A Counterfeiter's Paradise

by Ben Tarnoff

  The crew was led by a former collaborator of Sullivan’s, David Sanford. The two had counterfeited New York bills at Sanford’s home in Salem, a town in the Oblong about forty miles south of Sullivan’s Dover headquarters. From the start, money brought out the worst in Sanford. When a couple of fellow travelers on a Connecticut road confronted him about spending fake notes in taverns along the way, Sanford offered them £1,000 each for their silence and, if that didn’t work, threatened to kill them if they squealed. “Say nothing,” he said as they neared the next tavern, “but go with me, and I will make Gentlemen of you.” They didn’t expose him then, but the next day, after Sanford was arrested for passing counterfeit money in Waterbury, they came forward to tell the justice of the peace what they knew. Their testimony proved incriminating enough for Sanford to be convicted on counterfeiting charges in New Haven on February 26, 1754. He soon escaped from jail and slipped over the New York border to Salem, where he assembled a criminal ring and swore vengeance on those who had imprisoned him. From Salem, Sanford and his men launched nighttime raids into Connecticut, terrorizing the countryside near the southern tip of the Oblong. They focused on the farmlands between Ridgefield and Norwalk, a gentler stretch of land than the craggy terrain farther north, made up of cascading hills that ran southward to the sands of the Long Island Sound.

  Sanford’s cronies shared his taste for destruction. One of them, Joseph Nichols, was convicted of forging the deed for his house. He resolved to avenge himself by burning down the house that he had acquired illegally, and then setting fire to the home of the justice of the peace who prosecuted him. When he arrived at his old address, he looked through the window and saw his daughter Abigail inside, weaving. He asked her why she was still in the house, and Abigail replied that she wanted to finish her work. She would pay a price if she did, her father sneered, because he and Sanford would have the building burning by nightfall. Nichols demanded that she hand over all the bullets in the house, and when she refused, he pulled out a gun. Before he left he promised to kill her if she ratted on him. Shaken, the girl worked up the courage to tell a neighbor what had happened, and the alarmed villagers posted men to keep watch. After sunset, the watchmen caught a glimpse of Sanford’s dog and knew the criminals were nearby. Soon flames flared in the dark and the residents rushed to extinguish them. They put out the blaze, but not before it did a fair amount of damage.

  Sanford’s victims, knowing that the authorities wouldn’t take the initiative, decided to put an end to the rampages themselves. In May 1754, a posse of young men from Ridgefield cornered Sanford and hauled him to the New Haven jail. Capturing the crook had been a simple, bloodless affair, but holding him would be tricky. The jailhouse was completely insecure—Sanford had broken out of it earlier that year—and Nichols, who was still on the loose, might do something desperate to liberate his friend. The people of Ridgefield and Norwalk petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly, trying to convey the urgency of the situation to the legislators. Sanford and Nichols, they explained, had been “arming themselves in daring and audacious manner, threatening waste and destruction to the persons and estate of sundry,” and leaving colonists “greatly terrified and disquieted.” The assembly responded by ordering the capture of Nichols and any remaining members of the gang, and went on record to praise Abigail for “Disclosing the wicked Design of certain convicted Desperados.” Since her father might return to fulfill his promise to kill her, the assembly placed her under government protection.

  Sanford was a different kind of criminal than Sullivan. He was nastier and more vindictive, with none of the Irishman’s charm. While Sullivan endeared himself to the populace with his playful defiance of the authorities, Sanford tormented innocent people with acts of violence. He and his gang didn’t taunt officers of the law to entertain crowds, like Sullivan at the pillory in Providence: instead, they vowed retribution and destroyed the property of anyone who got in their way. The men who captured Sanford calculated that the fires had caused more than £4,000 worth of damage. The figure wasn’t significant compared with the amount of fake cash Sullivan produced, but there was an important contrast between the two men’s crimes. Sanford deprived people of their possessions: the crops he incinerated were irreparably lost to the farmers who planted them. Sulli-van’s impact, on the other hand, was more ambiguous. His counterfeits could defraud colonists of genuine money or goods, but they could also circulate as a useful medium of exchange in local markets starved for cash. Most people could relate to Sullivan’s entrepreneurial motives; cutting tongues out of cows, however, inspired little sympathy. Although powerless to stop Sanford, Sullivan bore part of the blame. By casting a wide net in his search for accomplices, the counterfeiter had indiscriminately enriched a whole cast of characters, some less savory than others.

