Mary Peck Butterworth didn’t need the money.
She was born into a prominent Rehoboth, Massachusetts, family and married at the age of 25 to a well-respected builder, or “homewright” as the profession was then called, a man who also owned his own tract of land. As the Newport Daily News put it in 1967, Mary had a “‘respectable’ beginning and was related to most of the leading citizens of southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.”
So it was not greed that led Mary to start one of the largest counterfeiting rings in New England in 1716. Rather, she was an inventive woman who saw an opportunity to make improvements in a field of business. The counterfeiters of her day were doing it all wrong and she had an idea of how to fix it. Who could resist the pull?
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For seven years, Mary’s ingenious system of copying the paper money newly flowing out of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut was a huge success. She had a failsafe counterfeiting method and a built-in distribution network thanks to her husband’s business — what could go wrong?
How many times in stories of historical misdeeds have we heard a man’s downfall blamed on a woman? It’s a tired trope, one that is generally a shoddy attempt to find a scapegoat for the perpetrator’s own failure.
Mary’s story offers a refreshing reversal; her counterfeiting syndicate was exposed by men who couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Unlike those other stories, Mary didn’t need to scapegoat the likes of poor Arthur Noble when her scheme came tumbling down. She had taken the possibility of exposure into account when she developed her new counterfeiting method that was so ingenious that, while she and her entire crew were arrested and charged with the crime, they were all eventually acquitted. The authorities knew what they had been up to, but they couldn’t find any proof of their crimes.
She could make a batch of bills with just one piece of muslin
Counterfeiting was present in the U.S. financial system from nearly the beginning of the institution of paper money. Prior to the late 1600s and early 1700s, a variety of currencies had been used in the young colonies—first wampum, then bartering, and even an attempt at metal coins.
But that all changed when England went to war with France and insisted the American colonists contribute to the effort. Wars require cash, so the American colonies began printing money. But the burgeoning financial system built on these new “bills of credit” was unstable.
According to a 1943 essay in The New England Quarterly, “counterfeiting soon became a popular pastime, especially as the crudely made bills were easy to imitate. A counterfeit bill was an easy way to anticipate the fall in value of the genuine bills, and consequently, since public opinion did not strongly condemn the practice, offered a means of self-protection against the certain depreciation of the genuine ones.”
It wasn’t that the authorities didn’t try to tamp down on the rampant financial fraud, it’s just that they didn’t have a whole lot of public support to successfully convict the offenders in court.
The reigning method of printing fake money was using copper plates to duplicate the $5 bills. (This is how the first known female counterfeiter in the U.S., Freelove Lippencott, got her start.) But the product left a lot to be desired. It was nearly impossible to create a perfect reproduction this way. And copper plates were very concrete and very permanent evidence of someone’s guilt.
Eagle-eyed Mary noticed these issues right away. Moreover, she had an idea for a new method of counterfeiting that would bypass them entirely.
Her innovation in counterfeiting was born out of the tricks of the trade she learned as a housewife. She used a damp scrap of muslin cloth in lieu of a copper plate. She would drape the damp cloth over a face-up authentic bill, and then iron the muslin. This would transfer the print of the real bill onto the cloth, which she would then move onto a clean piece of paper. She would use a quill pen to fill in any gaps in the printing so that it looked identical to the real bill. She could make a batch of bills with just one piece of muslin.
This method had dual benefits: she could run operations for a large counterfeiting ring out of her own kitchen, and the biggest piece of evidence of her crime—the muslin—could be tossed straight into the fire and burned into nonexistence.
For seven years, Mary was a loving housewife, mother…and thriving counterfeiter.
Mary’s operation was a family affair. Her brother and sister-in-law were both deeply involved in forging money, and her husband’s employees could be used to move the fake bills. Mary charged half what each bill was worth to her customers who were aware of the scheme—and who in some cases included prominent individuals like the Bristol town clerk and justice of the court. Over the seven years that Mary was in business, she made a fortune for her family, even providing the money for her husband to build them a new home.
This large operation took no lack of chutzpah on Mary’s part. While it is true that counterfeiting wasn’t completely frowned on at the time, anyone caught and convicted faced very steep punishment—either a cropped ear or the death penalty.
Sources give differing accounts as to what caused Mary’s downfall. Some say it was one of her employees who was caught using the money in the wrong place at the wrong time and who cracked under questioning. Another source says it was in part because Mary boasted about her methods too much to one of her biggest clients and that he eventually confessed when pressed.
A more colorful account has it that one employee involved in cleaning the money, Arthur Noble, traveled to Newport to see the hanging of 28 pirates. While there, he got into the celebratory spirit—both that of the emotional and the liquid varieties. As he drank more, he bought more rounds for others, flinging around money that made the tavern keepers very suspicious. How did a lowly employee have that much money to spend? They eventually turned him in to the cops where he, as is the theme of this story, quickly cracked under questioning.
Whatever the case or combination of triggers, after seven years of literally printing money for herself and her family, Mary’s reign as the counterfeiting queen of New England came to an end.
But the end was not as violent as one might fear. Though at least one, but probably more, men were running their mouths about Mary’s activities and exactly how she made her forged money, and while hundreds or thousands of her bills could be found in circulation, the authorities couldn’t find evidence of the actual crime. When they searched her house, all they turned up were things like a hot iron, a quill pen, and a fire that had some remains of muslin—nothing that was out of place for a Colonial kitchen.
So Mary and her merry band of counterfeiters were all released from prison and the charges dropped. It seems that Mary was satisfied with her time as a criminal and she went back to her life as a housewife and a mother, with no nefarious side gigs, or at least none that have survived the historical record.
She lived a long life, raising seven children and dying at the age of 89. During the eulogy at her funeral, she was celebrated as a “worthy Christian lady who had ever lived a goodly and blameless life.”
