Since you brought up the Founding Fathers, some excerpts from an article by historian Jack Lynch about the many con artists who took on phony identities in colonial America:
Colonial America appealed to people because it offered them a fresh start, a chance to begin life anew. In the New World a person could establish a new identity, free from the onerous traditions and snobberies of the Old. And it pleased Americans to think of themselves as the sort of people who gave strangers the benefit of the doubt, who judged men by their characters and achievements rather than by family ties and pedigrees.
But the liberty honest folk had to reinvent themselves gave the same opportunity to the less scrupulous. Knaves and rascals learned to take advantage of this characteristically American trust: the colonies swarmed with rogues, tricksters, impostors, and con men.
Their stories are often entertaining—narratives about their adventures circulated widely in their lifetimes and long afterward—but they're also informative. These cheats, or "sharpers" as they were known at the time, show how fluid identity could be in the eighteenth century.
Some of these scoundrels were imports from the mother country. Bampfylde-Moore Carew, for instance, was the wayward son of a Devonshire minister. He traveled around...under such false identities as a lunatic called "Mad Tom," a sailor, a preacher, and an old woman, bilking people of their money...Now a Quaker, now a shipwrecked sailor, now a sufferer from smallpox, he imposed on uncounted dupes...
Other early American impostors were homegrown. Stephen Burroughs, born in 1765, grew up in New Hampshire and Vermont, and tells us he spent his youth "almost perpetually prosecuting some scene of amusement." His amusements turned criminal. After two years at Dartmouth College he dropped out and began what historian Larry Cebula calls "a colorful career of thief, counterfeiter, schoolteacher, and seducer of schoolgirls." Like Carew, he was a master of the assumed identity, a trick he learned when he pretended to be someone else to avoid detection after one of his adventures.
As Cebula says, "So great was his fame that unsolved crimes were routinely ascribed to him and other criminals sometimes gave the name 'Stephen Burroughs' when they were arrested."
The most notorious colonial impostor of all was Tom Bell. He featured in more than a hundred newspaper articles between 1738 and 1755, making him one of the most famous men in early America. Born in Boston in 1713, Bell was enrolled in Boston Latin School and Harvard, and used his education to ingratiate himself with the wealthy and powerful. During a career of fifty years, historian Carl Bridenbaugh "pursued him in the colonial newspapers as resolutely as Inspector Javert did Jean Valjean"...
What can we learn from these tales of deception and imposture? They show us that personal identity was fluid in the colonies. The self-made man is a mainstay of our early history: the archetypal American hero is born not in a palace but in a log cabin, and makes his way in the world by the force of his personality.
But while we often dwell on the advantages that come from self-creation, we should remember that imposters thrive in a republic in which a person's identity is what he or she makes it.
