The Alchemy of the Self: Stephen Burroughs and the Counterfeit Economy of the Early Republic

Trois Rivières, Quebec, was nothing more than a tiny colonial outpost on the banks of the St. Lawrence when Isaac Redfield, the famous legal scholar and chief justice of Vermont, paid a visit in the winter of 1839. Whatever his reason for stopping at the sleepy hamlet, Redfield spent most of his time chatting with Stephen Burroughs, an elderly American living out his last days in self-imposed exile. "Few men possessed such extraordinary powers of conversation," the judge later recalled. "His manners were courteous and dignified, without being distant or affected." Redfield reported that Burroughs, a devout Catholic, spent his days reading in a room "hung round with copies, or originals, of the master-pieces of some of the distinguished painters of Christian life and suffering." According to Redfield, Burroughs "never, save once, referred to his former course of life."

Anyone who knew of Burroughs's past must have greeted this news with considerable skepticism. Only a generation earlier, he had been one of the more notorious confidence men and criminals in the United States. His reputation for imposture, not to mention self-aggrandizement (he penned a best-selling memoir detailing his exploits after his release from prison) was nothing short of legendary. So infamous had he become that he fled the country, settling in the sparsely inhabited frontier north of Vermont, where he continued his roguery, counterfeiting the notes of banks in the United States, much to the consternation of authorities on both sides of the border. He was not, in short, a likely candidate for respectability, much less salvation. But this was indeed the case, as Redfield assured his readers: "after a long life of turmoil, of commotion, and not seldom of vice and wickedness," Burroughs had settled down, finding in religion both "quiet and penitence."¹

Burroughs was the kind of character whose life becomes the very quintessence of an era. His adult years spanned a tumultuous period, one that witnessed the dissolution of the rigid hierarchies of colonial times and their replacement by the more fluid social order of a democratic commercial society governed by the doctrine of laissez-faire. As older sources of authority crumbled, self-fashioning and self-advancement slowly became a viable way of life. Burroughs, who counterfeited identities and bank notes with comparable ease, became one of the more colorful representatives of this new ethos.² In a society increasingly organized around the pursuit of wealth, Burroughs seemed both to his critics and admirers an extreme incarnation of the self-made man, having carried the desire to become rich to its logical conclusion. He represented a new breed of entrepreneur, one who thrived in an economy where distinctions between capitalists and counterfeiters became difficult to discern.

Those distinctions grew especially faint with the rise of note-issuing banks in the late eighteenth century, just as Burroughs reached the height of his popularity. In the wake of the Revolution, a growing number of entrepreneurs claimed the right to print money, establishing banks and issuing bank notes backed by little in the way of assets. Burroughs simply took the rationale behind these feats of paper alchemy one step further, issuing imitations from his own "bank" based in the contested borderland between Canada and the United States. Tales of his exploits soon spread, and Burroughs became the real and imagined source of every counterfeit note in circulation in the new nation. In the process, he became symbolic of the common spirit animating the conventional and illicit pursuit of wealth in the post-Revolutionary era, a time when the right to "make money"—literally and figuratively—went from being a privilege of the few to a franchise of the many.

Roguery and Revolution

Burroughs's early years are well documented, thanks to his Memoirs, parts of which began appearing in the late 1790s.³ It is a remarkable work, akin to Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, but far more literary—and cynical.⁴ Like Franklin's narrative, it spans the transition in the social order from the fixed hierarchies of colonial times...