“One Hale, in New York, on suspicion of spying, was taken up, and without ceremony, to the execution point and hung up.”

This single sentence, announcing the death of Nathan Hale to New Londoners, appeared in the October 11, 1776 edition of the Connecticut Gazette. Nathan was 21 years old. I’d have thought the editor would have given his martyrdom more ink, but probably those were the only details available. The news quickly made headlines all over the colonies, and Nathan became an American hero. Over the years, contradictory, unsubstantiated second- and third-hand reports proliferated, and today no eyewitness documents describing his capture or execution are known to survive.

Nathan was born in Coventry in 1755. His family sent him to Yale when he was 14 years old. He graduated with honors four years later and began teaching, first in East Haddam and then New London. (The Gazette’s publisher, Timothy Green, was on the New London school board that hired him.) Nathan was a respected educator who ran a strict classroom, probably because he wasn’t much older than his students and needed to maintain control. He’s been described as handsome, charismatic, scholarly, restless, and flirtatious.

One story about his social life appeared in an April 1915 edition of The Day. According to the article, a letter had been found that Nathan wrote in 1774 to a maternal ancestor of New London judge, John P.C. Mather. It was an invitation for the young lady to join him in the garden at Shaws’ mansion to sit on the rocks and watch the sunset over the Thames River. Steve Manuel, executive director of the New London County Historical Society, points out an obvious problem with this account: looking out at the river from the mansion, you’re facing east and can see the sun rise, not set. Manuel believes that if Nathan had a date on a Shaw property, it wasn’t in the garden but rather at Shaw’s Landing or Shaw’s Cove. It’s a shame the reporter was so sloppy. Nathan was friendly with the Shaws, so I hope the date really happened.

In 1775 at the outbreak of the Revolution, Nathan joined the 7th Connecticut Regiment, and was chosen the next year to serve in Knowlton’s Rangers, an elite espionage group commissioned by George Washington. When Washington needed intelligence about the impending British invasion of New York City, Nathan volunteered to go behind enemy lines on Long Island to gather information. It wasn’t long before the British apprehended and imprisoned him. He was hanged on September 22, 1776 in Manhattan at a location that’s still debated. One version of his arrest cited a Tory cousin as the person who betrayed him, an allegation the Hale family vehemently disputed.

Did Nathan really say, “I only regret I have but one life to give for my country”? It’s a remarkably composed utterance from a young man about to be killed. Some commentators believe that Nathan was a brave but inept agent who got caught on his very first mission, and that the words attributed to him were likely designed by others to further ennoble a tragic hero.

There’s another possibility, discussed by Mary Beth Baker, a retired museum director who lives in New London. Her 200-page master’s thesis (“The Making and Breaking of an American Icon”) considers the historiography of the Hale story. Based on tantalizing clues she found in his journals and other primary documents, Baker thinks that Nathan, rather than being an inept novice, may have had training and skill in spy craft before being sent on his final, but possibly not his first, mission. Aware of the risks and knowing that condemned prisoners were usually allowed some last words, he’d have had time to prepare a speech. The famous line was possibly paraphrased from a popular play known to him and his audience.

Baker isn’t surprised by the scarcity of concrete information about Nathan’s spying, and notes as an example that the existence of the Culper Spy Ring, which provided Washington with information on British troop movements, wasn’t recognized until the 1930s. (One of the Culper founders, Benjamin Tallmadge, was a college friend of Nathan’s; they drank, chased girls, and even went on an inebriated window-smashing spree at Yale.)

Six months after his death, an article about Nathan’s execution appeared in the Gazette. According to that narrative, Nathan “told the British, among other things, that they were shedding the blood of the innocent, and that if he had ten thousand lives, he would lay them down, if called to, in defense of this injured, bleeding country.”

When Nathan was chosen Connecticut State Hero in 1985, the selection was criticized by some because of his apparent failure as a spy. But a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency offered this perspective: “Hale is what he is in the American pantheon not because of what he did, but because of why he did it.”

In the end, of all the stories, fact or fiction, the one I like best is about Nathan’s tryst at Shaws’. I like to picture him as a 19-year-old boy, sitting by the river with a pretty girl, dreaming about the future he should have had.

The articles cited are from the extensive historical newspaper collection held by the NLCHS.