A Counterfeiter's Paradise

by Ben Tarnoff

  Few people knew the region as well as Robert Rogers, a man who would become the most famous of Sullivan’s many collaborators—even more famous than Sullivan himself. Six feet tall and athletically built, Rogers was the consummate frontiersman. Born in a log cabin, he roamed New Hampshire’s dense forests from an early age and, as a teenager, saw combat when Indian raiding parties surged across the Northeast after the capture of Louisbourg in the summer of 1745. Rogers served as a scout during the war, a job that required him to tread silently through the woods looking for approaching Indians. The fighting on the New Hampshire frontier left a trail of scalped corpses, slain cattle, and demolished homes. No one was immune to the carnage—not even Rogers’s family, who returned to their farm one day to find that the Indians had burned their house, killed their cattle, and hacked down every tree in their orchard but one. Rogers’s father survived the war but suffered a bizarre death five years later, when, at dusk on a winter day, he approached a friend’s hunting camp dressed from head to toe in bearskin. The dark figure looked so much like a bear that the friend, thrilled to find such large game, shot him fatally. The friend was so upset that he could never again tell the story without crying, but it was a fitting end for a frontiersman, who might have been flattered by the resemblance if it hadn’t killed him.

  When Rogers went hunting later that year, he found a different kind of creature, something rarer than a bear and considerably more dangerous: Sullivan, who emerged from behind the pine trees to greet him. The counterfeiter showed him a wad of fake bills, and gave him a twenty-shilling note in exchange for pasturing his horse. Sullivan also told him that he wanted to buy three yoke of oxen, and they agreed to meet two days later at the farm of Rogers’s friend Ebenezer Martin to make the trade.

  Sullivan and Rogers had a lot in common. Both men had learned how to traverse tough ground fighting Indians on the frontier: while Sullivan repulsed attacks at the St. George River in Maine, Rogers was in New Hampshire, weaving his way through the trees to tell settlers of the enemy’s movements. Like Sullivan, Rogers was restless. As a young man he dabbled in farming and hunting but couldn’t settle on a trade. He traveled widely, wandering the British, French, and Indian quarters of the continent with the same peripatetic spirit that drove Sullivan across the Atlantic and throughout the Northeast. They both preferred the backwoods—inaccessible, unpopulated places that provided a vast and varied haunt for their activities—though, as always, Sullivan’s reasons were more practical. He filled the terrain’s unfrequented nooks with paper notes and copperplates, covered by rocks or buried in the undergrowth.

  Whether by playing to their affinities or to the frontiersman’s lust for cash, Sullivan easily seduced Rogers. The eager recruit secured some oxen and brought them to the appointed place, but the counterfeiter never showed up. Undeterred, Rogers sought out Sullivan and became one of his many coconspirators along the Merrimack. He continued until late January 1755, when a warrant for his arrest was issued by Meshech Weare, a justice of the Superior Court in Portsmouth, the colonial capital, and the speaker of New Hampshire’s House of Representatives. It warned of an extensive counterfeiting conspiracy, with “Just Grounds to Suspect that there are many Persons Concerned.” Written below, in Weare’s elaborate hand, were nineteen names, Rogers’s among them.

  The trial that took place before the Inferior Court at Rumford (now Concord) on February 7 generated many pages of testimony, taken both from the defendants and from witnesses called by the court. By then Sullivan had fled the area, but his name loomed large over the proceedings. People recalled encounters with Sullivan, divulged glimpses of their neighbor’s suspicious behavior and snippets of eavesdropped -conversations—bits and pieces that together composed a clear view of the counterfeiter’s Merrimack outfit. Sullivan had arrived as early as March 1754. His most important contact was Benjamin Winn, a carpenter who housed him for two or three months. The engraver cut a plate for making New Hampshire money while Winn built a printing press, and the two men produced about £15,000 worth of forged notes.

  Winn’s wife hated Sullivan. She complained that he made unreasonable demands, like insisting on having chicken or fresh meat on his plate every day, and swore that she would never board him again, not even for £1,000. Sullivan’s irritability no doubt had to do with his heavy drinking. He was rarely sober, and his alcoholism made him prone to explosive fits of rage. When one of Sullivan’s associates introduced him to a potential new recruit named John McCurdy and McCurdy rebuffed the counterfeiter’s advances, Sullivan erupted. “Damn you for a pack of fools,” he told his associate. “I never was concerned with such a pack of damned fools before.”

  Sullivan had always had a hot temper. Fighting with his wife five years earlier led to his first arrest in Boston, after she accused him of moneymaking loudly enough for the neighbors to hear. In Providence, Nicholas Stephens’s betrayal had made Sullivan so furious that he publicly shamed his former partner at the pillory. The character sketched by the statements before the Rumford court was just as angry. But the charisma that leavened his wrath seemed to have vanished, replaced by something more brooding and choleric. The loyalty Sullivan displayed at the Providence jailhouse when he committed himself to freeing his imprisoned confederates had disappeared; now he lashed out at them over trifles. His life had acquired the monotony of a professional criminal: he made money and moved on—not with the light step of an impatient, enterprising youth but with the heavy gait of a traveling salesman weary of the road. Perhaps it was the itinerant lifestyle, or the alcohol, or all the time spent by himself in the woods, but the confidence man had lost his charm.

  In his examination before the court, Rogers had relatively little to say about Sullivan’s temperament. He played naive and tried to persuade the justices of the peace that he barely knew the counterfeiter. When they asked him how he had met Sullivan, he replied in a way calculated to convey his innocence:

  I saw a man when I was hunting in Goffstown near Ebenezer Martin’s house that called himself John McDaniel, and had some conversation with him. He wanted to buy a number of fat cattle and told me he would pay me as much as they would fetch in any market, and give me my money and that it would go through all the laws in any of the provinces, and maintained that his money was good.

  Rogers explained that he appeared with the oxen at the rendezvous but Sullivan didn’t come, so he sold them to someone else. When the justices asked if he knew that Sullivan “could make money or plates, or had so designed any such thing,” the frontiersman flatly denied it. “No, never,” he told the court. “I saw him only that one time.”

  Rogers was lying through his teeth. Perjury wasn’t always a bad tactic, but in this case it wouldn’t work, since other testimony contradicted Rogers by indicating that the two had more contact after their first meeting in the woods. The Rumford court released Rogers on bond and summoned him to stand trial before the Superior Court at Portsmouth on February 12. Rogers was terrified. A conviction at Portsmouth would mean branding, cropping, or death. Determined to dodge the charge, he traveled the forty-odd miles to Portsmouth and, with only five days until his trial, considered his options. What he needed was the protection of a powerful official, but to win favor, Rogers needed leverage, something he could offer in return. Fortunately, another war with the French and their Indian allies had broken out, and with it came a window of opportunity just wide enough for Rogers to make his escape.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1754, while Sullivan stalked the shores of the Merrimack, George Washington marched through the Pennsylvania backwoods, his boots muddy from a night of heavy rain. Then a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, Washington and his company of forty soldiers followed their Indian guide over the damp earth until they reached the rim of a small hollow shortly after sunrise. In the glen below was a French camp. The Frenchmen had just woken up, and someone was cooking breakfast; the smell wafted up to Washington’s men, perched motionless with their muskets ready. No o
ne knows who fired first, but the brief battle that followed left thirteen French corpses on the valley floor and saw another twenty-one taken prisoner by Washington.

  These were the first casualties in what would become a decisive struggle for control of the American continent, the culmination of more than a century of strife between England and France. War had been brewing for several years, and arrived just in time for Rogers, who used it to duck his counterfeiting charges and, later, to boost his personal fame. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the last colonial conflict in 1748—the war that had brought Sullivan to Louisbourg—resolved nothing; neither side emerged with significant gains, and it was only a matter of time before the struggle for territory sparked another confrontation. Louisbourg, restored to the French under the terms of the treaty, continued to frustrate British ambitions in the North Atlantic, and tensions soared when the French built a fort on the isthmus linking Nova Scotia to the Canadian mainland, in present-day New Brunswick.

  An even more volatile flashpoint lay farther south, in the upper Ohio River valley, where a French military buildup on the western borders of Virginia and Pennsylvania caused growing alarm among British colonists. When the governor of Virginia sent Washington to lead an expedition against the French at the forks of the Ohio River, it prompted the skirmish in the glen that triggered a wider war. The fighting would spread to Europe, eventually engulfing every major European power and their colonies all over the globe in what Winston Churchill later called history’s first world war. Europeans called it the Seven Years’ War, while the colonists used their enemies’ names, labeling it the French and Indian War.

  As with the last conflict, England expected the American colonies to contribute troops to the effort. Rogers had enough military experience to convince Major Joseph Frye of the Massachusetts militia to hire him as an enlisting agent. In January 1755, with money that Frye provided, Rogers signed up twenty-four colonists and had them gather in Portsmouth. But he was arrested before he could arrange their passage to Massachusetts, and the men remained there, waiting for him.

  While in Portsmouth awaiting trial, Rogers realized that his two dozen recruits were powerful bargaining chips. He contacted New Hampshire’s governor, Benning Wentworth, and offered to hand over the men in exchange for his freedom. It was an appealing offer, as Wentworth needed troops for an expedition against Fort St. Frédéric, a French garrison on Lake Champlain. The governor arranged for Rogers’s release and made him a captain in the New Hampshire regiment, commanding a company of his recruits. When news of Rogers’s defection reached Boston, Major Frye was outraged. Frye complained to Governor William Shirley, who in t-urn wrote Wentworth a letter requesting the return of the soldiers. Went-worth deflected the plea, replying that the matter was out of his hands.

  Rogers so successfully ingratiated himself with his superiors that in April, when fresh evidence of the frontiersman’s counterfeiting career surfaced, nothing came of it. The incriminating items had come from Carty Gilman, a shoemaker who was arrested for passing bad bills. When the officer came to apprehend Gilman, he saw the shoemaker put a piece of paper in his mouth and start chewing it into scraps small enough to swallow. The man grabbed Gilman, pried open his jaws, and wrested out what was left, tattered and soaked with spittle. The half-chewed morsel in Gilman’s mouth was a letter, still partly legible. “Gilman, for God’s sake do the work that you promised that you would do,” it read. “By no means fail or you will destroy me forever, for my life lays at your providence. Once more I adjure you by your Maker to do it, for why should such an honest man be killed?” The signature belonged to Robert Rogers. In addition to the letter, two counterfeit notes were found on Gilman. During his interrogation, Gilman swore that Rogers had given him the bills, along with several other fakes.

  Rogers presumably wanted Gilman to destroy the evidence and keep quiet about their dealings. Actually, Rogers had nothing to worry about. Someone who knew the terrain of the Northeast as intimately as he did was too valuable an asset to be wasted on the gallows. After a few humiliating defeats early in the war, the British realized they needed to do a better job adapting their forces to the realities of the American landscape. The French and their Indian allies organized units that could fight in the forests, using the cover of the woods to launch guerrilla attacks. Rogers helped develop the British equivalent, drawing on his experiences as a scout and his skills as a frontiersman to create a light infantry corps trained in woodland warfare. These commandos were more mobile and versatile than traditional soldiers accustomed to the European style, which consisted of pitched battles between large, strictly regimented formations.

