The Dark Day

“’T was on a May-day of the far old yearSeventeen hundred eighty, that there fellOver the bloom and sweet life of the spring,Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon,A horror of great darkness, like the night.”WHITTIER.

“Yellow Friday,” or “the Dark Day,” in New England, was the l9th of May, 1780. For nearly a week before this day the air had been full of smoke and haze, and the sun at noontime and the full moon at night had looked like great red balls in the misty sky. Thursday night the sun went down red and threatening.

Friday morning it rose as usual, but, as the weather was overcast, it only peered now and then through the broken gray clouds. There were mutterings of thunder and a few drops of rain fell, big and heavy with black soot. Then the shower stopped and a stillness like that before a great storm settled over the land. The day, instead of growing lighter, grew darker and darker. Yet no storm came.

Strange colors edged the low-hanging clouds, red and brown and a brassy yellow, while the fields and woods below were a deep, unnatural green. The white roads and houses and the white church steeples turned yellow. Even the clean silver in the houses looked like brass. These colors foreboded an eclipse of the sun; yet there was no eclipse.

By noon it was as dark as early night, and the birds sang their evening songs and disappeared. Some of the smaller ones, frightened and fluttering, flew into the houses or dashed themselves against the window panes. Chickens went to roost, the cows came home from pasture, and the frogs croaked in the ponds.

Men planting corn in the fields stopped work because they could not see the corn as it dropped. Women at home lighted candles to find their way about the house. No one could see the time of day by the clocks, and white paper looked like black velvet. Many people were terrified and wondered what was coming. Some expected a great tornado; others said a comet was due and feared it portended some great calamity, perhaps a disaster to the armies in the field who were fighting England in the war of the Revolution. Still others, more ignorant and superstitious, were sure that the end of the world had come, that the last trumpet would soon sound and the dead be raised. One woman sent a messenger in haste to her pastor to ask what this dreadful darkness meant, but he only replied that he was “as much in the dark” as she.

Several gentlemen, who happened to be at the house of Reverend Manasseh Cutler, the minister in Ipswich, Massachusetts, have left us a record of their observations that day.

Mr. Cutler wrote in his journal:—

“This morning Mr. Lathrop of Boston called upon me. Soon after he came in I observed a remarkable cloud coming up and it appeared dark. The cloud was unusually brassy with little or no rain. Mr. Sewell and Colonel Wigglesworth came in. The darkness increased and by eleven o’clock it was so dark as to make it necessary to light candles ... at half-past eleven in a room with three large windows, southeast and south, could not read a word in large print close to windows .... About twelve it lighted up a little, then grew more dark.... At one o’clock very dark.... The windows being still open, a candle cast a shade so well defined on the wall that profiles were taken with as much ease as they could have been in the night. ... We dined about two, the windows all open and two candles burning on the table. In the time of the greatest darkness some of the dunghill fowls went to roost, cocks crowed in answer to one another, woodcocks, which are night birds, whistled as they do only in the dark, frogs peeped, in short there was the appearance of midnight at noonday.... At four o’clock it grew more light.... Between three and four we were out and perceived a strong sooty smell. Some of the company were confident a chimney in the neighborhood must be burning; others conjectured the smell was more like that of burnt leaves.”

These gentlemen went over to the tavern near by and found the people there greatly excited and tried to reassure them. They proved to them from the black ashes of leaves, which had settled like a scum on the rainwater standing in tubs, that the darkness was not supernatural, but probably came from the burning of forests far away.

Dr. Ezra Stiles, who was then president of Yale College in New Haven, gave the same explanation. He says:—

“The woods about Ticonderoga [in New York] and eastward over to New Hampshire and westward into New York and the Jerseys were all on fire for a week before this Darkness and the smoke in the wilderness almost to suffocation. No rain since last fall, the woods excessively dry.... Such a profusion of settlers pushing back into the wilderness were everywhere clearing land and burning brush. This set the forests afire far beyond intention, so as to burn houses and fences.... The woods burned extensively for a week before the nineteenth of May and the wind all the while northerly.”

A quaint old ballad, said to have been written about that time, gives a description of this Dark Day:—

[Image: From Harper’s weekly, Copyright 1893. Copyright Harper and Brothers. An Old Connecticut Inn, 1790.]

