At first it was hoped that he would be convicted of treason, but the evidence showed that this charge could not be sustained. He was tried for cowardice in face of the enemy, found guilty, and sentenced to be shot. The latter part of the sentence President Madison remitted, in consideration of his past eminent services in the army. So, stamped with indelible disgrace by all who did not know the facts, a ruined and dishonored man, in his sixty-first year General Hull went back to the farm in Newton that had come to him through his wife. Here, surrounded by the most devoted affection, he passed his few remaining years.
A ruined and discredited man he truly was,—the reputation and the honor due him from his countrymen irrevocably lost and by no fault of his own. Yet his grandson, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, asserts that he was not once heard to say an unkind word about the government that had treated him so cruelly.
After his death, in 1825, one of his daughters wrote the story of his life from his own writings, and the Rev. James Freeman Clarke sketched for the world an outline of his grandfather's services in Michigan. This shows that the man who, in his youth, tried to dissuade his friend Nathan Hale from accepting the rôle of martyr, himself, in his old age, bravely and gently endured a martyrdom compared to which the ostracism he predicted for Hale, even if he succeeded in his mission, was but a passing dream.
(5) Stephen Hempstead
To Stephen Hempstead, a sergeant in Nathan Hale's company in 1776, we are indebted for the most reliable account that is known of Hale's movements after he left New York in the service from which he was not to return. Sergeant Hempstead removed to Missouri after the war, and this account was first published in the Missouri Republican in 1827. His own words describing his last days with Hale are these:
"Captain Hale was one of the most accomplished officers, of his grade and age, in the army. He was a native of the town of Coventry, state of Connecticut, and a graduate of Yale College—young, brave, honorable—and at the time of his death a Captain in Col. Webb's Regiment of Continental Troops. Having never seen a circumstantial account of his untimely and melancholy end, I will give it. I was attached to his company and in his confidence. After the retreat of our army from Long Island, he informed me, he was sent for to Head Quarters, and was solicited to go over to Long Island to discover the disposition of the enemy's camps, &c., expecting them to attack New York, but that he was too unwell to go, not having recovered from a recent illness; that upon a second application he had consented to go, and said I must go as far with him as I could, with safety, and wait for his return.
"Accordingly, we left our Camp on Harlem Heights, with the intention of crossing over the first opportunity; but none offered until we arrived at Norwalk, fifty miles from New York. In that harbor there was an armed sloop and one or two row galleys. Capt. Hale had a general order to all armed vessels, to take him to any place he should designate: he was set across the Sound, in the sloop, at Huntington (Long Island) by Capt. Pond, who commanded the vessel. Capt. Hale had changed his uniform for a plain suit of citizen's brown clothes, with a round broad-brimmed hat, assuming the character of a Dutch schoolmaster, leaving all his other clothes, commission, public and private papers, with me, and also his silver shoebuckles, saying they would not comport with his character of schoolmaster, and retaining nothing but his College diploma, as an introduction to his assumed calling. Thus equipped, we parted for the last time in life. He went on his mission, and I returned back again to Norwalk, with orders to stop there until he should return, or hear from him, as he expected to return back again to cross the sound, if he succeeded in his object."
So far as there is any other evidence, it tends to confirm this part of Sergeant Hempstead's report, and he is to-day considered one of the most valuable authorities on Hale's last intercourse with brother soldiers.
Of the details of his captain's arrest and execution, which are told in the last part of the account, and of which Hempstead had no personal knowledge, he declares that he was "authentically informed" and did "most religiously believe" them. Some of the incidents he gives appear to have been proved since to have no basis in fact; others that vary from reports now accepted may yet, with more light gained, be found to be true.
The second letter sent by Sergeant Hempstead to the Republican deals with his experience in the army in 1781, when he was one of the victims of the brutalities inflicted upon the hapless prisoners of war at Fort Griswold, Groton, Connecticut. The injuries he received there were, as he tells us, so severe that his own wife, having searched for his body in the fort among the dead, scanned carefully the face of every wounded soldier sheltered by pitying neighbors, passing him twice without recognizing him—he too ill to make any sign—and then resuming her search among the dead.