References

  1. Stuart, I. W. Life of Jonathan Trumbull. Crocker & firewater. Boston, 1859.
  2. The Lebanon War Office. Published by the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the Revolution. Hartford, 1891.
  3. Lodge, Henry Cabot. “Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of the Count de Rochambeau,” in A Fighting Frigate and other Essays. D. Appleton & Co. New York, 1902.
  4. Chastellux, Marquis de. Travels in North America. London.

[Nathan Hale]

“To drum-beat and heart-beat
A soldier marches by;
There is color in his cheek,
There is courage in his eye,
Yet to drum-beat and heart-beat
In 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.”