Our town and civic duty

by Jane Eayre Fryer

PLAIN BUTTONS

Edward Everett Hale’s Story, “The Man Without A Country,” retold by Edna S. Knapp.

I

Once there was a man, an officer in the American army, who said something dreadful, when he was only a mere boy; he cursed his native country! He pretended for a while that he did not care when he was punished, but in the end he was very, very sorry. Because he wore his uniform without the official buttons, the sailors on the ships where he spent his life called him “Plain Buttons.”

His name was Philip Nolan. He had been brought up on a southern plantation where the most welcome guests were Spanish or French officers. He spent half his time with an older brother hunting horses in Texas. The “United States” meant almost nothing to him.

Still, when he grew up he became an officer in the army of the “United States;” he swore, on his faith as a Christian, to be true to the “United States.” Nolan was a lieutenant in the “Legion of the West,” as our western army was called in those early days, one hundred years ago.

At that time the Mississippi valley was the “far West” to most people, and seemed a very distant land indeed. We had a number of forts along the river bank and Nolan was stationed in one of these. Nolan’s idol was the brilliant and dashing Aaron Burr, who visited the fort several times between 1805 and 1807. He paid some attention to Nolan and obtained a very strong influence over him.

Burr got into trouble and some of his friends were tried for treason, Nolan among them. It was very plain that Nolan would do anything Burr told him; that he would obey Burr far quicker than his country, in spite of his oath.

So when the President of the court asked Nolan, at the close of the trial, whether he wished to say anything to show that he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried out in a fit of frenzy, “Curse the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!”

Colonel Morgan, who was holding the court, turned white as a sheet. Half the officers who sat in it had served through the Revolutionary War and had risked their lives, not to say their necks, cheerfully and loyally for the country which Nolan so lightly cursed in his madness. Colonel Morgan, terribly shocked, called the court into his private room and returned in fifteen minutes to say: