A Counterfeiter's Paradise Read Free Page B

secure his freedom in exchange for a plate for making counterfeit currency—not Massachusetts money, Fairservice specified, but New Hampshire. Since Sullivan’s tools had been seized, he would have to make the plate from scratch. He would need a few things: a New Hampshire note to work from, a sheet of copper, and a small metalworking chisel. Fortunately, jails in colonial America were poorly guarded, making it easy for Sullivan to smuggle in whatever he needed. He could bribe a warden to pass packages for him or enlist one of the jail’s many debtors, who were allowed to leave the prison grounds whenever they liked as long as they returned at night. Once Sullivan had obtained the materials, he set to work.
    New Hampshire’s forty-shilling note was printed on a rectangular piece of paper, and the text read from top to bottom, like a page out of a book. The bill was adorned with a large royal seal and various images: columns of acanthus leaves wreathed its borders, scrolls coiled and unfurled across the page, a pine tree stood at the center. The note’s designers had introduced these flourishes to dissuade counterfeiters, who couldn’t reproduce such elaborate designs without real technical skills. These details had another, more abstract purpose: they gave the bill a certain gravity, so as to reassure people that an inked slip of paper equaled a certain quantity of silver or gold. Aside from discouraging forgers, the intricate handiwork helped bolster people’s confidence in the colony’s currency.
    To make the plate, Sullivan had to engrave everything backward. It was tedious, painstaking work. Each curlicued letter and drooping leaf had to be carved into the copper as a mirror image, so that when the plate was inked and run through a printing press, the resulting bill would look right. He etched the front of the note on one side of the copper sheet and the back on the other. The finished product must have looked peculiar, but anyone who glimpsed it sitting in Sullivan’s cell—a brown pane inscribed with delicately executed, illegible glyphs—would have known what it was for.
    Satisfied with the silversmith’s services, Fairservice paid his bail, and Sullivan walked free for the time being. Fairservice stashed the plate at the bottom of a sled in a barn on Bull Wharf, one of the piers on the south side of town, and started printing counterfeit notes, hanging the newly inked forgeries from a string to let them dry in the wind along the waterfront. When the bills were crisp, he assembled them and headed off to make the sale. Across from the wharf stood a tavern named the Bull, where sailors and sloop masters passing through Boston ate, drank, and traded stories from abroad. These were Fairservice’s ideal customers: itinerant men of dubious morals who could be persuaded to purchase counterfeit New Hampshire money, particularly after they had been softened up with a few tumblers of rum. Instead of selling his forgeries for a fixed fee, Fairservice lent the billson consignment: the patron would keep one-half of the profits made from spending the counterfeits and remit the other half to Fairservice. Perhaps for this reason, the enterprise never really took off. In 1767, after twelve years of marriage, Fairservice’s wife, Mary, filed for divorce. She claimed that her husband was financially irresponsible, abusive, and unfaithful; the most damaging of her many charges was that he had conducted “criminal conversation with a Negro Woman Slave in the family.” Mary got the divorce.
    In the meantime, Sullivan stood trial in the fall of 1750. He pleaded not guilty, but there was enough incriminating evidence found in his house to persuade the jury to convict the silversmith of “wickedly falsely & deceiptfully” forging Massachusetts bills with an intent to pass them off as genuine. On Thursday, September 13, Sullivan was led to the square below the imposing Georgian facade of what is now known as the Old State House