A Counterfeiter's Paradise

by Ben Tarnoff

  Counterfeiters owed their success in large part to the patronage of their fellow citizens, who often didn’t discriminate between forgeries and the genuine article. They were grateful to get a note that could hold its value until they could pass it, regardless of its authenticity. The men who printed the genuine bills and those who counterfeited them were opposite sides of the same coin: both hoped to inspire trust in pieces of paper whose value relied entirely on the confidence that people had in them.

  It was this faith that enriched three of the most colorful counterfeiters in American history: Owen Sullivan, David Lewis, and Samuel Curtis Upham. Owen Sullivan (c. 1720–1756) was an Irish immigrant whose extraordinary talent for earning people’s trust made him among the most notorious counterfeiters of the colonial era. After stints in Boston and Providence, Sullivan settled in a sliver of swampy land on the lawless border between New York and Connecticut, where he forged tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of colonial currency. David Lewis (1788–1820) was a charismatic counterfeiter and robber who prowled Pennsylvania’s Allegheny backcountry. His legendary acts of charity catapulted him to prominence as a populist folk hero, a Robin Hood who dispensed his ill-gotten gains to the poor while punishing the greedy. Samuel Curtis Upham (1819–1885), a Philadelphia shopkeeper and former California gold prospector, sold counterfeit Confederate currency from his storefront during the Civil War. Upham’s “mementos of the Rebellion” proved enormously popular, and the influx of these fakes into the South drove down the value of Confederate currency, infuriating Southern leaders.

  The biographies of these men tell the story of a country coming of age—from a patchwork of largely self-governing colonies to a loosely assembled union of states and, finally, to a single nation under firm federal control. Each responded to the political and economic realities of his era, propelled by a desire for profit and fame. They belonged to a class of criminal that overran America for much of its history, as integral to the country’s financial past as those who printed its many kinds of legal currency.

  Moneymakers didn’t just infiltrate the money supply—they embodied the nation’s speculative spirit. The American economy rose and fell on a tide of paper credit, fueled by notes that tended to promise more than they could deliver. As long as everyone believed something had value—whether a colonial bill of credit or a stock certificate—it did. But when that faith faltered, mistrust spread throughout the system, triggering a panic. Americans had a confidence problem: they either had too much of it, taking risks as everything surged, or too little, fleeing the market as everything crumbled. By feeding America’s appetite for paper currency, counterfeiters helped stoke this cycle. They made fake money in a country where real money’s value was often just as imaginary, bluffing their way to wealth in the casino of American capitalism.

  IF YOU HAD SPENT THE SUMMER OF 1749 in Boston, you likely would have heard that a gardener grew a twenty-eight-pound melon—the biggest anyone had ever seen—and invited thirty of his friends over to help him eat it. You might have heard about the mulatto boy who had been bitten by a rattlesnake at Stoughton and died twenty-four hours later, or the Irishman in yellow buckskin breeches who had hired a horse and then absconded with it to Rhode Island. You certainly would have heard about what the North End merchants were selling that season: Choice Lisbon Salt, the Best Burlington Pork, a Good Brick House, a Healthy Strong Negro Man—and at the printer’s over on Queen Street, the latest selection from a fiery Calvinist preacher named Jonathan Edwards.

  The printer couldn’t have picked a better time to publish the preacher, whose best-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” warned parishioners that God could toss them into hell at any moment. After a summer in colonial Boston, everyone would have had a pretty good idea of what hell felt like. An oppressively hot sun singed the flesh, the air’s humidity smothered the skin like a damp blanket, and the sour smell of sweat mixed with the fish stink wafting down from the piers of the harbor. The inferno couldn’t have felt very far. An unchristian season, summer encouraged slothfulness, stirred lust, quickened the temper.

  One day in late August, a local silversmith could be heard fighting with his wife. Their voices reverberated through Boston’s corkscrew streets and into the ears of inquisitive neighbors in houses of timber and brick listening through thin walls and open windows. The wife was drunk; the silversmith probably was too. The words were indistinct; perhaps they slurred their speech. Suddenly a phrase, howled by a woman hoarse with rage, could be heard clearly above the din: “You forty-thousand-pound moneymaker!”

