by Becky Akers
We know he was born June 6, 1755 in Coventry, Connecticut, in a house that his family replaced sometime after 1776 with a more capacious one. (Captain Hale never saw this new mansion, though the Hales undoubtedly discussed it during his furlough in January, 1776. Now a museum, it contains such treasures as his silver shoe buckles, army trunk, and autographed Bible.)
The Captain hailed—to use one of his own puns—from a distinguished family. Not only did it sparkle with preachers, the celebrities of Puritan New England, but his great-grandparents were prominent in the Salem witch trials. He was one of twelve children, ten of whom survived infancy, born to Richard “Deacon” Hale and Elizabeth Strong.
There was a powder scar on his forehead and a birthmark on his neck, about which “his [boyhood] playmates sometimes twitted him...telling him he would be hanged,” according to Asher Wright. He was six feet tall and stunningly handsome, so much so that contemporaries unfailingly praised his appearance. No portrait of him exists, though we have one of his father and another of his brother John. In 1913, a biographer discovered a “shadow portrait,” produced by tracing one’s candlelit silhouette, on a door recycled from the old house for the Hale mansion; he presumed it to be Captain Hale’s. Alice’s miniature is a persistent, but probably false, legend. If it did exist, it is now lost.
Nathan’s mother died when he was twelve years old, after which his father remarried. Rev. Joseph Huntington, brother of the Samuel Huntington who signed the Declaration of Independence, tutored Enoch and Nathan. The brothers entered Yale College in 1769 and joined Linonia, with Nathan becoming its chairman. He graduated in September 1773 after setting academic and athletic records and debating the education of women. He then visited his uncle Samuel, a schoolmaster, in New Hampshire, probably seeking advice on that profession. He returned to Connecticut to teach at Haddam’s Landing and New London, including a class in the mornings for girls. He was renowned for treating his students kindly, encouraging their intellects, at a time when teachers physically punished their charges and insisted on rote learning.
On hearing of Lexington and Concord, Nathan urged the men of New London to march to Boston’s assistance. He was already touting independence as the best safeguard for liberty, though most colonists, even Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, still talked of reconciliation with the Crown. He joined Connecticut’s militia in the summer of 1775 as a lieutenant and was commissioned a captain in the Continental Army that winter. He paid his men from his own pocket to remain when their enlistments expired. Around this time, he took a deck of cards from some of his troops when he found them gambling, “doing it in such a way that they were charmed rather than angered,” as Sergeant Stephen Hempstead recalled. (I moved this scene to Nathan’s days as a schoolmaster because I was incredulous that anyone could confiscate cards from armed gamblers and survive. Truly, it testifies to the Captain’s inimitable style.) He also led the expedition that captured a supply sloop from beneath the guns of the Asia.
Nathan was recovering from illness when he alone volunteered for the dangerous and, in those days, horribly shameful assignment of discovering the government’s plans—and he insisted on doing so despite strenuous attempts to dissuade him. He disguised himself as a schoolmaster while behind enemy lines, concealing the notes he made on his person. The Redcoats captured him sometime on September 21, 1776, and General Sir William Howe interrogated him. Nathan hanged at 11 a.m. on Sunday, September 22, without a court martial, after delivering his awesomely courageous last words.
Almost all else is disputed, mythical, or theorized. Acquaintances reported his hair variously as brown or blond; we assume he argued in favor of educating women at his commencement since he was teaching a class of girls a year later; he may or may not have fought in the Battle of Long Island. No one knows precisely how long he was behind the enemy’s lines, what he discovered during his time there, the manner of his arrest, or even the place of his execution and burial (if any).
As for his engagement to Alice Adams, or any woman, the evidence is ambiguous. The only certainty is that Captain Hale, with his abundant charm, his brilliance, and his good looks, was a famous and perennial favorite with all the ladies.
