Nathan Hale: Failed Spy, Superb Patriot

In the pantheon of revolutionary heroes there stands a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed young man, a handsome former schoolteacher, fair of skin and athletic in build, full of hope and promise, fated for an untimely death. He was Nathan Hale.

A beautiful death, earned by virtue. Born in Connecticut but forever tied by history to Long Island, Hale was hanged by the British as a spy at the tender age of 21, left grotesquely suspended for three days as a lesson to the hated rebels, then cut down and cast into an unmarked grave somewhere on Manhattan Island.

Hale may not have been a very good spy, but he gets high marks for attitude. But the story of Nathan Hale has frustrating gaps, like a jigsaw puzzle with key pieces missing. Did Hale really say, ``I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,'' just before the noose tightened around his neck? Was he captured in Huntington or in New York? Did he participate in a plot to burn down New York City?

Here is what is known. Born June 6, 1755, at Coventry, Conn., Hale grew up with eight brothers and sisters on a prosperous 240-acre farm. The Hales were ardent Patriots, and six of the boys took part in the Revolution. Nathan studied at Yale College, graduating in 1773. For the next two years he was a schoolteacher, but in July, 1775, he accepted a commission as a lieutenant in the Continental Army.

For more than a year he soldiered without distinction. He was at the siege of Boston until the British evacuated in March, 1776. He also was present at the Battle of Long Island that August, as a captain, though he engaged in no fighting himself. Hale felt frustrated, wanting to make a more significant contribution. He was about to get his chance.

After losing the Battle of Long Island on Aug. 27 and being forced back to New York, Gen. George Washington ranged his forces in Manhattan from the Battery to Harlem Heights. But he was in the dark about what the enemy, dug in on western Long Island from the Narrows north to Astoria, would do next. He asked Hale's regimental commander to find among his officers someone to volunteer as a spy.

Hale was fired up by the possibility. He immediately went to see a close friend, Capt. William Hull, who related what happened in a memoir published in 1848. Hale was excited but Hull tried to talk him out of it, telling Hale that his nature was ``too frank and open for deceit and disguise . . . I ended by saying that should he undertake the enterprise, his short, bright career, would close with an ignominious death.''

``I am fully sensible of the consequences of discovery and capture in such a situation,'' Hale responded. ``But for a year I have been attached to the army, and have not rendered any material service, while receiving a compensation, for which I make no return.''

Hale's last words to Hull were: ``I will reflect, and do nothing but what duty demands.''

Accompanied by Sgt. Stephen Hempstead, the new spy left camp at Harlem Heights about Sept. 12 and made his way to Norwalk, Conn., far enough from the city to avoid confrontation with the British while crossing Long Island Sound. He found an armed sloop to take the two of them to Huntington, landing somewhere on the beach near what is now Huntington Bay.

In a letter to a newspaper published in 1827, Hempstead described what happened next:

Capt. Hale had changed his uniform for a plain suit of citizens brown clothes, with a round broad-brimmed hat, assuming the character of a Dutch school-master, leaving all his other clothes, commission, public and private papers, with me, and also his silver shoe buckles, saying they would not comport with his character as school-master, and retaining nothing but his College diploma, as an introduction to his assumed calling.

This was Sept. 15 or 16. Hale's plan was to make his way westward back to the British lines. He assumed -- incorrectly, as it turned out -- that the main British forces were still in the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. He expected to relay information to Washington by retracing his steps back to Huntington and across the Sound.

No one knows what route he took, but Hale made his way to the western end of the Island, where he would have learned that the British had already taken most of Manhattan. All of Washington's troops had been pushed back to Harlem Heights, north of what is now 110th Street. At that point, since Washington already knew what Hale had been sent to find out, Hale could have gone back the way he came. But, consistent with a bravery that bordered on the foolhardy, Hale crossed over into New York, probably at Brooklyn Ferry, near today's Brooklyn Bridge. As he went, he secretly took notes of such things as locations of troops and sketches of fortifications.

For the Americans, Hale had disappeared. Washington did not learn of his fate until the evening of Sept. 22. A British aide to Gen. William Howe, Capt. John Montresor, visited the Americans under a flag of truce to discuss a prisoner exchange. As an aside, Montresor mentioned that an American, Capt. Nathan Hale, had been hanged as a spy at 11 o'clock that morning. Hale's friend, William Hull, visited with Montresor, who gave him a lengthy account of what happened. Hull's memoirs give us most of what we know about Hale's last hours.

Montresor told Hull that when Hale was captured on Sept. 21 he was carrying concealed papers with sketches of fortifications and other information. Hale, as frank and open as Hull said he was -- poor qualities for a spy -- acknowledged that he was on a secret mission for Gen. Washington. Howe ordered him to be executed the following morning at 11. Hale asked to speak to a clergyman, and for a Bible, but both requests were refused. The best available evidence places the hanging at approximately the intersection of the present Third Avenue and 66th Street.

But are the last words attributed to Hale the ones that he actually said? Once again, not everyone agrees, but it is generally accepted that Hale, familiar with the English writer Joseph Addison, was paraphrasing a line from his play ``Cato.''

A 1777 newspaper article reported Hale as saying that ``if he had ten thousand lives, he would lay them all down, if called to it, in defence of his injured, bleeding country.'' Four years later another newspaper story quoted Hale's last words as: ``. . . my only regret is, that I have not more lives than one to offer in its service.'' Hull's 1848 memoirs give us the pithier version we know today: ``I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.''

Other parts of Hale's story are debatable. Although Washington always denied it, many people believe there was a plot to burn down New York City, after it was realized that it was going to be lost to the British. On the morning of the day Hale was arrested, a major fire broke out in lower Manhattan, destroying at least one-quarter of the city's houses. In a July 14, 1975, New York magazine article, historical novelist Thomas Fleming speculated that Hale was likely to have been part of the plot. But that remains speculation.

Whether Hale was captured in Huntington or in New York has been debated for more than a century. One belief is that he was apprehended after being betrayed at a tavern in what is now Huntington Bay, then put aboard the British ship Halifax and taken into New York to be hanged. What has been verified by British documents is that Hale was captured on the night of Sept. 21 and executed at 11 a.m. the next day. The question is whether a Huntington capture is consistent with that schedule.

A blue-ribbon panel appointed by Huntington Town to settle this issue reported in 1939 that it was impossible to prove one way or another. But Yale professor James G. Rogers, writing in George D. Seymour's 1941 book, ``Documentary Life of Nathan Hale,'' gives what is probably the most complete analysis of all the conflicting stories. He rules out Huntington.

First, Rogers says, the ship's logs show that the Halifax was not near Huntington on Sept. 21. Second, based on the rate of cruise of sailships in those waters, the Huntington-to-Manhattan trip took more than a day. Thus, Hale could not have been transported into New York in time for his own hanging.

If not Huntington, then where? One possibility is upper Manhattan, near the boundary of the British and American lines, which Hale was trying to reach. Other sources suggest that it was somewhere on the western end of Long Island, between Hell Gate and Flushing Bay.

In the end, does it really matter if the puzzle is never completely solved? Like Paul Revere and Betsy Ross, Nathan Hale has become part of our national revolutionary drama. In the early part of this century, a writer named Watson Sperry wrote in The Hartford Courant:

When Sir William Howe ordered him to be strung up he no doubt meant to make an end to the young American captain, but in fact he made the beginning of him. From that moment young Hale passed from an engaging and capable personality into an enduring national symbol.