A Counterfeiter's Paradise by Ben Tarnoff Read Free Book Online

civilians massacred, corpses scalped. By the time Sullivan arrived, however, Maine had been relatively peaceful for almost two decades. While tensions still ran high—British colonists along the St. George River complained that they frequently lost horses and livestock to Indian raids—no major hostilities erupted.
    The next conflict, when it came, would last for four years and yet leave the political map of North America virtually unchanged. It would also set in motion the chain of events that led Sullivan to counterfeiting and, along a parallel path, enabled Thomas Hutchinson to eliminate paper money from Massachusetts. It began in Europe, triggered by the unexpected death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI. One rainy night in October 1740, after returning from a hunting trip, Charles ate a meal of sautéed mushrooms. He spent the night vomiting, became feverish, and died ninedays later; although there was never a conclusive diagnosis, most people blamed the mushrooms, which were said to be poisonous. Charles’s death posed a serious problem, since his succession was disputed: he had decreed that the crown would pass to his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, but not everyone accepted her as legitimate, partly because of an ancient Frankish law forbidding royal inheritance by a woman. Prussia took advantage of the confusion by invading Silesia, an Austrian possession, in December 1740. The invasion eventually ignited the War of the Austrian Succession, with Prussia, France, and Spain on one side and Austria, Britain, and Russia on the other. As Voltaire recalled in his memoirs, “This plate of champignons changed the destiny of Europe.”
    Despite heavy fighting on the Continent, war was not officially declared between England and France until the spring of 1744. The news reached the French at Louisbourg on May 3, a full twenty days before it reached Boston. Emboldened by the element of surprise, the French wasted little time, striking British positions in Nova Scotia and dispatching privateers to capture British ships. This began the North American phase of the War of the Austrian Succession, named King George’s War after Britain’s King George II, the same conflict that would soon force the Massachusetts legislature to boost its production of paper money. When Sullivan’s master, Gillmore, heard of the French attacks, he decided to move his family to safety in Boston, fearing a wider war in the Northeast. He sold the remainder of his servant’s contract to Captain Jabez Bradbury, the commanding officer at a nearby fort along the St. George River.
    Bradbury was a veteran of colonial Maine. He had spent the last thirty-odd years living in trading outposts along the northeastern frontier, and was almost fifty when he took command at the St. George River in 1742, where he had the unenviable task of manning an isolated garrison in territory inhabited by mostly hostile Indian tribes. He hated it, and in his correspondence with the governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, he frequently requested to be reassigned, or “diliverd from this place oftorment,” as he put it in one such letter. By the summer of 1744, around the time that Sullivan got there, the mood at the fort must have been extremely tense. Now that the British and the French were officially at war, it was only a matter of time before the Indians, many of whom were allied with the French, emerged from the dense cover of the Maine forest and attacked the garrison. When he arrived, Sullivan found a fort full of frightened soldiers commanded by an aging officer who loathed his job.
    WHILE SULLIVAN AND BRADBURY’S MEN waited, their superiors in Boston set their eyes farther north, to another fiercely contested strip of terrain, Nova Scotia. The British had controlled mainland Nova Scotia since 1713, but Île Royale, the landmass that capped the peninsula, remained in French hands. Its main settlement, Louisbourg, was a heavily fortified seaport and one of