  IN THE FOUR YEARS following Sullivan’s escape from Providence, pressure had mounted among colonial officials to take a stronger stand against counterfeiting. Rhode Island, whose frequent printing of paper money had made its economy volatile, was the hardest hit. Its General Assembly offered a £400 reward for capturing Sullivan as early as October 1753, but the legislators were regularly reminded of their impotence by stories of the counterfeiter’s exploits. When the authorities arrested five people connected to Sullivan in Newport, the Boston Evening-Post reported that the “famous Villain Sullivan” ran free despite “[a] great Reward” offered for his arrest. “Our Gallows has groaned for him a long Time,” the article added. Sullivan’s forgeries so successfully infiltrated the Rhode Island money supply that in 1756, they turned up in an official lottery held to underwrite the construction of a fort. Rhode Island not only had to deal with the counterfeiting of its own money; it also faced a steady stream of fakes from other colonies, particularly New Hampshire, where Sullivan’s Merrimack operation was based. New York, the home of the counterfeiter’s Oblong gang, became so overrun with forged notes that its treasury published a notice in the newspaper urging anyone holding bills of a particular date to come in and exchange them for new ones.

  Colonial governments could put a price on Sullivan’s head, but the complicated task of taking the counterfeiter into custody would require the resolve of a private individual. On January 21, 1756, a forty-four-year-old businessman named Eliphalet Beecher trudged through the snow under the leafless branches of New Haven’s elm trees to the building that housed the Connecticut General Assembly. It stood on the northwest corner of the town’s Green, an unenclosed common overgrown with weeds and marked with the furrows of wagon wheels. Yale students walked nearby, passing through the doors of the newly built Connecticut Hall, a boxy brick structure three stories high. Tracking footprints through the powder, Beecher entered the assembly chamber and introduced himself. A native of New Haven, he had met members of Sullivan’s ring near Connecticut’s western border while traveling on business. He was eager to put a stop to the counterfeiter’s activities, and hoped to obtain the help of both Connecticut and New York. The legislators, relieved to find someone so committed to enforcing their laws, responded enthusiastically. They agreed to bear all of Beecher’s expenses and to pay a reward once he finished the job.

  From New Haven, Beecher rode northwest past the limestone bluffs of the Housatonic River valley, crossed the mountains near the New York line, and descended into the marshy lowlands of Dover. Traveling roughly sixty miles in winter over rugged terrain wasn’t easy, and once he reached the Oblong, he faced more challenges. When Beecher arrested two people he thought were involved with Sullivan and brought them before a pair of justices of the peace, the officials proved completely uncooperative. Citing lack of evidence, they refused to give Beecher a warrant to extradite the suspects to Connecticut and then released the two men on bail, setting their court date for a few months later. In a further insult, the justices made Beecher pay for the time they spent examining and processing his prisoners. The episode upset him enough to send a letter to New Haven to be read aloud on the floor of the Connecticut leg
islature. The lawmakers responded with a resolution regretting the “many difficulties” caused by “want of the encouragement and assistance of the civil authority” of New York, and demanded that their governor write his counterpart in New York requesting full cooperation.

  If he wanted to capture Sullivan, Beecher needed to rethink his approach. Since the prickly, amateurish men responsible for keeping law and order in the Oblong wouldn’t help him without hard evidence, he would have to catch someone in the act of passing counterfeit money. Beecher hired eleven deputies, including his son Eliphalet Jr., and set to work. One possible lead was a tavern keeper whom he suspected of -conspiring with Sullivan. Beecher decided to set a trap: he entered the man’s tavern, handed him some bills, and asked for change. A middle-aged stranger from Connecticut with an outstretched palm full of good money made an irresistible target. Travelers exchanged cash at so many places along the road that even if they discovered they had been cheated, they probably wouldn’t be able to remember where they received the forged notes.

