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Authors: Ben Tarnoff
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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 Providencetaught 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
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 Providencetaught 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
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