“The Whip-poor-will sung notes most shrill,Doves to their cots retreated,And all the fowls, excepting owls,Upon their roosts were seated.“The herds and flocks stood still as stocks,Or to their folds were hieing,Men young and old, dared not to scoldAt wives and children crying.“The day of doom, most thought was come,Throughout New England’s borders,The people scared, felt unpreparedTo obey the dreadful orders.”

“The Whip-poor-will sung notes most shrill,Doves to their cots retreated,And all the fowls, excepting owls,Upon their roosts were seated.

“The herds and flocks stood still as stocks,Or to their folds were hieing,Men young and old, dared not to scoldAt wives and children crying.

“The day of doom, most thought was come,Throughout New England’s borders,The people scared, felt unpreparedTo obey the dreadful orders.”

In Connecticut the legislature was in session at Hartford. It was like night in the streets of this city and candles were burning in the windows of all the houses. Men grew anxious and uneasy. As the darkness became deeper, the House of Representatives adjourned, finding it impossible to transact any business. Soon after, a similar motion for adjournment was made in the Senate, or Council, as it was then called. By this time faces could scarcely be distinguished across the room and a dread had fallen on the assembly; “men’s hearts failing them for fear and for looking after those things which were coming.”

Then up rose Honorable Abraham Davenport, a judge of Fairfield County and councilor from Stamford, a stern and upright man, strict in the discharge of his duty.

“I am against adjournment,” he said. “The Day of Judgment is either approaching or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish, therefore, that candles may be brought.”

His strong words held the assembly. Its members rallied from their fears and, following his example, turned steadily to the transaction of the necessary business of the hour.

“And there he stands in memory to this day,Erect, self-poised, a rugged face half seenAgainst a background of unnatural dark,A witness to the ages as they passThat simple duty hath no place for fear.”WHITTIER.

On the Green of the old town of Lebanon a mound is shown to-day on the spot where a large brick oven stood in the winter of 1781—an oven in which bread was baked for the soldiers of the American Revolutionary Army. These soldiers, who might have been seen almost any day that winter in their gay uniforms, crossing and recrossing the Green, or gathered in groups about the oven, were, strangely enough, not American soldiers, but French hussars belonging to the Duke de Lauzun’s famous “Legion of Horse.”

France, being herself at war with England, had recently sent an army to America to help the colonies in their struggle against a common enemy, and the French commander-in-chief, the Count de Rochambeau, wrote from Newport, Rhode Island, to Governor Trumbull, of Connecticut, asking if the governor could provide winter quarters in Lebanon for a part of his forces—for the Duke de Lauzun and some of his Legion of Horse.

Governor Trumbull’s home was in Lebanon. His house was near the village Green, and close beside it stood his store, which, by this time, had become famous under the name of the “War Office,” because in this store the governor and the Council of Safety used to meet and talk over the important business of the war, and what Connecticut could do, as her share, to help the American army.

There is a story that Washington used to say when he needed more supplies, “Let us see what Brother Jonathan can do for us,” and that this nickname, which is now used for the United States, belonged originally to Jonathan Trumbull. It is true that Washington often turned to him for help. He had approved the application of the Count de Rochambeau to Governor Trumbull for winter quarters for the French troops. But long before the arrival of these soldiers there had been busy times in Lebanon. Provisions of all kinds were brought from all over the state to the governor’s store to be packed and sent off to the troops in the field. The governor was usually to be found there himself, weighing and measuring, packing boxes and barrels, dealing out powder and lead, starting off trains of loaded wagons and often large herds of cattle to be driven all the way to the army at the front. Messengers came and went, flying on horseback along the country roads, and sometimes they sat on the counter in the store, swinging their spurred boots, waiting for the governor to give them their orders. A piece of that counter, with the marks of their spurs in the soft wood, can be seen now in the rooms of the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford. Although there were dark days during the war when the state’s treasury was exhausted and the people discouraged and the demands of the army hard to meet, yet

“Governor Trumbull never quailedIn his store on Lebanon hill.”

Somehow or other the supplies were found and little Connecticut became known as the “Provision State.” Washington spoke of her governor as “the first of patriots.” This is one of Governor Trumbull’s proclamations to the men of Connecticut:—

“Be roused and alarmed to stand forth in our glorious cause. Join yourselves to one of the companies now ordered to New York, or form yourselves into distinct companies and choose captains forthwith;... march on; play the man for God and for the cities of our God, and may the God of the armies of Israel be your leader.”

