“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” The words Nathan Hale is said to have uttered just before being hanged as a spy by the British have become among the best remembered of the Revolution. The story of the young schoolteacher-turned-officer embodied American patriotism and sacrifice for nineteenth-century Americans. But with no contemporary portrait of Hale, citizens did not know what their hero looked like. Not until the turn of the twentieth century would two American artists give Hale a face. The Society of the Cincinnati’s Robert Charles Lawrence Fergusson Collection includes three important works of art documenting their efforts.
Nathan Hale was an intelligent, engaging, athletic, ambitious, and dutiful schoolmaster at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, yearning for a more meaningful life than the one he led in New London, Connecticut. The son of an affluent deacon and farmer, Hale was raised in Coventry, a rural community east of Hartford. He attended Yale College with his older brother, graduating in 1773. Nathan’s four years in New Haven were transformative, forging a bright and inquisitive scholar with an independent spirit. His classmates — including the future spy ring leader Benjamin Tallmadge, one of his closest friends — debated the politics of the day and, after graduation, prodded Nathan to join the colonial struggle.
News of the Battles of Lexington and Concord reached New London on April 22, 1775. Hale reportedly declared: “Let us march immediately and never lay down our arms until we obtain our Independence.”[1] But rather than run to Boston with the town’s militia company, Hale delayed his service to wrap up his obligations at the school. In July, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Seventh Connecticut Regiment of the Continental Army. After several anxious months of recruiting, training, and watching the coastline, Hale’s regiment finally received orders in September to march to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was promoted to captain as the regiment settled in to the Siege of Boston — which Hale found tedious and lonely, even while he reunited with Yale classmates in camp.
After the British evacuated Boston in March 1776, George Washington’s army — including the Seventh Connecticut Regiment — turned to New York to defend the city from complete capture. Although Hale had seen little action in the war, he was selected for a prestigious company of rangers commanded by Col. Thomas Knowlton. Knowlton’s Rangers were among the sixteen thousand American troops encamped at Harlem Heights by September, awaiting the next move. Washington was desperate for information on the enemy’s movements — a force rumored to be more than double the size of the Continentals. With scouting parties and citizen couriers proving to be ineffective, the general proposed that one of Knowlton’s rangers conduct the first American spy mission of the war. The effort required a regular soldier to disguise himself in civilian clothing, slip behind British lines, collect information and documents on their next planned attack, and return to camp undetected. Knowlton first asked for a volunteer, and after a round of silence among the rangers, Hale responded to the call.
Nathan Hale left camp on September 12, disguised as a schoolmaster looking for work. He took a circuitous path to British-held Long Island, where he quickly gathered information on the enemy’s numbers and positions. But on the night of September 21, he was discovered and captured on his way back to the American lines. Stories vary about how Hale was detected. One alleges that he was recognized by his Tory cousin, Samuel Hale, who was British general William Howe’s deputy commissioner of prisoners in New York. Another maintains that Col. Robert Rogers, the guerrilla leader and mercenary fighting with the British in New York and New England, came across Hale and uncovered his true mission. However he was captured, Hale’s effort seems ill-fated from the start. He was not trained in tradecraft before leaving camp and was not given invisible ink, cyphers, or other tools to avoid detection. Nor was he someone who would easily blend in — he was of above average height with noticeable facial scars from a gunpowder explosion.
Hale was immediately taken to General William Howe’s headquarters at Mount Pleasant, a New York City mansion seized by the British from patriot James Beekman. Because the general found Hale carrying incriminating papers and wearing civilian clothes rather than a military uniform, he declared the American a spy and ordered him hanged in the morning. On September 22, 1776, the British marched Nathan Hale north to their artillery park — in the vicinity of present-day 66th Street and 3rd Avenue on the Upper East Side — and executed him at the age of twenty-one.2
The account of Hale’s famous last words — which were inspired by a similar line in Joseph Addison’s play Cato — comes from British engineer John Montresor, who witnessed the execution. Another British officer, Lt. Frederick Mackenzie, recorded Hale’s last moments: “He behaved with great composure and resolution, saying he thought it the duty of every good Officer, to obey any orders given him by his Commander-in-Chief; and desired the Spectators to be at all times prepared to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.”[3] Later the same day, Montresor traveled to the American camp to deliver an unrelated message from Howe to Washington and told several officers of Hale’s fate. But despite its inspiring display of patriotism, duty, and sacrifice, Nathan Hale’s story was infrequently told and little remembered in the eighteenth century — perhaps due to his mission’s embarrassing failure.
More than one hundred years later, the first statue of Nathan Hale was dedicated in New York on Evacuation Day in 1893 — the anniversary of the British departure from the city at the end of the Revolution. The bronze statue was erected by the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York in City Hall Park, where Hale’s execution was thought to have taken place. The artist Frederick MacMonnies sculpted the work, which is considered one of the best examples of American Beaux-Arts sculpture.
Frederick William MacMonnies (1863-1937) was born in Brooklyn, the son of a Scottish immigrant. The artistic talent he showed as a boy led, in 1880, to a position in the studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an emerging American master who had recently returned from several years in Paris. Following Saint-Gaudens’ tutelage and classes at the National Academy of Design in New York and École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, MacMonnies embarked on his own career as a sculptor. His works included the Columbian Fountain at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893), the equestrian statue of Civil War general George McClellan in Washington, D.C. (1906), and the Princeton Battle Monument (1908-1922).
