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.
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:—