Lebanon was then on one of the main roads through New England, and many distinguished men stopped there at different times to see the governor. Washington came, and Lafayette, the young French nobleman whom Washington loved almost as a son, and who is, perhaps, “nearer to the hearts of the Americans than any man not of their own people.” Lafayette holds this place in their affections because, before the French Government decided to send help to the colonies, he “came from France of his own accord and brought with him the sympathy of the French people,” among whom also new ideas of liberty were stirring.

“From the moment I first heard of America,” he said, “I began to love her; from the moment I understood that she was struggling for her liberties, I burned to shed my best blood in her cause.”

Lafayette’s countrymen, who spent the winter of 1781 in Lebanon, were the gallant soldiers of France. Their leader, the Duke de Lauzun, was a gay French nobleman, very handsome, very fond of good living, brilliant and witty as well as brave; nobody like him or his men had ever been seen before in Lebanon. The people of that quiet little town opened their eyes in surprise when the dashing French hussars, in their tall black caps and their brilliantly braided jackets, came galloping in over the muddy country roads. Governor Trumbull had made provision for them. Barracks were built for some on a farm which he owned just outside the town, and others camped on the village Green.

With their arrival life in Lebanon changed. At daybreak the French bugles blew the reveille. There were parades and reviews, there were balls and parties. Washington held a review of Lauzun’s Legion when he passed through the place one day in March. The corps was finely equipped. Its horses were good, its men brave and handsome, and their uniforms vivid and trim. The hussars wore sky-blue jackets braided with white, yellow breeches, high boots, and tall caps with a white plume at the side. They made a great impression on the country people, who had seen their own men, dressed in homespun clothes, mount their rough farmhorses and ride away, just as they were, to the war. The duke himself was friendly and pleasant and popular with his new neighbors. He lived in a house lent him by David Trumbull, the governor’s son.

[Image: The Marquis of Lafayette. This statue was presented to France by the School Children of the Unites States]

Once, early in the winter, two distinguished visitors from the French army came to see him, the Marquis de Chastellux, who wrote a book of “Travels in North America,” and the Baron de Montesquieu; and he gave a dinner for them to which he invited Governor Trumbull. In the marquis’s book we can read a description of it and of Governor Trumbull as he appeared to these French gentlemen from the Old World.

“On returning from the chase,” says de Chastellux (he had been out hunting squirrels), “I dined at the Duke de Lauzun’s with Governor Trumbull. This good methodical governor is seventy years old. His whole life is consecrated to business, which he passionately loves, whether it is important or not. He has all the simplicity and pedantry of a great magistrate of a small republic, and invariably says he will consider, that he must refer to his council. He wears the antique dress of the first settlers in this colony.” Then the marquis goes on to tell how the small old man, in his single-breasted, drab-colored coat, tight knee-breeches, and muslin wrist-ruffles, walked up to the table where twenty hussar officers were waiting and with “formal stiffness pronounced in a loud voice a long prayer in the form, of a Benedicite.” The French officers must have been surprised; they were not used to simple country manners and to grace before meat on all occasions, but they were too polite and too well trained to laugh. “Twenty amens issued at once from the midst of forty moustaches,” says the marquis, and in spite of the fun he makes of the old Puritan governor’s stiff manners, we feel in reading the story that he fully appreciates his sterling good qualities.

Some of these pleasure-loving French gentlemen met a strange and sad fate, years later, in the terrible days of the French Revolution. The Duke de Lauzun was beheaded in Paris in 1793, his long and adventurous life “ended with a little spurt of blood under the knife of the guillotine”; and Lafayette spent five years in an Austrian prison.

There is another story of old Lebanon which is connected with the visit of the French soldiers. The French commander-in-chief, the Count de Rochambeau, had given to Madam Faith Trumbull, the governor’s wife, a beautiful scarlet cloak, and one Sabbath day she appeared in the governor’s pew in the Lebanon meeting-house wearing the French general’s handsome gift. Now, in those hard times contributions for the army were often collected after service on Sundays, and the people not only gave money, but whatever else they could spare, Indian corn, flax, wood, shoes and stockings, hats and coats. Quietly the governor’s wife rose in her seat and, taking the scarlet cloak from her shoulders, carried it down to the front and laid it with the other gifts. Later, it was cut into narrow bands and used to make red stripes on the soldiers’ uniforms.

