A Counterfeiter's Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

view represented the soul of colonial America. Paper reflected hard work, ambition, and enterprise; it offered a practical alternative to the idolatrous fever for precious metals that afflicted the Old World.
    Franklin’s greatest insight was that for money to have value, people have to believe in it. Money can’t do anything by itself; unlike a gun or a banana, it has no utility other than as a medium of exchange agreed upon by a group of individuals. This is most obviously the case with paper money: it depends entirely on confidence, which is why it can become worthless overnight if people lose faith in it.
    The intangible nature of paper money caused its detractors in the Massachusetts money war to condemn it in unusual terms: not just as financially unsound but as immoral and even supernatural. One Protestant minister compared printing paper bills to the “Popish Doctrine of Transubstantiation,” a false metamorphosis that preyed on the laity’s will to believe. Substituting paper for silver and gold was not only deluded, it was blasphemous. Another hard-money supporter extended the religious argument even further: paper money, in usurping the role traditionally reserved for precious metals, represented “an abomination to the righteous GOD.” Silver and gold were eternal, God-given measures of value. Spurning them in favor of something man-made disrupted the natural order of things, and betrayed an unholy desire to play God.
    According to this logic, paper money’s sinful origins meant that its use inevitably encouraged immoral acts, like debtors cheating their creditors and speculators exploiting the volatility of value. Paper was a kind of illusionist’s trick with potentially catastrophic consequences, an intrinsically deceitful medium that bred bad behavior as it spread like a virus throughthe body politic. Both the officials who printed money legally and the counterfeiters who forged it were sorcerers of a sort, inspiriting otherwise worthless paper with the power to be exchanged for goods and services.
    The oft-repeated charge that paper money was unnatural revealed a deeper, more tangible fear. Paper posed a very real threat to the traditional class system of colonial America, an order that its self-appointed stewards liked to think of as natural. While hard currency tended to be concentrated in the hands of rich merchants, paper money was more widely distributed and changed hands more frequently. As a fluid and fickle form of wealth, paper’s dynamism undermined a static social arrangement built around fixed classes and a fixed currency. An entrepreneurial class buoyed by credit clearly unnerved traditionalists, who were terrified of an economy where value had been sublimated into something spectral and slippery. Their alarm at the “ghost” of paper money had a metaphysical aspect: what they really feared was a world where appearances no longer reliably corresponded to reality, where a piece of paper could equal a pile of gold or an uncultured tradesman could become a powerful member of society. No one typified this phenomenon better than counterfeiters, who made a fortune capitalizing on the interval between appearance and reality. They were the most extreme exemplars of paper money’s corrosive effect on social conventions: men of simple origins who became rich and famous riding the coattails of an incorporeal currency.
    IF THE PHANTOM OF PAPER frightened men like Thomas Hutchinson, then Owen Sullivan was the flesh-and-blood fulfillment of their fears. In many respects, he was their worst nightmare: a hard-drinking Irish immigrant who used colonial America’s dependence on paper currency to become as wealthy as a prosperous Boston merchant. It was an exercise in immorality that only an economy built on paper could produce.
    The only account of Sullivan’s early life is a pamphlet that appearedposthumously entitled
A Short Account of the Life, of John—alias Owen Syllavan
. He probably dictated