by Ben Tarnoff
Once he had recovered, he unaccountably lost all interest in returning home. “After I got well I went down to the Wharf,” Sullivan reports, “where I saw several Passengers going on Board of a Vessel bound for Boston, in New-England.” Finding the captain, he negotiated to pay his passage with an indenture of service for four years, and after a few days, the ship set sail. Perhaps Sullivan couldn’t face seeing his parents after all those years, or was suddenly tempted by the promise of the New World; his motivations are unclear, but his destination was New England, three thousand miles across the ocean. By Sullivan’s own account, the most important decision of his life—his emigration to America—appears to have been completely spontaneous.
Within the first few pages of the counterfeiter’s tale, a personality emerges whose outlines are immediately recognizable from later accounts: impulsive and impatient, marked by a hustler’s itch for a better angle and resentment of anyone who stands in the way. Sullivan’s hostility toward authority of any kind would only increase in the coming years, as the early tyranny of his well-intentioned parents became the tyranny of a government trying to capture and kill him. He followed his instincts, and often appeared to act without thinking, yet his resourcefulness rarely failed him, and he seemed to know intuitively how to get what he wanted. Sullivan was the kind of man it would have been easy to underestimate. He was a drunken Irishman who, in the language of the period, fell victim to vice; but he was also indisputably ambitious, driven first across the Irish countryside and then across the ocean by something greater than just pleasure-seeking.
IN THE FALL OF 1741, a sloop named the Sea-Flower floated off the coast of Massachusetts. Its mast had split in a gale, and the boat drifted helplessly with the current. On deck, emaciated men and women, tongues swollen from thirst, sat staring at the horizon with bloodshot eyes. Many of their companions had died of starvation and sickness. The corpses that hadn’t been thrown overboard or left decomposing in the hold were sitting half-digested in the stomachs of the survivors: chunks of putrid muscle and brittle bone, carved in desperation from the withered bodies of former friends and relatives. The passengers ate six carcasses altogether. While cutting into the seventh, a vessel appeared, a British warship under the command of Captain Thompson Commander. Commander boarded the Sea-Flower and found that the ship had departed Belfast for Philadelphia months earlier.
Fifteen days into the voyage, the Sea-Flower’s captain had died, followed by the first mate; the mast snapped off, and the supplies of food and water ran out. Commander loaded provisions onto the ship and put one of his midshipmen on board to navigate the Sea-Flower into port. About a week later the survivors spotted the flickering candles of Boston’s lighthouse. By the time the Sea-Flower arrived in Boston Harbor on October 31, 1741, it had been at sea for sixteen weeks, and 46 of the original 106 passengers had died. The survivors were taken to a hospital to recover, but no one seems to have seriously considered releasing the half-starved servants from their indentures. A month later, on December 1, an advertisement appeared in the Boston Gazette: “Just arrived in the Sloop Sea Flower, from the North of Ireland, several likely Men Servants, both Tradesmen and Farmers, their Time to be disposed of, for four years, by Capt. John Steel, at the North End of Boston.”
While an extreme case, the Sea-Flower was fairly typical of transatlantic journeys for indentured servants at the time. Sullivan probably boarded a boat at the Waterford pier in 1742, a year after the Sea-Flower disembarked from Belfast, and often went hungry during his nine-week passage. He cut a deal with the captain to fill his empty stomach: in exchange for adding three more years to his indenture (for a total of seven years), he would be allowed to eat as many biscuits—bread designed to survive long sea voyages—as he could in the span of ninety minutes, as timed by the ship’s hourglass. The skipper burst into laughter when he heard Sullivan’s offer. He agreed to it on one condition: the Irishman couldn’t have any water for the hour and a half he was eating. The captain upended the hourglass and Sullivan stuffed the biscuits into his mouth, the parched bread ground down to a semi-edible paste of flour and saliva by his teeth before being forced down his throat. A few dozen biscuits were worth this little piece of sadistic entertainment, the captain figured, even if he lost some servants to starvation as a result.
The reason for the nightmarish conditions aboard these ships was simple economics. People like Sullivan who were too poor to afford the trip to America sold contracts of their future labor for a certain period of time, usually between three to five years, to the ship’s owner, who recouped his expenses by retailing the contracts to customers in the colonies. Merchants tried to maximize profits by cramming as many servants as they could into their ships and keeping costs low by feeding them as little as possible. Even if a quarter of their cargo died, the traders reasoned, enough would survive to turn a profit. Provisions consisted of heavily salted bread, meat, and cheese calculated to last for twelve weeks, although a ship making several stops along the British Isles and the Continent before departing for America could be at sea for much longer. Even if there had been enough food, it would have been nearly impossible to stay healthy under such circumstances. One observer who inspected the servants’ quarters on a ship in the middle of the eighteenth century described foul odors, vomiting, seasickness, fever, dysentery, constipation, boils, scurvy, and mouth rot.