All that is left of those stirring times in Lebanon to-day is the little “War Office,”—restored and kept as a memorial of the Revolution,—and the mound on the Green where the brick oven stood in which bread was baked for the French soldiers who fought for American independence.

“To drum-beat and heart-beatA soldier marches by;There is color in his cheek,There is courage in his eye,Yet to drum-beat and heart-beatIn a moment he must die.”

The story of Nathan Hale is the story of a short life and a brave death. Connecticut has written his name on her Roll of Honor—the name of a man who was executed as a spy in the War of the Revolution. He was born in Coventry, Tolland County, on the 6th of June, 1755. His father, Deacon Richard Hale, who, as well as his mother, Elizabeth Strong, was descended from the earliest settlers of Massachusetts, had moved to Coventry, Connecticut, and had bought a large farm there. The children were brought up strictly, as they were in all New England families in those days, and no doubt there was plenty of hard work for them on the farm, but, as there were ten or twelve of them, we may be sure there was plenty of play, too.

It is said that Nathan was not a strong child at first, but grew vigorous with outdoor life; that “he was fond of running, leaping, wrestling, firing at a mark, throwing, lifting, playing ball,” and used to tell the girls of Coventry he could do anything but spin. Stories told of him say that when he was older he could “put a hand on a fence as high as his head and clear it easily at a bound”; and that the marks of “a leap which he made upon the Green in New Haven were long preserved and pointed out.” One of his comrades in the army wrote of him, “His bodily agility was remarkable. I have seen him follow a football and kick it over the tops of the trees in the Bowery at New York (an exercise which he was fond of).”

But he was fond of study, as well as of play, and he must have done well at the Coventry School, for his parents determined to send him to college. He was fitted for Yale by the minister in Coventry, as there were then no preparatory schools such as we have now. When he was fourteen he entered Yale College at New Haven with his brother Enoch, who was a year and a half older than he. They were known in college as Hale Primus and Hale Secundus.

At Yale Nathan studied well and took a good stand. He became, too, one of the most popular men in his class. He made many friends, and their letters to him show us how much they loved and admired him. At one time he was president, or “chancellor” as it was called, of the Linonia Debating Society; at another he was its secretary, or “scribe,” and the minutes which he kept then can be seen now, in his own handwriting, in the Yale Library.

He was nearly six feet tall, broad-shouldered, wit blue eyes and brown hair, a pleasant voice, and a manner that was both attractive and dignified. A gentleman in New Haven who knew him well said of him, “That man is a diamond of the first water and calculated to excel in any station he assumes.”

After he graduated in 1773, he taught school for a few months in East Haddam. The country schools were very simple in those days. There were few books; a Psalter and a spelling-book were the most important ones used. There were no blackboards, and the teacher set “copies” on paper, and read out the “sums” in arithmetic, and often the whole school studied aloud. One of Nathan Hale’s pupils in East Haddam, who lived to be an old lady, said of him as a teacher, “Everybody loved him, he was so sprightly, intelligent, and kind and withal so handsome.”

He was soon offered a better position in New London as the master of a new school in which he was expected to teach Latin as well as English. He wrote in one of his letters from New London:—

“I am happily situated here. I love my employment and find many friends among strangers. I have a school of thirty-two boys, half Latin, the rest English. In addition to this I have kept, during the summer, a morning school, between the hours of five and seven, of about twenty young ladies.”

The schoolhouses in East Haddam and New London where Nathan Hale taught have been restored and are kept now as memorials of him.

While he was teaching in New London the war with England broke out. There was great excitement when the news came of the battle of Lexington (April 19, 1775), and a public meeting was held at which he is reported to have said, “Let us march immediately and never lay down our arms until we obtain our independence.” He could not march immediately himself, for he was teaching school, but when summer came he entered the army as a lieutenant, and was soon made a captain. In September he went with some of the Connecticut troops to join Washington’s army which was besieging Boston. The American flag was not adopted until the next year, and as the colors appointed for his regiment, the Seventh Connecticut, were blue, they marched away from New London under a blue banner. His camp-basket, a powder-horn made by him, and his army diary are still in existence, and can be seen in the rooms of the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford.

Here are some of the entries in his diary that fall and winter:—

“Friday 29th (Sept.)—Marched for Cambridge. Arrived 3 o’clock, and encamped on the foot of Winter Hill.