  The silversmith’s name, the neighbors would tell the authorities, was Owen Sullivan. Presumably this wasn’t the first time the couple had quarreled: both he and his wife drank heavily, and they were angry drunks. Lately Sullivan had been seen with large quantities of cash, which he spent lavishly, conspicuously, arousing envy and suspicion. When officers came to arrest him on August 28, 1749, they found more than thirty counterfeit ten-shilling Massachusetts notes on the silversmith—not £40,000 but still a considerable amount of money. The print on the forgeries was too black, making his bills easily detectable as fakes when placed alongside genuine notes. Discovered in Sullivan’s chest were printing materials, ink, and pieces of paper with his attempts to imitate the official signatures that appeared on the colony’s currency.

  They carried Sullivan off to jail, but the silversmith didn’t intend to stay long. Once inside the prison, he passed a message to his partner John Fairservice, who agreed to secure his freedom in exchange for a plate for making counterfeit currency—not Massachusetts money, Fairservice specified, but New Hampshire. Since Sullivan’s tools had been seized, he would have to make the plate from scratch. He would need a few things: a New Hampshire note to work from, a sheet of copper, and a small metalworking chisel. Fortunately, jails in colonial America were poorly guarded, making it easy for Sullivan to smuggle in whatever he needed. He could bribe a warden to pass packages for him or enlist one of the jail’s many debtors, who were allowed to leave the prison grounds whenever they liked as long as they returned at night. Once Sullivan had obtained the materials, he set to work.

  New Hampshire’s forty-shilling note was printed on a rectangular piece of paper, and the text read from top to bottom, like a page out of a book. The bill was adorned with a large royal seal and various images: columns of acanthus leaves wreathed its borders, scrolls coiled and unfurled across the page, a pine tree stood at the center. The note’s designers had introduced these flourishes to dissuade counterfeiters, who couldn’t reproduce such elaborate designs without real technical skills. These details had another, more abstract purpose: they gave the bill a certain gravity, so as to reassure people that an inked slip of paper equaled a certain quantity of silver or gold. Aside from discouraging forgers, the intricate handiwork helped bolster people’s confidence in the colony’s currency.

  To make the plate, Sullivan had to engrave everything backward. It was tedious, painstaking work. Each curlicued letter and drooping leaf had to be carved into the copper as a mirror image, so that when the plate was inked and run through a printing press, the resulting bill would look right. He etched the front of the note on one side of the copper sheet and the back on the other. The finished product must have looked peculiar, but anyone who glimpsed it sitting in Sullivan’s cell—a brown pane inscribed with delicately executed, illegible glyphs—would have known what it was for.

  Satisfied with the silversmith’s services, Fairservice paid his bail, and Sullivan walked free for the time being. Fairservice stashed the plate at the bottom of a sled in a barn on Bull Wharf, one of the piers on the south side of town, and started printing counterfeit notes, hanging the newly inked forgeries from a string to let them dry in the wind along the waterfront. When the bills were crisp, he assembled them and headed off to make the sale. Across from the wharf stood a tavern named the Bull, where sailors and sloop masters passing through Boston ate, drank, and traded stories from ab
road. These were Fairservice’s ideal customers: itinerant men of dubious morals who could be persuaded to purchase counterfeit New Hampshire money, particularly after they had been softened up with a few tumblers of rum. Instead of selling his forgeries for a fixed fee, Fairservice lent the bills on consignment: the patron would keep one-half of the profits made from spending the counterfeits and remit the other half to Fairservice. Perhaps for this reason, the enterprise never really took off. In 1767, after twelve years of marriage, Fairservice’s wife, Mary, filed for divorce. She claimed that her husband was financially irresponsible, abusive, and unfaithful; the most damaging of her many charges was that he had conducted “criminal conversation with a Negro Woman Slave in the family.” Mary got the divorce.

