It is recorded that when Colonel Knowlton, on calling the insurgent officers together, suggested that one of them should volunteer his services for what was undoubtedly the work of a spy, a murmur of indignation went round the room. Many of the officers in bitter terms reproached the Colonel for having dared to carry such a suggestion to men of honour, even from Washington himself. Knowlton replied that he was only carrying out his General's instructions, but nevertheless managed to insinuate in his reply that the reward in the way of promotion for the successful achievement of the mission would be proportioned to the danger with which it was undoubtedly fraught. His fellow-officers, to whom Hale's high spirit and probity were well-known characteristics, little expected that the Captain would prove the very first to undertake the work of a common spy. Nevertheless Hale was the only man, among a band of men of undoubted courage, who could be found to respond to the suggestion. His friends, in no way deterred, indeed, rather encouraged, by the presence of Knowlton, whose proposal they considered as an insult, used all the arts of persuasion at their command to turn him from his purpose, but without success. Hale in accepting the perilous commission addressed them as follows:—
"Gentlemen, I think I owe to my country the accomplishment of an object so important and so much desired by the commander of her armies, and I know no mode of obtaining the information but by assuming a disguise and passing into the enemy's camp. I am fully sensible of the consequences of discovery and capture in such a situation. 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. Yet am I not influenced by any expectation of promotion or pecuniary reward. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary for the public good becomes honourable by being necessary. If the exigencies of my country demand a peculiar service its claims to the performance of that service become imperious."
On the same afternoon Hale met Washington for the second time, receiving from the General instructions with regard to the perilous task he had undertaken. He was also given a general order addressed to American shipmasters to convey Captain Hale to any part of Long Island on which he might desire to land. Sundown already saw him on his way, accompanied by a sergeant and a boatman, to a point fifty miles north of New York, Norwalk, where there was a safe crossing of the Sound into territory occupied by British forces. Dismissing his companions at dawn on 15th September, and exchanging into the brown civilian dress and Quaker hat common to that period, Hale ferried across the narrow water, instructing his retainers at the last moment to await him at the same spot with a boat on 20th September. Reaching Huntington Bay on the other side, he assumed the character of a schoolmaster who, disgusted with the course of the Revolutionary cause, had come to pursue his profession in surroundings more congenial to his political and social tastes. His appearance and speech both carried conviction to all with whom he conversed; he was made free of the British lines, visited all the camps on Long Island, making observations openly and drawing up memoranda, written in Latin, as well as plans, in the privacy of his room. In the meantime, the British had invaded Manhattan and captured New York, so that as far as the penetration of the designs of English commanders was concerned, Hale had really made his excursion to little purpose beyond what he had achieved in the gathering of military information on Long Island. Having heard of the British success, he retraced his steps in the direction of Norwalk, and on 18th September, at sundown, found himself again at Huntington Bay, where he had first landed on his mission. Wearing coarse shoes with loose inner soles, under which he was able comfortably to conceal his drawings and memoranda, and still in the plain dress of a middle-class citizen, he felt secure in the disguise which had already carried him so happily through the perils of many British camps. Accordingly he entered a famous tavern "The Cedars" and asked for a night's lodging. At his entrance, a number of persons were in the lounge, and one of them, a man whose face he seemed to recollect, suddenly rose and left the place. Hale spent the night at the hostelry and at dawn left for the waterside in quest of the boat which he had ordered to be ready. Agreeably surprised to find his supposed boatman so punctual, he gaily saluted an approaching skiff which was carrying several men. Hastening to the beach in expectation of meeting his friends, he discovered to his dismay that the boat was manned by British marines. Flight was impossible; he was seized, taken aboard and conveyed to the British guard-ship Halifax. His capture, it is said, had been brought about by the stranger whom he had recognised the previous night at "The Cedars," a distant cousin of disreputable habits, who had betrayed him to the British. Proper warrant is, however, lacking for this part of the story. Inevitably his captors found full proofs of the purport of his adventure and he was conveyed to the headquarters of General Howe who, on the evidence of the concealed papers, summarily condemned him to death by hanging.
In the presence of Howe Hale frankly admitted his rank and mission. "I was present," wrote a British officer who was an eye-witness of the closing scenes, "and observed that the frankness, the manly bearing and the evidently disinterested patriotism of the handsome young prisoner sensibly touched a tender chord of General Howe's nature; but the stern rule of war concerning such offences would not allow him to exercise even pity."
As might be expected from such a man, Hale met his doom with the iron firmness of one who is convinced of the righteousness of his purpose. His last requests to Cunningham, the provost-marshal who supervised the execution, were refused, and even his poor, hurriedly written letters to his mother, his sisters and his youthful betrothed, Alice Adams, were ruthlessly destroyed before his face. There was, indeed, a real nobility about the whole person and demeanour of Hale which, as is commonly enough the case, called forth the brutality and coarseness of the completely opposite nature of Cunningham, who jeeringly requested the doomed youth to make his dying speech. And Hale replied, in words which still ring in the spirit of the Independence Fathers:
"I only regret that I have but one life to give to my country."
VI
MACK AND THE MOLLY MAGUIRES
James M'Parlan, a North-of-Ireland man, must be ranked among the most successful spies in modern times and for the good reason that he was mainly instrumental in breaking up one of the most lawless and terrible conspiracies against public order and private liberty which any state has yet been called upon to suppress. Its home was Pennsylvania, its name the "Molly Maguires," and to find a parallel to its iniquitous arts and methods one must go to the Klux Klan, the Corsican Vendetta or the White Veil society of the Middle Ages in Italy. As the discovery of gold in Australia and California in the middle of the nineteenth century led to the commission of a vast amount of crime by reason of the peculiar character of the masses of adventurers who soon overran the gold-bearing regions, so also the discovery of anthracite coal in Pennsylvania led to the assembling of great camps of speculators and prospectors, wealthy capitalists and common labourers for whom the word Law meant next to nothing at all. The comparatively unorganised condition of new towns which had sprung up as if by magic in the anthracite zones made Pennsylvania in those days a likely jumping-off ground for any man who possessed good physique, a brutal bearing, a disregard of private rights and the ability to impose his ideas upon a band of men of his own kind and kidney. Knowing what we know of the enterprising courage of many types of Irishmen and their talent for the business of pioneering, it is not difficult to imagine that they swarmed to the valuable coal regions of the Quaker State in legions proportionate to the vast immigrant hordes of their countrymen that were then flowing into every port of the United States. Great settlements consisting only of Irishmen sprang up at once in the mining districts of Pennsylvania and this new Irish colony separated automatically into as many divisions as there were counties in Ireland itself, each section carrying with it all the local pride, prejudice and other characteristics which had marked it within its geographical bounds in the old home. In fact a New Ireland sprang up in Quaker State hardly differentiable from the Old.