A Counterfeiter's Paradise (7 page)

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 handful 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.

Another virtue of the region was its contested history, which made the already difficult task of capturing and convicting Sullivan nearly impossible. Since the counterfeiter would operate on the border and forge the currencies of both New York and Connecticut, intercolonial cooperation would be essential for apprehending him. But the disputed status of the Oblong meant that officials from the two colonies weren’t inclined to help each other police the area. Whoever wanted to catch Sullivan would not only have to wade long distances through wolf-infested swamps; he would also face the challenging chore of getting two colonies with a history of conflict to work together.

If his choice of location is any indication, Sullivan seems to have
thought things through. Once he had a base of operations, he set to work gathering the necessities. One of these was a hideout, and the hills around Dover had many promising candidates: spacious caves that had been carved into the cliffs by rivulets. The size of these caverns was impressive; one of them, known locally as the Dover Stone Church, had an arched portal and a vaulted stone interior that resembled a Gothic cathedral. Sullivan picked out a cave cut into the side of a small bluff, located near a particularly isolated corner of a forested swamp. He camouflaged the chasm’s mouth with brush and a tree stump so the entrance wouldn’t be visible. Inside, a long corridor led to a sizable room that Sullivan covered with wooden panels, presumably to prevent it from collapsing, or perhaps to lend the interior a cozier atmosphere. His grotto was certainly comfortable. There were tables and chairs, places to eat and to sleep. An opening in the rock formed a natural window, letting in light that illuminated the chamber.