-made notes must have looked out of place—slips of yellow-brown paper inked with arbitrary insignia, as flimsy as the leaves dangling from the locust trees overhead.

When they had finished divvying up the cash, the fugitives got back on their horses and sped away, each in a different direction. Someone would come after them eventually, and the farther they made it into the countryside, the better their chances of escaping. But one of the men, once his partner had ridden out of sight, turned his horse around and returned to Providence. In town he gave himself up, hoping to receive a lighter sentence: he told the authorities he was Nicholas Stephens, a laborer from Dighton, Bristol County, and an accomplice to a counterfeiter named Owen Sullivan.

The Providence jail already held several of Sullivan’s gang, who had recently been picked up for passing false £16 Rhode Island bills. On August 17, the
Boston Post Boy
accused Sullivan of engraving the plate for the forgeries—“he is now in the Country with a great Quantity of the aforesaid Bills,” the newspaper warned—and promised a large reward from the government for his capture. With a price on his head and his associates behind bars, the counterfeiter decided to make a run for it. He split the remaining money with his partner and took off. He couldn’t have known at the time that Stephens would ride back to Providence—toward the modest skyline cast by its taverns, churches, and inns, right into the center of town—and offer to testify against his former friend.

Colonial Americans had an expression for this kind of betrayal: they called it “turning king’s evidence.” Informants played a crucial role in convicting counterfeiters. The government needed their testimony to prove that the defendant paid money that he knew was false, since without establishing criminal intent, it was almost impossible to secure a conviction. Strictly speaking, spending forged notes wasn’t illegal; what criminalized the act was the knowledge that the bills were bad. This convenient legal wrinkle meant that as long as there wasn’t an abundance of incriminating evidence—like the plates and ink found on Sullivan when he was arrested in Boston—people caught with spurious notes could always plead ignorance by saying they believed the bills were genuine. Part of what made counterfeiting so hard to stamp out was how abstractly it was defined: the only thing that distinguished the culprit from the dupe was the thoughts passing through their respective skulls at the moment the money changed hands.

Sullivan was caught after a week in hiding. His captors delivered him to the jailhouse that stood near Towne Street, the winding thoroughfare that ran along the eastern shore of the Great Salt River. The sea-water smell drifted up from the brine below the banks, and in the distance, ships bound for the West Indies sailed through the brackish tide with
hulls full of rum, butter, and horses. Farther south, past the row of houses that lined Towne Street, a wooden drawbridge eighteen feet wide straddled the stream. Across its surface farmers herded livestock to town to be butchered and sold, and underneath, the muddy shells of oysters and clams glinted in the riverbed. The bridge had been there for eighty years, a prized piece of infrastructure in a town that had seen little growth since its founding in the early seventeenth century. As late as 1752, Providence still didn’t have a post office, a customhouse, a schoolhouse, a bank, a printing press, or a newspaper. But in recent years local merchants had begun a lively export business, and with greater wealth came a growing population: the number of residents went from almost four thousand in 1730 to more than seven thousand by 1748. On the west side of the river, opposite the piers and storehouses arrayed below Towne Street, stood the shipyard where the boats that carried the colony’s wares overseas were built. Despite the increasing amounts of money brought in by these ships, Providence remained what it had been for decades: an agrarian community, a place for people from nearby farms to trade, drink, and worship.

By the time of his arrest, Sullivan had spent two years in Providence forging Rhode Island currency, recruiting coconspirators, and polishing his engraving technique. He had come a long way since his early efforts in Boston, when the ink on his bills was so black that the authorities immediately recognized them as fakes. He had gone from novice to professional; even the
Boston Post Boy
admitted that his Rhode Island notes were “exceedingly well Counterfeited, so that without inspecting very narrowly, few but what may be deceived,” a phrase that must have flattered the counterfeiter’s vanity. At least two other newspapers—one in Boston, another in New York—reprinted the report, so that as early as the summer of 1752, colonists throughout the Northeast were reading about the moneymaker Owen Sullivan, a name that would become notorious before the decade was over.

Providence provided a good staging area for Sullivan’s activities. Its
small size and rural setting made his operation easier to conceal. Certain sights and sounds—freshly inked bills drying on a line, the squeaks and groans of a printing press—had to be hidden from inquisitive neighbors, and Providence offered more privacy than a densely inhabited city like Boston ever could. Local politics also worked to Sullivan’s advantage. Providence’s farmers dominated the Rhode Island General Assembly, where they used their political muscle to push for a plentiful currency. From 1710 to 1751, the Assembly approved nine paper money printings, despite vocal opposition from the merchants of Newport, Providence’s more affluent neighbor to the south. The struggle between the two towns over the currency mirrored the money war being waged in Massachusetts at the same time: farmers wanted cheap paper to pay debts and exchange goods, while merchants needed a stable, coin-based currency for international commerce. Who better to satisfy Providence’s demand for cash than a counterfeiter, whose infusions of phony capital weren’t bound by the dictates of the law or the legislature?