Nathan Hale, the First Martyr

Nathan Hale was twenty-one, a Yale graduate and a Connecticut schoolteacher. In September 1776, after the defeat on Long Island, Washington needed to know where the British would strike next, and Captain Hale of Knowlton's Rangers volunteered to go behind their lines.

He crossed to Long Island in a plain brown suit and a broad-brimmed hat, posing as a Dutch schoolmaster. He was caught and, on General William Howe's order, hanged as a spy on the morning of September 22.

A British officer, Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie, wrote that day that Hale "behaved with great composure and resolution." The words Americans remember reached us secondhand: another British officer, John Montresor, told Hale's friend William Hull that his last words were "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." They echo a line in Joseph Addison's play Cato, which Hale's generation knew well.

The painting dresses him as the Continental captain he was rather than the schoolmaster he pretended to be. He stands bareheaded under a broad tree, in a blue coat over a buff waistcoat, looking up past the noose that hangs from the branch above. To the right a British officer reads from a paper beside redcoats with fixed bayonets, and the low sky behind them burns gold.