Legend has been especially busy with his capture and death. He supposedly noted his discoveries behind the lines in Latin, more than likely for someone who would have recited in that language daily while at Yale. He was probably turned over to William Cunningham, a man almost unrivaled in the British Army for cruelty. Captain Hale wrote at least two letters immediately before he died, for Cunningham later flaunted them and Nathan’s diploma to John Wyllys, a classmate from Yale, whom the government had also captured. Tradition says one letter was to Nathan’s mother (who had died nine years before) and the other to Alice, and that Cunningham ripped them to shreds to taunt his prisoner while denying him both a Bible and a chaplain. But Enoch Hale recorded in his diary for “25th Janr AD 1777” that he spoke with “Maj Wyllys, who has returned from Captivity at N Y—He saw my Brother’s Diaploma [sic], which t[he] Provo’ Marshal showed him who also had two letters of his one to me the other to his Commanding Officer, written after he was sentenced.”
Legend has also truncated Nathan’s “sensible and spirited” speech on the gallows. In reality, he not only delivered his famous line, he also urged his audience to be ready to meet death “in whatever form it might appear, at any time.” Captain Hale was a committed Christian, and his composure and words at the gibbet reflect that.
But it is the sentiment about giving his life for his country that has come down as quintessentially Nathan Hale.
We owe the quotation in its present form to the memoirs of Captain (later, General) William Hull. Therein he speaks of his last conversation with Nathan, when Hull tried to talk him out of spying. Hull also relates how the Continental Army learned of his death: “...an officer [British Captain John Montresor] came to our camp, under a flag of truce and informed...that Captain Hale had been...executed that morning...[Montresor] was present at his execution, and seemed touched by the circumstances....But a few persons were around...yet [Captain Hale’s] characteristic dying words were remembered. He said, ‘I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.’”
Hull wrote his memoirs decades after the Revolution. By then, American rulers had established a national government as well as local ones that were already abusing the people’s hard-won liberties. But in 1782, just six years after Captain Hale’s death, the Boston Chronicle published an article anonymously; Hull seems the likeliest author. Here he quotes Captain Hale’s last words as, “‘I am so satisfied with the cause in which I have engaged, that my only regret is that I have not more lives than one to offer in its service.’”
Obviously, the shorter version is zippier, but it also changes “cause” to “country.” Captain Hale was no nationalist. He gave his life for the cause of liberty, not for a federation of states that didn’t exist until 1789.
Indeed, the entire Revolution was intensely anarchic. It was not a battle between the British and American peoples, as so many historians pretend. Rather, taxpayers and other victims of government fought against the State. Many folks on both sides of the Atlantic craved complete freedom from all government, not just England’s; they realized that every government, whatever its form or ethnic composition, relies on violence and physical compulsion, theft, lies, and murder. And Americans certainly didn’t want a federal administration, as the Constitutional Convention’s stealth, secrecy, and dirty tricks prove. Ditto for the frequent uprisings against the national government that Constitution established (the Whiskey Rebellion, the secessionist movement in Connecticut, and later, the War Between the States). It would take pompous twits like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton to force Americans back into the shackles they had so triumphantly shucked with their Revolution.
Whatever else we debate, Captain Hale was clearly an extraordinary man who profoundly affected those around him. For example, Asher Wright suffer
ed a deep depression from which he never recovered when he heard of the Captain’s execution; as one friend put it, “Mr. Ashur [sic] Wright is now in the eighty second year of his life, and besides the infirmities of advanced age, has been affected in his mind, ever since the melancholy death of his young master, Captain Nathan Hale.” Others, too, who mentioned Asher’s hero to him noted his silence and tears or, if he spoke, his hesitant, heartbroken speech. (From that and his distinctive phrasing, whether his acquaintances reported their interviews with him or whether he himself was writing, I rather unfairly extrapolated Asher’s slow wits. But he was not illiterate, as I paint him. I have also imagined certain episodes of his friendship with Nathan, such as the latter’s saving him from a beating at school and from drowning). Boyhood friends and those who knew Nathan in college or during his brief career as schoolmaster all testify to his magnetism. It was the custom then to laud the dead, even idolize them. Still, it’s remarkable that one man provoked such adulation from all who knew him.
I have taken some liberties with the facts, as novelists do. For starters, Deacon Hale’s Christian convictions would have prevented his dallying with a lady outside of marriage, so Alice Adams was not Nathan’s half-sister. But if we wish to believe that they were engaged, we must wonder at the next part of the tale, in which the Deacon objects vehemently to their intentions though he had married Alice’s mother and given his blessing to John Hale and Sarah Adams.
