A Counterfeiter's Paradise

by Ben Tarnoff

  ON 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?

  WHEN SULLIVAN ARRIVED at the Providence jail in 1752, he found several members of his counterfeiting ring. These men weren’t hardened criminals; they were farmers, millers, boatmen—people who dabbled in passing forged bills in order to earn a little something extra on the side. The prisoners were probably frightened by the time Sullivan got there, and unsure of how to plead their case. The engraver took control immediately: he promised his confederates that if they followed his instructions, all of them would walk free.

  There was only one problem. Stephens confessed that he had received money from Sullivan that he knew was forged, which gave the government exactly what it needed to build a solid case against the counterfeiter: a sworn statement from a former accomplice. When Sullivan discovered Stephens’s treachery, he was outraged. Not only had Stephens ridden into Providence and surrendered like a coward, he had squealed, volunteering testimony that would surely convict Sullivan and possibly implicate the others.

  Sullivan’s anger didn’t prevent him from thinking clearly about how to get his gang out of jail. He told them to plead not guilty, and to swear that they had considered the bills genuine. Sullivan would then declare he had intentionally deceived them—that they were his victims, not his collaborators—and enter a guilty plea. What’s more, he would announce that he had hidden £4,000 in counterfeit money, and refuse to reveal the stockpile’s location until the innocent men were released.

  Sullivan had learned enough about colonial courts to know his offer was irresistible. A big bundle of spurious notes, along with a guilty plea and deposition from Stephens, proved too tempting to the Providence authorities, who promptly freed all of the prisoners except for the counterfeiter and the informant. From their point of view, nailing the ringleader was much more appealing than convicting a hand
ful of small fish. The plan worked: once Sullivan’s associates had been set free, he delivered the cache of forged money, confessed his guilt, and stood trial.

  A grand jury indicted Sullivan, identified as “a Transient Person now confined in his Majesty’s Gaol in Providence,” of engraving a plate to counterfeit Rhode Island’s currency “in order to defraud and cheat” unsuspecting colonists. Stephens had probably described the counterfeiter’s activities in some detail, because the charges were unusually specific: the court accused Sullivan of starting to make the plate on June 12, finishing it on August 5, and then using it to produce “sundry false & counterfeit Bills in imitation of the true Bills of Publick Credit.” In a puzzling twist, Stephens also faced charges, since he had incriminated himself in his confession. “[F]or the sake of unlawful gain,” his indictment read, the laborer from Bristol County “did council and advise Owen Sullivan” in engraving the plate, printing the notes, and passing them. Both men pleaded guilty, and both were convicted.

  In September 1752, two years to the month since his last punishment in Boston, Sullivan was led to the pillory across the street from the jailhouse and bolted between its wooden beams. He stood there, overlooking the crowd that had gathered to watch. An hour and a half after Sullivan had put his head and hands into the contraption, the constable emerged with a red-hot branding iron with the shape of the letter R at one end, for “incorrigible Rogue.” Although punishments varied by colony, physical mutilation was typically reserved for criminals considered irredeemable, or repeat offenders like Sullivan, who would be forced to carry the mark of their crime for life. In this case, however, Sullivan convinced the authorities to show mercy, so the constable planted the brand above the hairline, where it would be less visible. The onlookers inhaled a strange smell: the stench of burning hair and skin mingling with the sweet odor of fermenting molasses from the nearby rum distilleries. Then the constable took out a blade to crop the convict’s ears, but again, Sullivan had prevailed on the authorities to get his penalty reduced. Instead of slicing large pieces off the ears, the lawman only cut the edges, severing bloody strips from the counterfeiter’s head while the residents of Providence stood staring.

  Stephens’s punishment was next. He had received the same sentence and, despite helping convict his former partner, wasn’t as persuasive as Sullivan in his appeal for leniency. According to the inscrutable whims of the colonial authorities, Stephens faced the full force of the law: the constable burned the R into each of the criminal’s cheeks and cropped both ears. Sullivan, freshly branded and bloodied, had talked his jailers into letting him attend the performance, to gloat over Stephens’s suffering. But once he got there, the sight of the snitch so enraged him that he broke away from his keepers, seized a cutlass, and, swinging the sword in the air, urged the constable to do his duty. When the sentence was carried out to Sullivan’s satisfaction, he vaulted into the crowd, fought his way through, and disappeared.

  Sullivan had escaped in broad daylight while the entire Providence law enforcement establishment looked on. His keepers, whether from fear or incompetence, were incapable of holding him; he did what he liked, and when he fled, they couldn’t recapture him. If this wasn’t embarrassing enough, Sullivan returned to town a few days later to shame the authorities again. He declared that by turning himself in, he would do voluntarily what they couldn’t do: put him in prison. The counterfeiter was promptly hauled back to jail and chained with heavy irons. Within a few days he broke out again, somehow having gotten hold of a sword, and the town officials, determined not to be further humiliated, sent men to chase him. “[T]hey pursu’d me very close, sent Post haste after me, and did all they could to Apprehend me,” Sullivan recalls in his confession. But he eluded his pursuers, and traveled 150 miles west through Rhode Island and Connecticut to settle in Dutchess County, New York, where he began planning the next phase of his career.