  In the meantime, Sullivan stood trial in the fall of 1750. He pleaded not guilty, but there was enough incriminating evidence found in his house to persuade the jury to convict the silversmith of “wickedly falsely & deceiptfully” forging Massachusetts bills with an intent to pass them off as genuine. On Thursday, September 13, Sullivan was led to the square below the imposing Georgian facade of what is now known as the Old State House and locked into the pillory. He spent two hours with his head and arms fastened between two pieces of wood and his back painfully bent while Bostonians passed on their daily business or paused to get a glimpse of the criminal. The more entertaining spectacle came later, when a sore Sullivan was removed from the wooden frame, tied to a nearby post, and whipped twenty times, his naked back reddening with each blow. Sullivan wasn’t the only convict punished that Thursday; on the same day, one man received more than twice as many stripes for stealing. But those who remembered watching the little-known silversmith lashed would later recall the scene when they read reports of a notorious moneymaker named Owen Sullivan in the newspaper. No one could have known it at the time, but in the shadow of the Old State House, the greatest counterfeiter in colonial America had made his criminal debut.

  BEING A COUNTERFEITER IN a city was never a good idea. There were always neighbors listening, whether to your drunk wife or to the rumbling of the printing press. Counterfeiting also produced refuse like test prints and bad bills that needed to be disposed of without attracting attention. Most difficult of all, counterfeiting generated wealth that was hard to conceal in a densely populated environment. In a town like Boston, crowded with fifteen thousand inhabitants when Sullivan lived there, neighbors knew a lot about one another, including their trade and income. If the silversmith down the street started living above his means, people would notice. By colonial standards, Sullivan was forging a lot of money. When he was first arrested, the authorities found three hundred shillings in counterfeit Massachusetts notes on him. In Boston in 1749, three hundred shillings could buy you about six bushels of wheat at wholesale prices, enough to feed a family for months. In his barn on Bull Wharf, John Fairservice printed more than twice that in a single day, producing 680 shillings in paper bills. Counterfeiting cash in such large quantities posed a problem. Spending it was risky, particularly among people who had reason to doubt you earned it honestly.

  The solution was to let others pass it for you, either by selling them the counterfeits in batches or, like Fairservice, lending the notes on consignment. At the top of the counterfeiting scheme was the engraver: someone like Sullivan, whose metalworking skills determined the success of the whole undertaking. Next came the printer, preferably someone who knew how to operate a press and could obtain the right ink and paper. At the bottom were the passers, who exchanged the fake bills for real money, thus generating the profit that fueled the venture.

  This system had a couple of advantages. It protected the heart of the operation—the engraver—by transferring most of the risk to easily replaceable unskilled workers: the passers, who could be arrested whenever they spent the counterfeits. It also meant that one engraver could rapidly recruit a large, decentralized network of accomplices. A single plate was enough to build a diffuse criminal organization consisting of several printers, countless passers, and everyone in between. In reality, the distinction between the different roles wasn’t always clearly defined; while primarily an engraver, Sullivan often helped print and pass his forged notes. But his basic business model—the engraver as the vital center of an expanding web of collaborators—remained intact. Without it, he could never have gone from a solitary silversmith to the boss of a major counterfeiting ring.

  Sullivan’s arrest in Boston in the summer of 1749 marked the beginning of a remarkable criminal career that would span seven years. It was evident early on that Sullivan was more than just a gifted engraver. He also possessed an extraordinary talent for getting others to trust him, a flair for persuasion that helped endear him to the public, recruit partners in crime, and convince the authorities to lighten his punishments. While Sullivan was a skilled forger of notes, his greatest counterfeit was the confidence he inspired in others, from the accomplices who trusted him to produce undetectable fakes to the colonists who believed his bills were authentic. Sullivan had an entrepreneurial streak, a trait that placed him firmly within the commercial culture of his day. Just as the North End vendors exploited Boston’s prominence as a port to maximize their returns, he capitalized on the conditions in colonial America that made his venture particularly ripe: the colonies’ reliance on paper money, a general craving for cheap currency, and lax law enforcement. In the years following his arrest in Boston, he would distribute his wares throughout the Northeast, peddling strips of paper that cost him little to produce, netting profits that he either spent or reinvested in an enterprise that helped him become the most successful counterfeiter in colonial history.

