A Counterfeiter's Paradise (11 page)

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 legislature. 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.”

The place of execution stood on the upper end of the Common, a triangular tract of land on the northern end of town that occupied what is now City Hall Park, right beneath the palisades near present-day Chambers Street. Sullivan’s hanging was scheduled for the morning of May 7 but had to be postponed. First the hangman couldn’t be found, and then someone snuck across the Common in the middle of the night and cut down the rope. No one knew who did it—probably one of Sullivan’s friends or admirers. It took a few days for the authorities to string up a replacement and find an executioner; in the meantime, anticipation for the spectacle grew, fueled by stories of Sullivan’s showmanship. The final date for his death was set for May 10. “He is certainly to make his exit,” the
New-York Gazette
promised.

The best route to the Common was up Broadway, the tree-lined promenade that cut through the center of town. It started near the island’s southern edge at Bowling Green, a well-kept park in an expensive neighborhood of Georgian brick houses, and from there extended north toward the tall Gothic spire of Trinity Church, a favorite spot for New York’s Anglican elite. Closer to the Common, Broadway passed through a poorer area, blocks of makeshift wooden shanties where the cart drivers, bricklayers, carpenters, and other tradesmen lived—the class that Sullivan, as a silversmith in Boston, once belonged to. The street ended at the Common, the view widening as the town’s buildings fell away. On the fields ahead was a tree with a rope dangling from a branch; below, the counterfeiter stood on a cart with the noose around his neck.

There was no guarantee that Sullivan would give a good performance. In the four years since he dazzled crowds in Providence, he had spent a lot of time alone in the backwoods. He was so obsessed with making money, his charm had worn thin: he barked at his associates and when courting
new recruits, relied more on their lust for money than on his powers of persuasion. In New York he could have made an angry exit, raging at the men who captured and convicted him, or gone quietly to the gallows, broken by the inevitability of his death. Instead, energized by the onlookers who gathered that spring day on the grass, he mustered an endearing mix of defiance and levity.

First Sullivan boasted about how much money he forged: £12,000 of Rhode Island’s currency, between £10,000 and £12,000 of New Hampshire’s, £3,000 of Connecticut’s, and large amounts of New York’s. These numbers were huge by colonial standards: in Manhattan at the time, a single pound could buy about three bushels of wheat or ten gallons of rum. When asked what denomination of New York money he counterfeited, Sullivan refused to say. “You must find that out by your learning,” he declared. “All my accomplices deserved the gallows,” the moneymaker continued, “but I will not betray them, or be guilty of shedding their blood.” Looking out at the spectators, he scanned their expectant faces. “I see none of my accomplices here,” Sullivan announced, adding that he hoped they destroyed all the money and plates in their possession, so “that they may not die on a tree as I do.” Then, in a final flourish, he put a plug of chewing tobacco in his mouth and, as his saliva blackened, grinned at the people collected below. “I cannot help smiling,” he told them, “as’tis the nature of the beast.” As the hangman prepared the noose, Sullivan made one last request. “Don’t pull the rope so tight—it is hard for a man to die in cold blood,” he instructed before the cart disappeared from under his feet.