  Sullivan’s performance at the pillory and subsequent jailbreaks provided just the right kind of kindling to fuel his burgeoning reputation. It helped that he had a flair for showmanship. There was no reason to return to jail after his first escape other than to demonstrate his daring and his brazen contempt for the law. His theatrics had the quality of a burlesque—taunting, humiliating, and outwitting his captors. But Sullivan wasn’t just entertaining; he was also sympathetic. One account of his punishment in Providence called him “a man of good Address” who “found Means to prejudice the Populace in his Favour.” It made sense for the crowd to commiserate with the counterfeiter. First his partner betrayed him, then he was punished for making money, an activity that inspired more admi-ration than indignation among the spectators standing below the pillory. Everyone wanted to make money—Sullivan’s method was just more literal than most.

  Sullivan also provided a service that many residents of Providence had patronized: cheap currency, virtually indistinguishable from the genuine article. There was always demand for paper money among the town’s farmers and laborers, who needed it to pay down their debt and trade in the marketplace. For these people, Sullivan had an obvious appeal. Like them he came from humble origins—an Irish immigrant and a former indentured servant—but went on to make a fortune almost overnight. Many of the men and women standing within sight of the town pillory in September 1752 must have found something moving in the spectacle of an entrepreneur forced to suffer for his success.

  Sullivan had more than just the popular desire for paper currency to thank for his growing celebrity. He also owed his fame to the public nature of punishment in colonial America, which gave the counterfeiter a soapbox and a captive audience. In Sullivan’s day the government would discipline the convict publicly, in front of his peers, to shame him and to deter onlookers from following in his footsteps. While specific punishments varied by jurisdiction, the sentence passed on Sullivan and Stephens was fairly typical for property crimes; burglars and thieves were likely to face the same penalty. Since long-term imprisonment was rare, jails served mostly as holding areas for convicts awaiting trial and debtors who defaulted on their loans, which helps explain why they were so poorly guarded. Punishment didn’t happen within a cell hidden from sight but outside, in full view. The whip, the branding iron, the pillory, and the gallows gave colonists their community rituals—entertaining and edifying theater pieces about the consequences of crime. But as Sullivan understood, once you had the stage you could do what you wanted with it. All it took was a little imagination to depart from the official script and spin a more interesting story line. The treachery of Stephens, the audacity of Sullivan, the helplessness of the authorities—these were the things people remembered from the moneymaker’s Providence premiere.

  IT WAS IN DUTCHESS COUNTY that Sullivan made his third and final effort at being a counterfeiter. His experiences in Boston and Providence taught him the fundamentals of the craft: how to carve a plate from copper, how to recruit people to print and pass the notes, and, crucially, how to dodge the law. His name had started to become familiar to the readers of New England newspapers, and his antics at the Providence pillory surely enlivened the conversations of more than a few colonists at the local taverns. If Sullivan had stopped then—if he had returned to Providence, served the rest of his jail term, and renounced his criminal past—he wouldn’t have left much of an impression on the historical record. He would have been remembered as a minor crook, if at all: just one out of the countless low-level moneymakers who plied their trade throughout colonial America. Instead, Sullivan decided to give free rein to his ambition, assembling a counterfeiting venture on an unprecedented scale. Within the next four years, he would produce thousands of pounds of fake currency, develop an extensive network of accomplices spanning several colonies, and provoke considerable panic among the leaders of colonial governments, who scrambled to respond to the Irishman’s onslaught.

  Sullivan set up his headquarters in an area called the Oblong, a rectangular strip of land on Dutchess County’s far eastern boundary. Two miles
wide and sixty miles long, it ran along New York’s border with Connecticut, and had been fiercely contested by the two colonies since the early seventeenth century. Although Connecticut officially ceded the area to New York in 1731, the exact location of the dividing line remained disputed well into the nineteenth century. Sullivan settled in a place called Dover, a loosely defined region that included a handful of hamlets and settlements scattered along the New York–Connecticut frontier.

  Dover presented a number of advantages to anyone who wanted to do something illegal on a large scale. In the early 1750s it was only sparsely inhabited, its settlers few and far between. German immigrants had been the region’s first colonizers. By the time Sullivan arrived, poor squatters had taken up residence on East Mountain, scouring a subsistence life from the inhospitable soil of its hillsides and valleys. Farther south, on a smaller hill, stood the meetinghouse of a Quaker colony. Life there was basic: when the young men traveled to Massachusetts to find women to marry, they passed around their only pair of good shoes. In the next few years, homesteaders from New England would start streaming into the area, but in 1752, Dover was still populated principally by enterprising Germans, starving squatters, and barefoot Quakers.

  Pioneers are usually too concerned with surviving to be curious about what their neighbors are doing, particularly if their neighbors live far away. Even if they had wanted to check in on one another, the terrain wasn’t easy to traverse. Two rivers ran through the lowlands of Dover, watering a large swathe of thickly wooded marshes and swamps. The boggy wilderness offered excellent places to hide counterfeiting tools that would be impossible to see through the layers of foliage. The wetlands’ tangled growth also concealed something else: wolves and panthers, which stalked the damp ground in great quantities looking for deer. There were so many of them that the government regularly offered rewards for killing the predators: all you had to do to collect was bring the animal’s head and pelt to a local magistrate. In a place like Dover, Sullivan wouldn’t have to deal with unexpected visitors. If the forbidding terrain didn’t keep people away, the threat of wild creatures lurking behind the trees certainly would.