Even though he failed on the first big job of his life, Nathan Hale established his identity and the world remembers who he was. He did it with a few simple words. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ VOCABULARY Look up each word before you read the following story. AFFIRM ANECDOTES CAMPAIGN DECLAIMED EVACUATED IRE REMINISCENCES SCUTTLE SIEGE &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& NATHAN HALE by NANCY HALE "The boy was only a couple of years out of New Haven' when he joined up. He'd hardly got started. He'd been teaching school, you know, up at East Haddam and then down in New London, and it looked as if he was shaping up into a fine teacher. He'd made a lot of friends everywhere he went, and the girls always liked him. They say he was a goodlooking boy. "Then the war came. Things had looked bad to us Americans for a long time, but when the first gun was fired on that April day' it seemed to light a sudden strong ire in everyone's heart. It seemed to call out-Americans!' The boy's brothers, John and Joseph, volun- teered first off. It was a patriotic family-the father'd been a Deputy in the old Connecticut Assembly. The boy himself had signed up with the school for a year. He wasn't the kind to let people down, but he did write and ask to be released from his contract two weeks early. He joined up in July, as a Lieutenant in Webb's Seventh Connecticut. "Well, you know how things went after that. The boy was in camp up near Boston all winter. It wasn't an exciting siege. But there was a lot to do getting the men to reenlist. Most of their terms of enlistment ran out in December. The General was worried about it. Our boy offered the men in his company his own pay for a month if they'd stay that much longer. Anyway the siege was maintained. "He got a leave in the Winter and went home. Maybe that was when he got engaged. Alicia Adams. A lovely girl; they would have made a handsome couple. When Spring came the enemy evacuated Boston and our army went down to New York, where real trouble was threatening. The boy'd been made a captain by that time. He was twenty-one years old. "Our Long Island campaign was just this side of disastrous. Morale was none too good, afterwards. I don't suppose the General was in a worse spot in the whole war than he was for those three weeks right after The Battle of Long Island. There we lay, facing the enemy across the East River, and no way of knowing what they had up their sleeve. Surprise was what we feared. The answer to that was companies of rangers, to scout around and find out what was up. Knowlton's Rangers was organized, and our boy switched over to it. He wanted action, you see. "But the rangers weren't enough. The General wanted to know two things: when the enemy was planning to attack, and where. No- body could tell him. The General let it be known that he'd welcome volunteers to spy. "Now, people didn't take kindly to the word spy around these parts. It didn't mean excitement or glamour or any of those things. It meant something degrading. It was a job they gave to bums, who didn't care. But the General said he wanted a spy. Well, our boy volunteered. His friends tried to talk him out of it. They spoke of the indignity; they also told him he'd make a terrible spy-frank, open boy like him. "But his idea was, the job was necessary. That was the great thing. Its being necessary seemed to him to make it honorable. He was sent through the enemy lines dressed up like a Dutch schoolmaster. "He didn't make such a bad spy, after all. He got what he went after, and hid the drawings in his shoes. He was on his way back, crossing their lines, when they caught him. They found the information on him. He admitted he, was over there to spy. You know what a spy gets. They hanged him in the morning. He wrote some letters to the family at home, but they were destroyed before his eyes, they say. But in his last moment, they let him say what he wanted to. And later one of their officers told one of our officers what he'd said. "There he was, with the noose around his neck. He hadn't got much done. He'd got caught on the first big job of his life. He wasn't going to marry Alicia Adams, nor to have any children, nor to do any more teaching, nor to finish fighting this war. He stood there in the morning air, and he spoke and said who he was, his commission and all. And then he added, 'I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.'" You could tell the story like that, simply, because it is a simple story, and when you'd finished you would have told about all there is to tell about Nathan Hale. There isn't even a contempo- rary picture of him. Most of the friends to whom he wrote didn't keep his letters. He was just a young American who'd gone to war, who'd lived for twenty-one ordinary enough years before-in the day's work -be died for his country. One of his brothers, Enoch, was my greatgreat-grandfather. When I was a child there was a small bronze statue, about four