A Counterfeiter's Paradise (10 page)

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 rather 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.

T
HE 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.

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.