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Nathan Hale's Mission
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Hale's Mission
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| and buried in a forgotten grave-on the whole a series of events quite unlikely, on the face of it, to provide the material for making a patriotic legend or a national hero. But such is the power of the word-a garbled quotation from Addison, spoken by a condemned man on the gallows-that one quick sentence spoken in precisely the right circumstances can illuminate in one brilliant flash a whole landscape of human motivation. Hale is what he is in the American pantheon not because of what he did, but because of why he did it. From the early 19th Century on, the chroniclers of Hale have been tireless in their recital of this fact. To a man they have insisted on contrasting Hale and Andre-the one universally admired and pitied by both sides, eulogized and ultimatedly re-buried in Westminster Abby; the other buried unnoted except by his family and friends and almost forgotten until many years later. Their judgments of the two men are invariably made on the basis of the motivation shown by their 'last words; Andre concerned only with his personal reputation: "I beg the gentlemen to bear witness that I die as a soldier," Hale concerned that he could no longer serve his country's cause. |
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| Perhaps the final irony in Hale's story is that the fact that we know it at all is due solely to the presence at his execution of one British officer who was sufficiently sensitive to his demeanor and impressed by the character of his motivation to have befriended him, to have heard what he said on the gallows, and to have passed it on to his friends. |
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Posted: May 08, 2007 08:41 AM
Last Updated: May 08, 2007 08:41 AM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:41 AM