Second, Alice had eight siblings instead of only one sister, as I portray. Her eyes were hazel, not blue. Like her stepbrother, she was blessed with great beauty; she was reputed to be the prettiest girl in Connecticut. Her marriage to Elijah Ripley and the birth and death of their son actually occurred, though her misery during this period is my interpretation. Her husband probably died of natural causes, not murder.
In addition, I invented Guy Daggett. Theories about how the government arrested Nathan Hale abound; most of them hinge on someone’s identifying him as he was returning to Continental lines. A fiendish play on this, and one to which both Enoch and the Deacon subscribed, has his cousin Samuel betraying him. (Deacon Hale wrote a letter, heartbreaking in its restraint, to his brother—with whom the Samuel in question had boarded—six months after the Captain’s death: “betra’d he doubtless wass by somebody he was executed about the 22nd of Sepetember Last by the Aconts we have had. A Child I sot much by but he is gone...” The biographer who found the shadow-portrait, George Dudley Seymour, collected this letter as well as Captain Hale’s army journal, surviving letters to and from him, the witness of British officers regarding his death and that of his friends regarding his life, in The Documentary Life of Nathan Hale. He printed this volume privately in the early twentieth century, so copies are hard to find.) There is no evidence that Alice Ripley joined the Captain in his spying, that the Redcoats wounded him while arresting him, or that he repeatedly escaped them, as I depict.
I’ve altered details as well, such as Benjamin Tallmadge’s membership in Linonia (he actually belonged to a rival fraternity), and the interior of the Province’s Arms, where I introduce Captain Hale to Colonel Knowlton over a bowl of punch. Though this tavern did exist and was a favorite of the Sons of Liberty, I borrowed its jungle motif from an ordinary in Vermont.
I have also played with the Hale family’s chronology: the Deacon was widowed for two years, not one, when he married Abigail Cobb Adams, and Alice’s baby died in October, not December. Additionally, I ignore Nathan Hale’s visit with his uncle in New Hampshire, during which he probably met his cousin Samuel (those who think his relative betrayed him make much of this trip). There are other instances, for which I ask indulgence.
It is tempting to speculate on what Captain Hale could have achieved had he lived. Had General Howe delayed his assault on York Island until the Captain’s information reached Continental lines, it might have diverted the debacle at Kip’s Bay on September 15, 1776. Perhaps the rebels could have repulsed the government’s forces and held New York instead of beginning their flight into Westchester, which culminated two months later in mass desertions and the horrific defeat of Ft. Washington. (That battle saw the end of Knowlton’s Rangers, in which Samuel and Joseph Hale were still serving. The Redcoats either killed or captured most of the Rangers—and the dead were the lucky ones since the captives endured the living hell of the government’s prison ships.) The war might have concluded years before Yorktown.
Ironically, when the Continentals apprehended British Major John Andre for his part in Benedict Arnold’s treason four years, almost to the day, after the Captain’s execution, they entrusted him to Benjamin Tallmadge, by then head of Continental intelligence. Andre argued that he was not a spy: he had instead entered American lines in civilian clothes under duress from Arnold. When he asked Tallmadge what treatment he could expect, the officer’s reply revealed how he still grieved for his friend: “I had a much loved classmate in Yale College by the name of Nathan Hale...[he] went into N. York, and was taken...do you remember the sequel of this story[?]” Andre protested that their situations were hardly comparable, to which Tallmadge replied that they were, indeed, similar, and similar would be his fate.
A final witness to Captain Hale’s appeal comes from Alice Ripley. She waited seven years after his death to remarry (a telling feat in an age when one often discussed the next romance with a dying spouse and wed within months or weeks of the funeral). By all accounts, she enjoyed a happy marriage with many children. She lived to be eighty-eight years old.
Still, her last words on her deathbed were, “Write to Nathan.”
Don’t miss Becky Akers’ upcoming novel,
M GENL B ARNOLD
Clem Shippen, a young in-law of Benedict Arnold, becomes a spy for the Patriots after witnessing Nathan Hale’s execution. When Arnold flees behind British lines following his treason, Clem agrees to kidnap him for delivery to the Continental Army and hanging — until she discovers an explosive secret binding her fate and that of the new country to his…
A tale of espionage, heartbreakingly close calls, and profound betrayal.
Available Autumn of 2013.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16