If Sullivan came to America hoping to find the good life, he would soon be disappointed. When the ship arrived in Boston, the captain sold Sullivan’s seven-year indenture to a man named Captain Gillmore, who put the Irishman to work clearing wooded land on his estate near the St. George River in Maine. Maine in the 1740s was still mostly wilderness, beset by severe winters that kept its settlements rugged and small. It was also a major battleground, perhaps the bloodiest in North America, aggressively contested by the English, the French, and local Indian tribes for more than a hundred years. The fighting had been ruthless, with atrocities committed on all sides—villages burned to the ground, civilians massacred, corpses scalped. By the time Sullivan arrived, however, Maine had been relatively peaceful for almost two decades. While tensions still ran high—British colonists along the St. George River complained that they frequently lost horses and livestock to Indian raids—no major hostilities erupted.
The next conflict, when it came, would last for four years and yet leave the political map of North America virtually unchanged. It would also set in motion the chain of events that led Sullivan to counterfeiting and, along a parallel path, enabled Thomas Hutchinson to eliminate paper money from Massachusetts. It began in Europe, triggered by the unexpected death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI. One rainy night in October 1740, after returning from a hunting trip, Charles ate a meal of sautéed mushrooms. He spent the night vomiting, became feverish, and died nine days later; although there was never a conclusive diagnosis, most people blamed the mushrooms, which were said to be poisonous. Charles’s death posed a serious problem, since his succession was disputed: he had decreed that the crown would pass to his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, but not everyone accepted her as legitimate, partly because of an ancient Frankish law forbidding royal inheritance by a woman. Prussia took advantage of the confusion by invading Silesia, an Austrian possession, in December 1740. The invasion eventually ignited the War of the Austrian Succession, with Prussia, France, and Spain on one side and Austria, Britain, and Russia on the other. As Voltaire recalled in his memoirs, “This plate of champignons changed the destiny of Europe.”
Despite heavy fighting on the Continent, war was not officially declared between England and France until the spring of 1744. The news reached the French at Louisbourg on May 3, a full twenty days before it reached Boston. Emboldened by the element of surprise, the French wasted little time, striking British positions in Nova Scotia and dispatching privateers to capture British ships. This began the North American phase of the War of the Austrian Succession, named King George’s War after Britain’s King George II, the
same conflict that would soon force the Massachusetts legislature to boost its production of paper money. When Sullivan’s master, Gillmore, heard of the French attacks, he decided to move his family to safety in Boston, fearing a wider war in the Northeast. He sold the remainder of his servant’s contract to Captain Jabez Bradbury, the commanding officer at a nearby fort along the St. George River.
Bradbury was a veteran of colonial Maine. He had spent the last thirty-odd years living in trading outposts along the northeastern frontier, and was almost fifty when he took command at the St. George River in 1742, where he had the unenviable task of manning an isolated garrison in territory inhabited by mostly hostile Indian tribes. He hated it, and in his correspondence with the governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, he frequently requested to be reassigned, or “diliverd from this place of torment,” as he put it in one such letter. By the summer of 1744, around the time that Sullivan got there, the mood at the fort must have been extremely tense. Now that the British and the French were officially at war, it was only a matter of time before the Indians, many of whom were allied with the French, emerged from the dense cover of the Maine forest and attacked the garrison. When he arrived, Sullivan found a fort full of frightened soldiers commanded by an aging officer who loathed his job.
WHILE SULLIVAN AND BRADBURY’S MEN waited, their superiors in Boston set their eyes farther north, to another fiercely contested strip of terrain, Nova Scotia. The British had controlled mainland Nova Scotia since 1713, but Île Royale, the landmass that capped the peninsula, remained in French hands. Its main settlement, Louisbourg, was a heavily fortified seaport and one of New France’s most important trading hubs. Hoping to consolidate British control over the North Atlantic, Governor Shirley started building support for an ambitious plan to capture the fort. The proposal, approved by the Massachusetts legislature in February 1745, was wildly impractical. It involved using three thousand poorly trained New England militiamen to stage an amphibious assault that even an elite British regiment would have found challenging. When operations began in the spring of 1745, the campaign started stumbling right away. Discipline among the New England militias, whose ranks consisted of plunder-hungry colonists with little to no military experience, was nonexistent. They made all sorts of mistakes, like loading the siege cannons with multiple shots, thinking that doubling the ammunition would pack twice the punch. Instead, the iron siding of the cannons burst, and the shrapnel from these explosions caused a significant number of casualties on the New England side. If the battlefield was chaotic and carnivalesque by day, the camps at night were no different. The men sat around the fire drinking, singing, and roasting hunks of meat carved from poached French cattle.
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.