  Rogers’ Rangers, as his men came to be called, had many military successes, and by 1759, their numbers had grown to more than one thousand, spread across six companies. Thanks to his tactical innovations and a talent for publicity, Rogers became a celebrated figure at home and abroad. He wrote three books, published in England in the 1760s—his journals, an account of North America, and a play—that helped cement his reputation. To European readers, he offered stories of an American wilderness teeming with exotic savages and devious Frenchmen, an alluring if not wholly accurate vision of the New World. But while Rogers fascinated Europeans, his real legacy was at home. He represented a distinctly American war hero: a white man who fused aspects of both Indian and European fighting techniques to create a new kind of combat. In the centuries following Rogers’s death in 1795, his reputation grew. Today’s U.S. Army Rangers consider Rogers their forefather and require recruits to read his “rules of ranging,” written during the French and Indian War only a couple of years after his trial at Rumford. If it weren’t for Sullivan, Rogers might never have organized his Rangers and become a legend to later generations.

  While Sullivan shared certain traits with Robert Rogers, he also bore a resemblance to an even better-known American, Benjamin Franklin. Both made paper money, although in different capacities: Franklin printed it, while Sullivan counterfeited it. Both also had a gift for deception that they discovered early in life. When Franklin was sixteen, he wrote a letter purporting to be from a widow named Silence Dogood and slid it under his brother James’s door. James, who published the New-England Courant, wouldn’t have run the piece if he had known its true author, but Benjamin’s counterfeit was so convincing—he even disguised his handwriting—that it appeared on the newspaper’s front page the following week. Emboldened by the success of his first confidence trick, Franklin went on to cultivate a variety of fake personas; his most famous, Poor Richard, offered aphoristic bits of wisdom in a series of best-selling books. “Let all men know thee,” he told his readers, “but no man know thee thoroughly.”

  Sullivan took the advice to heart. As a counterfeiter, he had experience with false facades, and like Franklin, used pseudonyms to mask his identity. Rogers and the other members of the Merrimack network knew Sullivan as James Tice or John McDaniel. These were just a couple of the many aliases that the counterfeiter used; others included John Pierson, Isaac Washington, and Benjamin Parlon. Even Owen Sullivan was a fake name, although his best known; he reinvented himself so often that his real name is unknown. Aliases helped him remain anonymous. If the townsfolk knew that Sullivan the moneymaker was passing through, they might notify the authorities. Aliases also shielded his accomplices, who, even if they knew the counterfeiter’s identity, could deny that they had met Sullivan. Colonial lawmen had few resources for identifying criminals. With no central database to consult and no system for sharing information with their counterparts in other colonies, the authorities relied on a name and a physical description in catching a culprit, an imperfect method at best.

  Sullivan’s various names reflected how dispersed and disconnected his enterprise was. As James Tice, he made New Hampshire money; as Isaac Washington, he handed out Rhode Island bills. Once he quit an area, he had no control over what happened to the plates and the notes he left behind. The strategy had its advantages. As a colleague r
ather than a boss, he could concentrate on making as much money as possible without worrying about preserving his authority. But his hands-off approach also meant that he couldn’t affect how people used his products. Injecting huge quantities of cash into small communities had consequences. Many spent their new wealth in predictable ways: one purchased a barrel of Spanish wine, and another bought drinks for everyone at the tavern. But Sullivan’s money could also empower more desperate men, with more violent minds.

  THE SOUND OF GUNSHOTS FROM a nearby estate woke the neighboring farmers in Wilton, Connecticut, on the night of April 26, 1754. When they rose from bed and looked out the window, they saw fences from a field in flames, the wooden posts incandescent against the black sky. As the wind picked up, the blaze grew. A gang of robbers had started the fire after trying to steal cattle and being shot at by the men hired by the cows’ owner to stand guard. When the locals ran to smother the flames, the thieves set more fires and escaped. The gang returned a week later to take their revenge. They snuck into the barn where the cattle were, cut the tongue out of one of the cows, and started another fire. The flames were discovered before they could do much damage, but the arsonists got away.