belonged to a class of criminal that overran America for much of its history, as integral to the country’s financial past as those who printed its many kinds of legal currency.
Moneymakers didn’t just infiltrate the money supply—they embodied the nation’s speculative spirit. The American economy rose and fell on a tide of paper credit, fueled by notes that tended to promise more than they could deliver. As long as everyone believed something had value—whether a colonial bill of credit or a stock certificate—it did. But when that faith faltered, mistrust spread throughout the system, triggering a panic. Americans had a confidence problem: they either had too much of it, taking risks as everything surged, or too little, fleeing the market as everything crumbled. By feeding America’s appetite for paper currency, counterfeiters helped stoke this cycle. They made fake money in a country where real money’s value was often just as imaginary, bluffing their way to wealth in the casino of American capitalism.
I F YOU HAD SPENT THE SUMMER OF 1749 in Boston, you likely would have heard that a gardener grew a twenty-eight-pound melon—the biggest anyone had ever seen—and invited thirty of his friends over to help him eat it. You might have heard about the mulatto boy who had been bitten by a rattlesnake at Stoughton and died twenty-four hours later, or the Irishman in yellow buckskin breeches who had hired a horse and then absconded with it to Rhode Island. You certainly would have heard about what the North End merchants were selling that season: Choice Lisbon Salt, the Best Burlington Pork, a Good Brick House, a Healthy Strong Negro Man—and at the printer’s over on Queen Street, the latest selection from a fiery Calvinist preacher named Jonathan Edwards.
The printer couldn’t have picked a better time to publish the preacher, whose best-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” warned parishioners that God could toss them into hell at any moment. After a summer in colonial Boston, everyone would have had a pretty good idea of what hell felt like. An oppressively hot sun singed the flesh, the air’s humidity smothered the skin like a damp blanket, and the sour smell of sweat mixed with the fish stink wafting down from the piers of the harbor. The inferno couldn’t have felt very far. An unchristian season, summer encouraged slothfulness, stirred lust, quickened the temper.
One day in late August, a local silversmith could be heard fighting with his wife. Their voices reverberated through Boston’s corkscrew streets and into the ears of inquisitive neighbors in houses of timber and brick listening through thin walls and open windows. The wife was drunk; the silversmith probably was too. The words were indistinct; perhaps they slurred their speech. Suddenly a phrase, howled by a woman hoarse with rage, could be heard clearly above the din: “You forty-thousand-pound moneymaker!”
The silversmith’s name, the neighbors would tell the authorities, was Owen Sullivan. Presumably this wasn’t the first time the couple had quarreled: both he and his wife drank heavily, and they were angry drunks. Lately Sullivan had been seen with large quantities of cash, which he spent lavishly, conspicuously, arousing envy and suspicion. When officers came to arrest him on August 28, 1749, they found more than thirty counterfeit ten-shilling Massachusetts notes on the silversmith—not £40,000 but still a considerable amount of money. The print on the forgeries was too black, making his bills easily detectable as fakes when placed alongside genuine notes. Discovered in Sullivan’s chest were printing materials, ink, and pieces of paper with his attempts to imitate the official signatures that appeared on the colony’s currency.
They carried Sullivan off to jail, but the silversmith didn’t intend to stay long. Once inside the prison, he passed a message to his partner John Fairservice, who agreed to
Nora [Roberts Nora] Roberts