feet high, that stood in the corner of the living room at home. It was just about my height, but it wasn't another child. It was a young man, with his wrists tied behind him and his ankles bound. I passed it several times a day every day of my childhood. Sometimes I used to touch the bronze face. It was a small-scale replica of the Nathan Hale statue at Yale. I must have been told his story, because I always knew it. But my father never went on about it, if you know what I mean. There his story was, for what it might mean to you. Some of my other ancestors were the kind of characters that have a whole legend of anecdotes surrounding them, pointed, stirring, or uproarious. But the young man with his hands bound had died at twenty-one, a patriot, as stark and all alone and anecdoteless as young men of twenty-one must be. Once I was set upon the knees of an old gentleman whose grandmother had been Alicia Adams. She had married and had children, and lived to be eighty-eight, a pretty, sparkling old lady. And when she died she said, "Where is Nathan?" But about the young man himself there were no family reminiscences, no odd little jokes, no tales beyond the short, plain story of his life and death. He had had no time to do anything memorable but die. Nevertheless. . . . It was my job as a child to fill the kitchen scuttle with coal from the cellar. I was not a brave child, and to me the long comers of the cellar seemed menacing and full of queer, moving shadows-wolves? robbers? I cannot remember when I first started taking the thought of Nathan Hale down cellar with me, for a shield and a buckler.3 I thought, "If he could be hanged, I can go down cellar." The thing was, he was no impossible hero; he was a member of the family, and he was young too. He was a hero you could take along with you into the cellar of a New England farmhouse. You felt he'd be likely to say, "Aren't any wolves or robbers back there that I can see." Well, I am grown up now and I know very little more about Nathan Hale than I did then. There are, of course, a mass of details about his short life. A devoted scholar named George Dudley Seymour has spent years in collecting all that can be collected about him. There's a wartime diary. They know his friends. He played football and checkers at camp. He drank wine at Brown's Tavern and cider at Stone's. But when you add all things you only affirm the peculiar simplicity these little of the story. Hale is a symbol of all the young American men who, fight and die for us. Partly he is a symbol because he was the first of our heroes in the first of our own wars. He was the first to show the world what Americans are made of. The reason they destroyed his letters home at the time of his death was, they said, so that "the rebels should not know they have a man who can die so firmly." He showed them. He is no Washington or Jefferson although he ranks with the heroes. Washington was a great general and Jefferson was a genius. All of our nation's heroes are great men who are great by their minds and by their deeds and by their careers. All except Hale. His special gift to his country, and to us who love that country, was the manner of his death. He is the young American. He is the patron of all the young Americans who have grown up as he did in quiet self-respecting families; who have gone to college and done well, and had fun too; who have started out along their life's careers, well spoken of, promising; and then broken off to join their country's forces in time of war without an instant's hesitation; knowing what must be done and who must do it. He was no different than they. He was an American boy. Everything that can be said of them can be said of him. In the letters of his friends written about him after his death, certain words keep cropping up. They sound oddly familiar. "Promising . . . patriotic............ generous . . . modest . . . high-spirited............devoted . - ." His friends fitted the words to Hale. They fit Americans. Nothing was more American in Hale than his taking on the duties that led to his death. It was a dirty job, spying. Nobody wanted it. He took it. There's something about that, taking on a dirty job that's got to be done, that rings a bell. It's an American custom of American heroes, He wasn't a remarkably articulate boy. His letters are nothing special. He just jotted things in his diary. But he because the spokesman for young American fighting men who have to die for their country. He chanced to say the thing they think; the thing they mean, when there's not even a split second to think. He stood there at Turtle Bay on Manhattan Island. Don't think he declaimed. He wasn't that kind. He had those few moments, and he was thinking about all the different things that were ending for him. He said and I think it was more like a remark: "I only regret..." ************************************************************ T H E E N D ************************************************************