Nathan Hale: The Life and Death of America's First Spy - Hardcover

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Prologue Thunder of Heaven

FROM THE WESTERN FRONT of the green facing Yale College’s Connecticut Hall, a three-story, redbrick building, one could look to the east and manage a squinted glimpse of Long Island Sound and, just over the horizon, the magnificent Atlantic Ocean. Settled in 1638 as Red Mount, New Haven was a thriving colony, steeped in maritime aesthetics and deep-seated Christian values, established by its founders on the principles of community, education, economics, and, of course, religion. It was here, in the thick of the city near Chapel Street, that two teenage classmates left the Yale campus on a summer day in 1772 en route to New Haven harbor.1

To passersby, the students blended into the milieu of the city as if they had lived in New Haven all their lives. But neither scholar had grown up in town. One of the boys, Nathan Hale, the son of an affluent deacon and farmer, lived sixty miles north in the hills of Connecticut. Having spent the past three years studying at Yale, Nathan held an idealistic view of the city; its tradition of political discourse and fidelity to Christianity fell right into what he—indeed, nearly all colonists—had been raised to believe: that in God all things were possible.2

Still, beyond a visit to the house of the school’s resident physician, Dr. Eneas Munson, the local tavern, or a shop keeper nearby, Nathan rarely ventured beyond the surrounding neighborhood, keeping the majority of his socializing confined to campus.3

Nathan and his classmate Isaac Gridley were headed to New Haven harbor, a bustling seaport, situated along the jagged coastline between Stamford and Saybrook. There, merchants sold colonial goods—mainly sugar, pewter, nails, timber, fishing gear, compasses, sextants—and coopers and shiphands loitered about the docks in search of work, while businessmen kept tabs on their coastal offices and ware houses. The first Puritans to settle in New Haven 150 years earlier felt there was great value in such a sprawling seaside community and hoped to monopolize what they viewed as a prominent commercial port on the East Coast. The problem became, however, that New York was but a half day’s sail south, Boston a day’s sail north. Both were larger cities, with much more to offer seafaring merchants and importers. Yet even though their immediate plan for financial success failed, the harbor prospered and sustained a growing economy over the years, providing a viable tract of land and a tenable backdrop for the "neatly painted frame houses of many of the town’s influential families" dotted about the ribboned countryside overlooking the harbor.4

It had turned cloudy by the time seventeen-year-old Nathan and his fifteen-year-old classmate reached the shoreline. Undeterred by the gray skies above, they pushed a sloop out into the water and, with their backs to the wind, jumped aboard for what they assumed was going to be an afternoon of leisurely sailing.5

But soon after their voyage began, the weather turned volatile and violent. Waves crashed up over the bow of the small sloop as Gridley, certainly worried they wouldn’t make it back to shore without being swallowed up by the choppy waters, looked to Nathan for guidance and comfort.

With the confidence he had acquired while becoming one of Yale’s top thirteen scholars, Nathan said, "I will never be drowned."6

To Gridley, Nathan appeared too sure of himself, as if he knew—and firmly believed—that dying in the midst of a storm at sea was not in God’s plan for him. Nathan’s words did little to suppress Gridley’s trepidation; it thundered and lightning cracked in flashing bolts around them.

Maneuvering the vessel back to shore, Nathan explained why he was so certain they would make it in safely. He pointed to a blemish on his neck, beckoning Gridley to have a closer look.

A childhood friend of Nathan’s, Asher Wright, who would become his close ally and camp attendant during the Revolutionary War, later described Nathan’s pockmark as "a large hair mole on his neck." A mole on one’s neck was a sign of bad luck. If one had a hair growing from that mole, it further indicated that death by hanging was in your future.7 Reflecting back on his life with Nathan, Wright added, "In his boyhood, his playmates sometimes twitted him about [the mole], telling him he would be hanged."8

Apparently, Nathan Hale believed it to some extent—because as he and Gridley, surely drenched from the heavy rains, pulled the boat ashore, Nathan spoke of it again. He pointed to the slightly elevated mole on his neck and again said he knew he wasn’t going to drown. Gridley wanted to know how his friend could be so certain.

"I am to be hung," Nathan lamented.9

Chapter One

 

Chapter 1 The Righteous and Patriotic Man

THE FIERY COLORS OF leaves burst around New England during the fall of 1769. Fifteen-year-old Enoch and fourteen-year-old Nathan straddled their horses and began what was a sixty-mile journey to New Haven. They had been lectured by their father, Richard Hale, regarding the vices of living in a city far from his supervision. Richard probably told the boys to mind their studies and seek guidance in the word of God while away from home. For Nathan and Enoch, it was the first time they had left home alone, beyond a brief visit to their uncle Strong’s in Salmon Brook, or a trip into Hartford, Norwich, or Windham for supplies with their father.

Richard Hale had little to worry about. He had raised well-behaved, mindful, disciplined children. Richard had lofty religious morals and expected no less from members of his family. He could trust that when confronted with the pressures of college life, Nathan and Enoch would make the right choices. The Hale children were said to have been brought up under "the fear of God," drilled by their father on the particulars of right and wrong. In colonial Connecticut, "church and state were not separate." Attending church was not a right—but a requirement of the law. Richard understood that God was the source of all life. Without putting the Lord’s word first, nothing else was possible; and what ever happened in life, he told the children many times, was God’s plan. Never question His Divine Word.

Richard had instilled these ideals in his children at every opportunity. During the Sabbath, for example, the Hales would not have had a fire burning in keeping with Richard’s rule of respecting the sacred day (in winter months, a fire would be "banked," the massive granite cooking stone kept warm, but cooking was not allowed on Sundays). As a child, Nathan liked to play the board game morris, which is similar to checkers, with his brothers, but Richard, "thinking the diversion might lead to evil," disallowed it. Once, while reading, Richard fell asleep with a candle burning in his hand. Nathan and his siblings, who had waited for their father to doze off, huddled like campers and played the game in the candlelight around the chair.1

Both Enoch and Nathan were prepared for Yale by Dr. Joseph Huntington, who held classes at his home, two miles from the Hale family farm. Huntington was not only a friend and neighbor of Richard Hale’s, but a well-respected minister and renowned scholar in the small community of Coventry. "The two boys were fortunate in their preceptor," Hale family expert George Dudley Seymour said of Huntington, "urbanity in an ‘Age of Homespun,’ a classic scholar."2

Nathan became an exceptional student and enjoyed being tutored. His manners were honed by Huntington, who taught Nathan how to truly study the Gospels and also encouraged him to read biographies of Cyrus the Great and Philip of Macedon. Only...