Son of liberty: Nathan Hale, a true patriot, believed that liberty is worth any price

New American, The, Sept 15, 2008 by Becky Akers

He was full of fun and life, but he is remembered for his death. He was a man of honor who died in rank dishonor. His last words, which should have perished with him, have instead immortalized him.

His name was Nathan Hale, and he hanged for espionage 232 years ago this September 22.

He was one of those gifted-all-around people who succeed at everything they try, born on June 6, 1755. The sixth of 12 children, he came from a distinguished family. His great-grandparents John and Sarah Hale helped end the Salem Witch Trials, and his parents descended from long lines of preachers, the creme de la creme of ancestries in Puritan New England.

That godly influence molded all the Hales. Folks said of Nathan's farming father, "No man ever worked harder for both worlds than Richard Hale." And indeed, Richard was generally called "Deacon," though we don't know whether he actually held that office in his church or whether the honorific merely marked his piety. Nathan's mother, Elizabeth Strong, bore nine sons and three daughters. Ten of the dozen survived to adulthood. Losing two babies was a milder agony than families usually suffered: many had buried more children than sat around the dinner table. Elizabeth herself died when Nathan was 12 years old. Motherless families were another common tragedy in the 18th century.

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Nathan matured into a man so handsome that his looks were one of the first things people remembered about him. Colonel Samuel Green was a child when he knew Nathan; he described him as "full of intelligence & benevolence ... a face & appearance that would strike any one anywhere--face indicative of good sense & good feeling--warm & ardent." Nathan was also an athlete of rare ability in an age that prized physical strength. Green recalled that he could "jump from the bottom of one hogshead [barrel] up and down into a second and from the second up and down into a third like a cat.... [He] would put his hand on a fence high as his head, and jump over it." Another acquaintance marveled at Nathan's kicking a football over the treetops.

College and Career

His mind was as strong as his body. He enrolled at Yale when he was 14, an average age for matriculating in those days, where he continued studying Greek and Latin. He was already fluent in each: that was required for admission. The Classics and the Bible were scholarship's sine qua non in colonial America. Whatever else a man knew, he must boast a thorough knowledge of those ancient texts to call himself educated.

After settling in at Yale, Nathan joined Linonia, one of its debating societies. These organizations were a forerunner of fraternities as far as providing college kids with lifelong friends--and with beer. No colonial college would have tolerated the orgies for which modern fraternities are notorious, but they did assuage students' thirst. With the 19th-century crusades against "demon rum" still decades in the future, colonial and Revolutionary Americans drank in amounts that would stagger abstemious moderns. Colleges served beer at meals; the hypochondriac John Adams claims to have drunk a tankard of hard cider every morning while he was still abed; unpaid armies that hadn't eaten for days nevertheless mutinied when rum rations ran short. Heavy drinkers probably burned off the liquor as quickly as they imbibed it thanks to the physical exertion required to get through the day without electricity or machines. And the diseases water often carried made alcohol a safer choice.

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Nathan no doubt enjoyed his share of beer, but even so, he eventually became Linonia's secretary and, finally, its president. At the society's weekly meetings, the teenaged members argued topics ranging from when "the Latin Language arive[d--sic] to the greatest perfection in the City of Rome" to "the Reason that the Moon is not always Eclipsed every Opposition of the Sun and Moon." They also resolved that "As Persons very commonly in Conversation use bad Grammar it is determin'd that in the Meeting free liberty be taken by all present to criticise upon each other's Language."

Yale's curriculum fit a boy for the ministry, but Nathan may have planned to teach, not preach. He and three classmates debated "Whether the Education of Daughters be not without any just reason, more neglected than that of Sons?" at their commencement ceremony. We don't know which side Nathan defended, but since he was teaching girls a year later, it is likely he spoke in favor of the question. On the other hand, many graduates taught school while casting about for their life's work, and that may be the spirit in which Nathan accepted his first job in Haddam, Connecticut.

If Master Hale fell into teaching, he quickly came to love it. Whippings were then considered as integral to education as reading and writing, but he eschewed such cruelty. Not surprisingly, the "children all loved him for his tact and amiability." Colonel Green was one of Nathan's students; he recalled that "scholars old & young [were] exceedingly attached to him.... [He] taught the classics and English." Haddam had him for only a year before parents in New London hired Nathan for their "Union School"--"so called because about twenty gentlemen united & built a fine school house to accommodate thirty or forty scholars." There the gentle teacher inaugurated his class for "20 young ladies," as he wrote his uncle, "for which I have received 6s [shillings] a scholar, by the quarter."