Nathan Hale

Nathan Hale was hanged as a spy by the British in Manhattan at twenty-one, and the sentence attributed to him on the scaffold is among the best-known in American history and is not securely documented. He was a Yale graduate and a schoolteacher in New London who joined a Connecticut regiment after Lexington, and volunteered in September 1776 when Washington asked for someone to go behind the British lines on Long Island and report on their dispositions. He had no training, no cover story beyond posing as a Dutch schoolmaster looking for work, and was known by sight to at least one Loyalist relative; he was caught within days, carrying papers, and hanged the next morning without trial, which was the ordinary treatment of spies out of uniform. The line about regretting having only one life to lose for his country comes from the diary of a British officer, John Montresor, who described the execution to American officers under a flag of truce, and from a later account by William Hull; it closely resembles a line in Addison's Cato, a play Hale knew and that was popular with the Continental officers, which is either evidence that he said it or an explanation of why someone thought he had. What is better attested is that he asked for a Bible and a clergyman and was refused both, and that his letters were destroyed in front of him. He is the official state hero of Connecticut, and the CIA keeps a copy of the MacMonnies statue at Langley. No likeness of him made from life is known to exist. He was one of six siblings who served in the Continental Army. His brother Enoch spent years trying to learn what had happened to him. The British officer who ordered the hanging, William Howe, made no record of it in his own papers.

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