“Sat. 30th—Considerable firing upon Roxbury side in the forenoon.

“October 9th, Monday—Morning clear and pleasant but cold. Exercised men 5 o’clock, one hour.

“Sabbath, 22d—Mounted picket guard. Had charge of the advance picket.

“Monday 6th (November)—It is of the utmost importance that an officer should be anxious to know his duty, but of greater that he should carefully perform what he does know.

“Tuesday, 7th—Left picket 10 o’clock.... Rain pretty hard most of the day. Studied the best method of forming a regiment for a review, manner of arranging the companies, also of marching round the reviewing officer.

“A man ought never to lose a moment’s time. If he put off a thing from one minute to the next his reluctance is but increased.

“Wednesday, 8th—Cleaned my gun, played some football and some checkers.

“22d, Friday—Some shot from the enemy.

“Feb. 14, 1776, Wednesday—Last night a party of Regulars made an attempt upon Dorchester.... The Guard house was set on fire but extinguished.”

During this time many of the soldiers became discouraged with the hard work and poor food and pay, and we learn from his diary that Captain Hale offered to give the men in his company his own pay if they would stay on for a month longer. The diary and all his letters are full of courage and hopefulness.

In March, the British army, which had been shut up so long in Boston unable to get away by land, took ship and sailed for Halifax. Washington believed the next point of attack would be New York and he moved his army there to protect the city. So Hale’s regiment marched back to New London and embarked in transports for New York. The last six months of his short life were passed in and near New York.

The spring was spent in fortifying the city, and in June Captain Hale wrote to his brother Enoch, “The army is every day improving in discipline and it is hoped will soon be strong enough to meet the enemy at any kind of play. My company, which was small at first, is increased to eighty, and a sergeant is recruiting, who I hope has got the other ten which completes the company.”

When the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, the soldiers received the news with great enthusiasm, and felt that they had at last an independent country of their own to fight for and, if need be, to die for.

The British army arrived and encamped on Staten Island. It was a finely equipped force of twenty-five thousand men with a fleet of ships to support it, and was in every respect better and stronger than the half-trained militia that made up most of the American army. The battle of Long Island, late in the summer, ended in a defeat for the Americans, and Washington’s skillful retreat at night across the East River from Long Island to New York was all that prevented a greater disaster. Many of the men in Captain Hale’s company had been recruited along the Connecticut shores, and there is no doubt that these sailors under his command were very useful that night in getting the troops safely back to New York.

After this the condition of things became very serious, for the British had got possession of Brooklyn Heights, which commanded the city over East River, and they might cross at any time and attack it. Washington ordered companies of rangers, or scouts, to be formed to keep a sharp watch on the enemy’s movements, and Captain Hale accepted an appointment in this body of picked men. It was commanded by Colonel Knowlton, who was also a Connecticut man and had been a ranger himself in the old French-and-Indian War. He was a brave officer, and when he lay dying in the battle of Harlem Heights he said, “I do not value my life if we do but get the day.” Captain Hale must have been glad to serve under such a leader.

Meanwhile, Washington had moved the greater part of his army outside New York to avoid being shut up in the city as the British had been in Boston, and was anxiously expecting an attack. But none came, and his suspense grew greater and greater as time passed and he got no information as to what would happen. “Everything depends on obtaining intelligence of the enemy’s motions,” he wrote to his officers, “I was never more uneasy than on account of my want of knowledge,” and he begged them to send some one into the enemy’s camp in disguise to find out what their plans were, and when and where they would attack.

It was not easy to get any one to go, for it meant being a spy. Spies are necessary in all wars because the commanding general must have information about the enemy’s movements. But soldiers hate a spy, who comes into their camp as a friend when he is really an enemy, and honorable men do not like to do this. It is usually done by men who care most of all for the money it brings. The service, too, is so dangerous that the general may not command it, he may only accept it when it is volunteered. If a spy is caught within the enemy’s lines no mercy is shown him; his trial is swift and his death certain; in those days the penalty was hanging.

This time a man of intelligence was needed and Colonel Knowlton explained the matter to some of his officers. One of them is said to have replied: “I am willing to be shot, but not to be hung.” But there was another who looked at it differently, and this was Captain Nathan Hale. It seemed to him that if his country called it was his duty to go, at the sacrifice, if necessary, of both his honor and his life. And the more he thought of it the more sure he was that it is the motive with which a deed is done that makes it good or evil, and that a service which his country demanded could not be dishonorable.