  SULLIVAN COULDN’T HAVE PICKED a more momentous year to become a counterfeiter. Seventeen forty-nine was a turning point in the financial history of Massachusetts, a time when the disputes that had been simmering throughout the colony’s fifty-nine-year experiment with paper money ignited into a ferocious public debate. Massachusetts had begun printing paper notes in 1690 after an unsuccessful effort to conquer the nearby French colony of Quebec. The government expected to fund the expe-dition with plunder, but when the soldiers returned empty-handed and close to mutiny, the colonial legislature quickly issued bills to pay them off. The notes, whose value was secured by future taxes, proved to be a useful medium of exchange, so the legislators continued to print them. Their decision would change the American colonies forever. As the first society in the Western world to establish a public paper currency, Massachusetts became the battleground for a particularly intense struggle over the finer points of economic policy—a struggle fought not just by the elites and the experts but by the vast majority of the population.

  On May 1, 1749, a few months before Sullivan’s arrest, the rooftop of a magnificent town house in the North End burst into flame. A crowd of lower-class spectators gathered nearby to watch the fire consume the upper half of the building and, rather than running for help, started yelling, “Let it burn!” But someone must have alerted the authorities, because firefighters soon arrived to extinguish the blaze, and to the mob’s dismay, the house was saved. The next day, the Boston Gazette printed a report blaming the fire on a defective chimney flue. But given the anger evident in the streets, arson seemed like a distinct possibility.

  The house belonged to Thomas Hutchinson, the scion of a prominent Boston family and the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. The son of a wealthy merchant, Hutchinson had been precocious from an early age: he entered Harvard at twelve, graduated at sixteen, and joined the Massachusetts legislature at twenty-six after launching a successful business career. He was also an outspoken opponent of paper money, and early in 1749 had ushered a controversial bill through the legislature requiring that Massachusetts retire all of its paper currency by March 1751. Hutchinson, like most members of his social class, favored a “hard” currency based on silver and gold. This made him unpopular among the colony’s tradesmen and laborers, who relied heavily on paper money in their
daily commerce. The thought that it would be taken away by one of the richest men in Boston enraged them.

  Wealthy Bostonians had clear reasons for wanting money to be made of precious metals. Since many of them were involved in international trade, they needed a universally accepted currency whose value wouldn’t fluctuate with inflation in order to do business with their overseas partners. They also tended to be creditors, which made them particularly vulnerable to depreciations of the colony’s money. A ten-shilling note could have considerably more purchasing power when it was lent than the same amount a few years later. When the debt was paid, the lender had to sustain the loss of however much value had evaporated.

  This state of affairs benefited the debtors, who could essentially get away with paying less. But that wasn’t the only reason that Hutchinson’s plan provoked such panic among the middle and lower classes, from whose ranks most debtors were drawn. If you made your living trading goods or services in local markets, you depended on paper money. Paper provided people with a shared medium of exchange: it gave the colony’s silversmiths, brewers, and printers a way to sell their merchandise and buy what they needed to expand their business. Replacing paper with precious metals would have curbed this commerce, as coin was scarce and what little existed was held by Boston’s financial elite. Paper’s proponents didn’t object to a metallic currency on philosophical grounds. Their concerns were practical: coin was concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. Moving to a metallic currency would effectively hand control of the money supply to men like Hutchinson.

  It’s possible that Hutchinson’s attempt at currency reform was motivated purely by economic self-interest; the crowd that collected opposite his house to cheer while it burned undoubtedly thought so. But to be fair, he had a strong case against paper. Paper was a blessing and a curse: it may have lubricated local markets, but only at the cost of making the economy more mercurial. Ever since Massachusetts started printing its bills of credit in 1690, the currency had been steadily declining in value. As more and more bills came off the colonial presses, the legislature began postponing the notes’ retirement. The result was depreciation.