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

New France’s most important trading hubs. Hoping to consolidate British control over the North Atlantic, Governor Shirley started building support for an ambitious plan to capture the fort. The proposal, approved by the Massachusetts legislature in February 1745, was wildly impractical. It involved using three thousand poorly trained New England militiamen to stage an amphibious assault that even an elite British regiment would have found challenging. When operations began in the spring of 1745, the campaign started stumbling right away. Discipline among the New England militias, whose ranks consisted of plunder-hungry colonists with little to no military experience, was nonexistent. They made all sorts of mistakes, like loading the siege cannons with multiple shots, thinking that doubling the ammunition would pack twice the punch. Instead, the iron siding of the cannons burst, and the shrapnel from these explosions caused a significant number of casualties on the New England side. If the battlefield was chaotic and carnivalesque by day, the camps at night were no different. The men sat around the fire drinking, singing, and roasting hunks of meat carved from poached French cattle.
    Remarkably, though, the siege succeeded. On June 26, exhausted by more than a month of fighting, Louisbourg’s forces surrendered. The report of the fort’s capture had an electrifying effect on New England. This was their victory: it was the colonials who had defeated the French, not those pompous “lobster backs,” the red-coated British regulars. The reality, of course, was more complicated, since British soldiers had fought alongside the militias and a Royal Navy blockade played a key role in the victory. But in the jubilant outpouring of Yankee pride that swept Massachusetts in the summer of 1745, the finer points were lost. Americans of all classes took part in the festivities, toasting the triumph with copious quantities of liquor while fireworks burst against New England’s night sky. “The churl and niggard became generous and even the poor forgot their poverty,” reported the
Boston Evening-Post
.
    Not everyone greeted the fall of Louisbourg with joy. The news en-raged the pro-French Indian tribes in the woods near the St. George River. One day in the middle of July, Bradbury’s men heard the crackling report of gunfire followed by the shrill sounds of a woman screaming. They looked out and saw a woman running toward the garrison: she was bleeding from a bullet wound in her shoulder, with some seventy Indians in pursuit. The soldiers fired on the natives, slowing them down long enough for her to sprint to safety within the fort’s gates. When the battle was over, Bradbury found that the Indians had killed around sixty of the settlers’ cattle and taken a man prisoner; they discovered his scalped corpse about a week later.
    Sullivan witnessed the attack, and the several that followed, before leaving the fort in 1746. After serving Bradbury for two years, he chose to enlist in an infantry regiment bound for Louisbourg, departing for the newly captured town about a year later than most New Englanders. While Sullivan still had three years left on his indenture, servants were allowed to enroll in the military, albeit with the provision that their wages went to their masters. Sullivan’s enlistment proved decisive for his future as acounterfeiter, since in Louisbourg he became his regiment’s armorer, a position that taught him the metalworking techniques he would later use in engraving plates for forging currency. He seems to have enjoyed his time in the military, recording in his memoir that he “took great Delight in the Discipline, which pleased my Officers exceedingly.”
    Perhaps for someone so impetuous, the rigor of martial life was a relief, a forced vacation from his capricious nature. But if that was the case, he joined the wrong army. The wildness that the New England militiamen had displayed during the siege didn’t