He asked advice from his friends, especially from Captain William Hull, of his old regiment, who had also been one of his fellow students at college. Captain Hull urged him strongly not to do it. He reminded him how men feel about a spy and told him, too, that it was doubtful if, with his frank, open character, he could ever succeed in deceiving people and pretending to be what he was not. He begged him for the sake of his family and his friends to give it up because it might end for him in a disgraceful death.

Captain Hale replied, “I am fully sensible of the consequences of discovery and capture in such a situation. But for a year I have been in the army and have not rendered any material service while receiving a compensation for which I make no return. Yet I am not influenced by the hope of promotion or reward. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary. But,” he added, taking his friend’s hand affectionately, “I will reflect, and do nothing but what duty demands.”

He decided to go, and left the American camp the second week in September. He was to cross to Long Island and approach the British position from the rear, and he was to go as a schoolmaster looking for employment, which was the best disguise he could assume as he had once been a schoolmaster and might easily pass for one again. Just what his orders and instructions were we do not know, as the service was a secret one.

His faithful sergeant, Stephen Hempstead, of New London, went with him part of the way. On account of British ships cruising in the East Elver and in the Sound, they were obliged to go as far as Norwalk, Connecticut, before it was safe to cross. Hempstead tells us that at Norwalk Captain Hale changed his uniform for a plain suit of citizen’s brown clothes, with a round, broad-brimmed hat, took off his silver shoe-buckles, and left all his papers behind except his college diploma, which he thought might be useful. Then he said good-bye to Hempstead, telling him to wait for him there, and an armed sloop commanded by Captain Pond—probably Charles Pond, of Milford, a fellow officer in Hale’s regiment—carried him over to Huntington on Long Island.

Hempstead waited, but Captain Hale never returned. The next news his friends received was the news of his capture and execution as a spy in the British camp.

We shall probably never know just what happened after he left Huntington, what adventures he met with or what narrow escapes he had. About the time that he crossed the Sound, Sir William Howe, the British general, moved over to New York and took possession of the city, and Washington’s suspense ended. Perhaps Captain Hale did not learn of this until it was too late to return, or, perhaps, knowing it, he chose to go on and finish the work he had begun and take back information of the new position of the enemy.

We know that he passed safely all through the British camps, both on Long Island and in New York, that he did his work thoroughly and well, made plans and drawings of the new fortifications in the city, and was only arrested on the last night, when the work was done and he was ready to return. Just where he was when he was captured we do not know. From the new line of intrenchments made by the British across the city he could have looked northward over to the American camp on Harlem Heights, scarcely a mile away, and could almost have seen the tents of his own company of rangers. Perhaps he made a quick dash for freedom across this short mile and was seized then. Or, perhaps, in the excitement of a great fire which raged all through the lower part of New York City on that day, he may have got safely back to Long Island and have been arrested as he tried to pass the sentries on the outposts. An old tradition says that he had gone as far as Huntington and was taken there. We cannot tell. But just as the difficult task was over, the sudden disappointment came.

The papers and drawings found on him told the story only too plainly, and he was carried before Sir William Howe. When he was questioned he at once gave his name, his rank in the American army, and his reasons for coming inside the British lines. No trial was necessary, and General Howe immediately signed the warrant for his execution on the next morning, Sunday, September 22, at eleven o’clock.

He was handed over to the provost marshal, William Cunningham, a coarse and brutal man who has left a shocking record of cruelty to his prisoners. Hale asked if he might have a minister with him, but Cunningham refused. Then he asked for a Bible, but that, too, was forbidden. How he spent the night we cannot tell; part of it, no doubt, in prayer, for that was the habit of his life.

He could not want to die. He was young and strong, just twenty-one, hardly more than a boy, and life was all before him. He had friends who loved him; he was engaged to be married; he had every prospect of success and happiness. But he had deliberately counted the cost before he undertook the dangerous service, and the training of all his life, at home, at college, and in the army, had taught him not only to do and to dare, but, what is better still, to accept defeat bravely.

The next morning, while the last fatal preparations were being made, an aide-de-camp of General Howe’s, a brave officer of Engineers who was stationed near the place, asked that the prisoner be allowed to wait in his tent. “Captain Hale entered,” he says; “he was calm and bore himself with gentle dignity in the consciousness of rectitude and high intentions. He asked for writing materials, which I furnished him; he wrote two letters, one to his mother, and one to a brother officer.”

