ONCE there was a man, a young officer in the United States Army, who did a dreadful thing—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 on which he was imprisoned called him “Plain Buttons.”
His name was Philip Nolan. Lieutenant Nolan was as fine a young officer as there was in the “Legion of the West,” as the Western division of the United States 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. There were a number of forts along the river 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 walked and talked with Nolan and obtained a very strong influence over him. He got Nolan to take him out in his skiff and show him something of the great river and the plans for the new post; and by the time Burr’s visit was over Nolan was enlisted body and soul in Burr’s disloyal schemes. From then on, though he did not yet know it, Nolan lived as a man without a country.
Burr soon got into trouble with the government, and some of his friends were tried for treason, Nolan among them. It became very plain during the trial that Nolan would do anything Burr told him; that he would obey Burr far quicker than his country in spite of his oath as an officer of the army.
So when Colonel Morgan, who was 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!”
Probably he did not realize how the words would shock old Colonel Morgan and the other members of the court. Half the officers who sat with him 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.
It may be said for Nolan that he had grown up in the West of those days, then an almost unknown country. He had been educated on a plantation, where the most welcome guests were Spanish officers and French merchants from Orleans, who, to say the least, were unfriendly to the United States. He had spent half his youth with an older brother, hunting horses in Texas, which was not then a part of the United States. In a word, the “United States” meant almost nothing to him.
Yet there was little excuse for Nolan. He had sworn on his faith as a Christian to be true to the United States. It was the United States which gave him the uniform he wore and the sword by his side. Nay, Burr cared nothing for poor Nolan, but had picked him out to aid him in his wicked plots, only because of the uniform he wore. Of course, Nolan did not know this, and it did not excuse him; but it does partly explain why he cursed his country and wished that he might never hear her name again.