  The tavern keeper took the bait and slipped a counterfeit bill into the wad of notes he returned to Beecher. Beecher thumbed through the bills, spotted the fake, and, pulling it out, confronted the man. At first the tavern keeper insisted the money was genuine. When Beecher pressed him, he conceded it was forged, but denied he had known when he handed it over. Finally, he confessed he knew the bill was counterfeit but refused to say where he had gotten it. Beecher and his men hauled the tavern keeper to a justice of the peace and, furnished with a counterfeit bill and an admission of guilt, obtained more cooperation this time. In his examination the tavern keeper implicated other members of Sullivan’s ring, leading to more arrests. The prisoners divulged details about the Dover organization and, crucially, gave Beecher the location of Sullivan’s hideout.

  Boggy ground squished under the weight of Beecher’s boots as he and his deputies threaded their way across a vast wooded swamp, following a prisoner who had agreed to show them Sullivan’s retreat. The guide conducted them through the damp thicket to the side of a small hill. Walking ahead of them, he came up to the bluff and removed some brush and a tree stump, revealing the entrance to the counterfeiter’s cave. Beecher and his deputies ducked into the cavern, marching down the rock-hewn corridor. Gradually it broadened into a large, wood-paneled chamber where the sun shone through a crack in the wall. They scoured the room, overturning tables and chairs. Scattered across the floor was the counterfeiter’s furniture, places where he had sat, slept, and eaten in recent days. Sullivan was gone.

  He couldn’t have fled far. Beecher resolved to search the houses of anyone in the area connected to the counterfeiter. He went door-to-door with his deputies; desperate to catch Sullivan before he could run farther, they woke people up in the middle of the night, grilling the groggy tenants for the criminal’s whereabouts. At 1:00 a.m. on March 13, Beecher’s band arrived at yet another house. The residents answered the door and saw the men on the step, their tired faces lit unevenly by the quivering light cast by their lanterns. Beecher entered with his assistants, examining the rooms for any trace of Sullivan, and interrogated the inhabitants, who strenuously denied knowing the counterfeiter. The late hour hadn’t made Beecher’s men careless. While inspecting the house, they found a small but significant clue: dirt on the floor that looked as if it had been tracked in recently.

  The soil prompted an even more thorough search. Determined to comb every inch, they moved a bed with a woman sleeping in it to examine the ground underneath. There they discovered another clue: a floorboard that, instead of being nailed down, had been broken in half. They picked up the plank and saw a tunnel dug into the earth. The secret passageway led to a cozy burrow lit by a fireplace; the smoke rose through a vent that fed into the house’s chimney overhead. One of the men yelled Sullivan’s name into the hole, and the counterfeiter, knowing he had nowhere left to go, came forward to surrender.

  Sullivan was tired. He had spent the last seven days hiding in the mountains until, starving and exhausted, he came to the home of a friend and asked for help. By the time Beecher’s men found him, he was in no condition to put up a fight. But the counterfeiter’s fatigue didn’t diminish his bravado. He tried bribing Beecher with fake cash, and when his captor declined, bragged about making several hundred thousand pounds of currency over the course of his career. Taking Sullivan prisoner, Beecher and his crew departed for Connecticut. After four days of travel, the entourage reached New Haven and locked up the counterfeiter in the jail overlooking the Green, within sight of the building where Beecher, back in the middle of winter, had pleaded his case before the Connecticut legislators.

  It was March 17, 1756: St. Patrick’s Day. Thousands of miles away, in a seaside village in southeastern Ireland, Sullivan’s parents were likely celebrating: eating and drinking, parading shamrocks and Celtic crosses, while their son sat in his cell. It had been twenty years since Sullivan left home, and fourteen since he boarded a ship as an indentured servant bound for Boston. Now he awaited trial after a four-year counterfeiting spree that spanned five colonies and made him a legend. The “fa-mous Money Maker” was behind bars, the Boston Gazette reported, and it wouldn’t have happened without the “extraordinary Address and Resolution” of Eliphalet Beecher.

  Beecher never revealed what drove him to do it. Personal reasons often played a part: Robert Clarke broke up the Boyces’ gang after being cheated by one of its members, and the residents of Ridgefield had a lot at stake in sending their sons to stop Sanford. But in his speech before the Connecticut General Assembly, Beecher didn’t mention whether Sullivan’s men had swindled him, only that he wanted to bring them to justice. A later statement to the assembly, made after Sullivan’s capture, didn’t offer any more insight into his motives. Beecher had first discovered the counterfeiters “in the course of his private business, travelling forth & back through the country,” he explained, and he simply wanted “to break up a nest of so great Mischief.” He wasn’t in it for the money. He received a total compensation of £144 from the Connecticut treasury—£134 for his expenses and a £10 reward. Beecher would have made more as a counterfeiter: the Boston authorities seized more than twice that amount in fake Massachusetts money when they arrested Sullivan back in 1749. Beecher didn’t divulge his motives, but he did what he promised, and got written up in the newspapers for his trouble.

  AT THE END OF MARCH 1756, the Connecticut authorities sent Sullivan to New York to stand trial. Although the Connecticut legislature funded Sullivan’s capture, its counterfeiting laws were lenient compared with those of New York. New York had sentenced moneymakers to death since 1720, while Connecticut only cropped the convict’s right ear, branded his forehead with the letter C, and put him away in a workhouse for life. Since keeping prisoners was expensive, Connecticut officials usually released counterfeiters after a relatively short period of time. A conviction in New York, on the other hand, meant hanging, a cheaper and irreversible punishment. Letting Sullivan live would cost a lot of money—it would involve feeding, housing, and guarding him for decades. Eliminating the man behind the moneymaking epidemic was the most economic alternative. This presumably sweetened the deal for the Connecticut legislators, who would be willing to forgo the satisfaction of trying Sullivan in their colony if he might swing from the gallows of another.

  The men charged with bringing Sullivan from New Haven to New York could travel by land or by sea. The route along the Connecticut coast was rough and rocky; the journey would be difficult, especially with a prisoner who had to be closely guarded. For that reason they likely chose to go by boat, sailing across Long Island Sound and down the East River. Along Manhattan’s eastern shore Sullivan would see the country estates of New York’s wealthiest families, acres of landscaped gardens at a comfortable distance from the bustling town below. Farther down the island was a more somber sight: a barricade of cedar logs that secured the settlement’s northern border. The palisades had been built eleven years earlier
, during the last war, but the renewal of hostilities with the French and their Indian allies made defending the town a top priority.

  The outbreak of war delighted New York’s businessmen. The city became the provisioning center for British forces arriving in America, and local merchants made a fortune supplying soldiers with food, clothing, rum, horses, and anything else they needed. “New York is growing immensely rich,” Benjamin Franklin noted to a friend in 1756 with a twinge of jealousy. Selling to the British wasn’t the only way for entrepreneurs to cash in on the conflict. They also traded secretly with the other side, running contraband to the islands of the French Caribbean. Others became privateers, preying on enemy ships and capturing valuable cargo. The influx of cash from war profiteering coincided with a flood of new settlers that helped transform the former Dutch seaport on Manhattan’s southern tip into a major colonial town. By 1760, New York had eighteen thousand residents, surpassing Boston and second only to Philadelphia in size.

  Despite a booming economy and a growing population, New York still didn’t have a proper prison, only a jail in the basement of City Hall, a brick building located at the intersection of Broad and Wall streets. The authorities secured Sullivan in its cellar, chaining the prisoner with irons. That didn’t hold him long. Somehow he slipped out of his shackles and opened the door to his cell. He would have escaped if it weren’t mealtime, as the woman bringing his food saw him and raised the alarm. The incident reminded the authorities that they needed to deal with Sullivan quickly; five days later, he was arraigned before New York’s Supreme Court of Judicature, conveniently located in the rooms above the jail. Sullivan pleaded not guilty, but the court produced plenty of incriminating testimony. Among the witnesses called to testify were two people with intimate knowledge of Sullivan’s criminal activities: the convicted moneymaker and arsonist David Sanford, who turned king’s evidence against his former colleague, and Eliphalet Beecher, who came down from New Haven to volunteer his services. After hearing the statements, a jury of twelve New Yorkers declared Sullivan guilty. On April 29, the court delivered the sentence. “That the prisoner be carried from hence to the place from whence he came, and thence to the place of Execution,” it read, “and there be hanged by the neck, until he be dead.”