These letters Cunningham destroyed, saying that “the rebels should never know they had a man who could die with so much firmness.”

There were few people present at his death. When he reached the foot of the tree where the sentence was to be executed, he was asked if he had anything to say, any confession to make. He told again who he was and why he came, and added quietly, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Then the noose was adjusted, and the cruel end came quickly.

These last words of Nathan Hale have been repeated again and again since that time. They have been cut in bronze and in marble, they have been taught in our schools. They are noble words, because they are simple and brave and unselfish. He could have had no idea that they would ever be heard beyond the little group of people about him when he died, but it so happened that General Howe had occasion to send a letter to Washington late that evening about an exchange of prisoners, and the bearer of the letter was Captain Montresor, the officer in whose tent Nathan Hale had spent the last hour of his life. Inside the American tines Montresor met Captain Hull, Hale’s intimate friend, the man who had warned Hale so earnestly of the fate that might be his. To him Montresor told the tragic story of that morning and repeated the words that have since become famous.

[Image: Courtesy of Mr. George D. Seymour. Nathan Hale. The statue stands in front of old Connecticut Hall, Yale University. Nathan Hale’s room was in this building.]

Years afterward a monument was put up in Coventry to the memory of Captain Nathan Hale. There are several statues of him in different places; there is a fountain with his name upon it in Norwalk where he crossed the Sound, and another at Huntington, Long Island; there is an old fort named for him on the shore of New Haven Harbor; but the memorial which comes closest to our hearts is the little stone in the old Coventry graveyard, set there in memory of him by his own family. This is the inscription cut into it:—

“Durable stone preserve the monumental record. Nathan Hale, Esq., a Capt. in the army of the United States, who was born June 6th, 1755, and received the first honors of Yale College, Sept., 1773, resigned his life a sacrifice to his Country’s liberty at New York, Sept. 22d, 1778. Etatis 22d.”

By an unknown poet of 1776

The breezes went steadily thro’ the tall pines,A-saying “oh, hu-sh!” a-saying “oh, hu-sh!”As stilly stole by a bold legion of horse,For Hale in the bush; for Hale in the bush.

“Keep still!” said the thrush as she nestled her young,In a nest by the road; in a nest by the road;“For the tyrants are near, and with them appear,What bodes us no good; what bodes us no good.”

The brave captain heard it, and thought of his home,In a cot by the brook; in a cot by the brook.With mother and sister and memories dear,He so gayly forsook; he so gayly forsook.

Cooling shades of the night were coming apace,The tattoo had beat; the tattoo had beat.The noble one sprang from his dark hiding-place,To make his retreat; to make his retreat.

He warily trod on the dry rustling leaves,As he pass’d thro’ the wood; as he pass’d thro’ the wood;And silently gain’d his rude launch on the shore,As she play’d with the flood; as she play’d with the flood.

The guard of the camp, on that dark, dreary night,Had a murderous will; had a murderous will.They took him and bore him afar from the shore,To a hut on the hill; to a hut on the hill.

No mother was there, nor a friend who could cheer,In that little stone cell; in that little stone cell.But he trusted in love, from his father above,In his heart all was well; in his heart all was well.

An ominous owl with his solemn bass voice,Sat moaning hard by; sat moaning hard by.“The tyrant’s proud minions most gladly rejoice,For he must soon die; for he must soon die.”

The brave fellow told them, no thing he restrain’d,The cruel gen’ral; the cruel gen’ral;His errand from camp, of the ends to be gain’d,And said that was all; and said that was all.

They took him and bound him and bore him away,Down the hill’s grassy side; down the hill’s grassy side.’Twas there the base hirelings in royal array,His cause did deride; his cause did deride.

Five minutes were given, short moments, no more,For him to repent; for him to repent;He pray’d for his mother, he ask’d not another;To Heaven he went; to Heaven he went.

The faith of a martyr, the tragedy shew’d,As he trod the last stage; as he trod the last stage.And Britons will shudder at gallant Bale’s blood,As his words do presage; as his words do presage.

“Thou pale king of terrors, thou life’s gloomy foe,Go frighten the slave; go frighten the slave;Tell tyrants, to you, their allegiance they owe.No fears for the brave; no fears for the brave.”

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