Stephen Burroughs: The Criminal As Public Spirit

In A Nation of Counterfeiters, Stephen Mihm suggests that The Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs can be productively read beside Ben Franklin’s more famous, contemporaneous Autobiography. In particular, Mihm argues that both Franklin and Burroughs provide blueprints for the kind of self-making that would come to characterize U.S. literary narrative and the individualist mythos of American culture more generally. Whether narrating the adventures of a counterfeiter/thief/seducer or a printer/scientist/founding father, the critical emphasis, as it has been in most studies of Burroughs and Franklin, is on the concept of selfhood.

Yet, Burroughs also represents himself, as Franklin does, as a public spirit, who, in his own way, serves the needs of the common good. He describes his counterfeiting operations, for example, as an ingenious means of solving a cash scarcity problem, much as Franklin argued on behalf of his printing paper currency in Pennsylvania. Also like Franklin, he helps found a public library.  Burroughs on the whole, while chastening himself for certain blamable actions, does offer up his life to his readers as one spent advancing the cause of liberty. In doing so, he provides a unique synthesis of republican and criminal ideals, in which virtues like dispassionate disinterest and rational calculation serve to advance the agendas of founding fathers and con artists alike. In such a context, the qualities of mind a criminal like Burroughs possesses serve him well in the role of national public servant.