Description

Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs. To Which are Added, Notes, and an Appendix. Vols. I & II, Albany, NY: Published by B.D. Packard, No. 51 State-Street, R. Packard, Printer, 1811, 248 pp, 148 pp, 7 x 4.25", 12mo. In poor condition. As is. Leather boards are scuffed at edges & bumped/worn at corners. Tail of spine moderately chipped, causing exposed binding. Hinges worn & fragile. Head of spine rubbed. Previous ownership signature found on front paste-down. No preliminary pages - text begins at title page of Vol. I. Title page of Vol. I is also almost detached from binding, fragile. Both front and rear gutters split, cording exposed. Toning, finger-soiling and age-staining exhibited throughout text-block, but text remains legible. No known marginalia. Binding is intact, but very fragile. Please see photos. Stephen Burroughs (1765-1840) grew up in Coventry, New Hampshire, the son of a prominent & strict Presbyterian minister. As a child, Burroughs liked mischief; for example, he stole watermelons from neighboring farms and gardens. Most of his story derives from these memoirs, which Burroughs first published at the age of 33 and polished and republished repeatedly for decades. At the age of fourteen, he ran off to join the Continental Army, but could not convince the enlisting officers he was of age. Instead, he joined on a crew of a privateer in Newburyport, Massachusetts. His father sent him to Dartmouth College, but Burroughs lasted only a short while. After an unsuccessful attempt at medicine, Burroughs decided to turn to ministry. Though untrained, he had access to his father's sermons, and, armed with these stolen sermons, headed to Massachusetts to sell himself as a minister. In Pelham, MA, Burroughs was outed as a fraud, and chased out of town by an angry congregation. After the Revolutionary War, the new American country needed currency & Burroughs was happy to oblige. The only reason paper money had value, Burroughs concluded, was because people agreed that it did. Burroughs acquired some counterfeit coins from a colleague and attempted to pass them at an apothecary in Springfield, MA, but was immediately arrested on the spot. After being released from prison in 1788, Burroughs moved to Canada where he set up two shops: Shipton and Stanstead. He became a prolific counterfeiter. Burroughs became a master at reproducing bills from a variety of sources. His fame brought criminal partners flocking to him & he generated a steady flow of counterfeit money heading down from Canada to all states in the U.S.. American poet Robert Frost wrote that Burrough's memoir should stand on the shelf beside the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. To Frost, Franklin's volume was " a reminder of what we have been as a young nation ," while Burroughs' " comes in reassuringly when there is a question of our not unprincipled wickedness...sophisticated wickedness, the kind that knows its grounds and can twinkle... Could we have been expected to produce so fine a flower in a pioneer state? " A complete work. A reading copy - extremely interesting American history. RAREA1811BNOB 12/23 - HK1008