The competition for the Nathan Hale commission began in 1889, when the Sons of the Revolution announced their intention to erect a full-length statue of the hero in Manhattan. They sought designs for a standing figure of “a well-built young man of American type, dressed in a simple costume of the end of the last Century … at the moment immediately preceding his execution by the British, when his well-remembered words, ‘Would I had more than one life to give for my Country,’ were uttered.”[iv] Saint-Gaudens was the judge of the competition, and declared MacMonnies and Paul Wayland Bartlett the only sculptors worthy of the commission.
MacMonnies was inspired by Hale’s idealism and refinement. “I wanted to make something that would set the boot-blacks and little clerks around there thinking — something that would make them want to be somebody and find life worth living,” the sculptor later said.[v] From his studio in Paris, MacMonnies created a dramatic yet resolute figure of Hale. His torn and open shirt and bound arms and ankles hint at the violence of his captivity, but his slightly raised chin and calm face project strength and pride. MacMonnies based Hale’s facial features on a bust he sculpted of his friend, aspiring writer William Theodore Peters.[vi]
In September 1889, MacMonnies submitted a rough three-foot-tall plaster model of his Hale statue to the Sons of the Revolution in New York. The Sons and the New York Park Commission promptly approved the design. With the award came a $5,000 prize and a deadline of December 1, 1890, to deliver an eight-foot-tall bronze version for installation in City Hall Park. Back in Paris, MacMonnies cast the final model in early 1890 and submitted it for the 1891 Salon, where it won a second-class gold medal — the highest award open to foreigners and the first won by an American sculptor.
The December 1890 deadline passed without a finished statue from MacMonnies. The architect Stanford White, who promised to make the granite base for the sculpture, had still not finished the work, and MacMonnies felt no urgency to produce the statue without a base. The full-size bronze was finally cast in 1892 at the Paris foundry Jaboeuf et Bezout, and plans were made for an unveiling the following year.
MacMonnies’ statue of Nathan Hale — standing on a five-foot-tall pink granite base—was unveiled on November 25, 1893. The festivities began with a parade, in which members of the Society of the Cincinnati marched, followed by the formal presentation to the city by the Sons. Several addresses, including one by Hale’s great-grandnephew, the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, completed the day. The statue has since been moved around the park four times, most recently in 1999, when it was placed in a grass plaza in front of the steps to City Hall.
MacMonnies gained additional money and fame by selling reduced-size statuettes of his likeness of Hale. Beginning in 1890, the sculptor had copies cast by three different foundries in France and the United States. One of these statuettes is in the Society’s collections, cast in Paris by Jaboeuf et Rouard, which operated from 1901 to 1917. One full-size replica of MacMonnies’ statue was made. It was dedicated in 1935 in New London, Connecticut, where Hale was teaching at the outbreak of the war.
A second statue of Nathan Hale was created during the same period by another Beaux-Arts sculptor, Bela Lyon Pratt. Commissioned by Yale University, Pratt’s bronze statue was unveiled in 1914 outside Connecticut Hall, where Hale lived as a student. Although Pratt’s work did not receive the artistic accolades that MacMonnies’ did during their lifetimes, his likeness of Hale has been celebrated in other circles. Full-size bronze replicas of Pratt’s Nathan Hale stand outside the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, and the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.
The idea for a monument to Hale at Yale originated with George Dudley Seymour, a New Haven patent lawyer. Seymour’s lifelong interest in Hale was sparked by reading a poem about the patriot as a boy. His passion led him to restore Hale’s homestead in Coventry and publish his extensive research on Hale’s life. In 1898, Seymour convinced officials at Yale to commemorate his hero, with the hope of completing a monument by the university’s bicentennial in 1901. A committee of alumni began the search for a sculptor immediately.
Seymour suggested emerging sculptor Bela Lyon Pratt, whose professional pedigree resembled MacMonnies’. Born in Norwich, Connecticut, Pratt began his training at Yale’s School of Fine Arts. After graduation, he moved to New York, where he took classes at the Art Students’ League and worked in the studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who characterized Pratt as “grave and modest.”[vii] Pratt also studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before establishing his own studio. His works include sculptures for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress (1895-1896), along with busts of New England luminaries and coins and medals. He also taught modeling at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he influenced future American sculptors for twenty-five years.
Pratt modeled his first study for the Hale monument in 1899. The tableau depicts an indistinct figure of Hale surrounded by British soldiers — one to his left holds ropes that bind his chest and arms. A columned archway frames the scene. For this likeness of Hale, Pratt worked with an unnamed model for two weeks to perfect the figure. Pratt had at least one copy of this design cast by an unidentified foundry. The only known bronze version is in the Society’s collections.
Although the Yale committee complimented Pratt’s work, they stalled on awarding the contract for the Hale statue while they raised money and courted their first choice — Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Pratt’s mentor, who was occupied with other projects, did not commit to the Hale statue until 1906, when he demanded a fee of $40,000. The Yale committee balked. After Saint-Gaudens’ death the following year, Pratt became the leading candidate for the commission.
Pratt produced a second study for the Hale monument in 1907 — a single full-length figure that he considered more “real” and perhaps more focused than his earlier design.[viii] Like MacMonnies, Pratt depicted the young patriot in his last moments before death, with his wrists and ankles bound. Pratt may have been influenced by Seymour’s vision for the monument, to portray Hale as “tall, fair, and athletic … an ideal figure of a young man of the period—not a man of elegance and polish, so much as a man of nobility and courage.”[ix] For this study, Pratt used a local man, Crary Brownell, as the model for Hale’s likeness. Seymour had noticed Brownell — who he said “closely resembled the profile [of Hale] that was on the door at the Nathan Hale home in Coventry” — at a performance of the Moodus Drum and Fife Corps in New Haven and recommended him to the artist.[x] Pratt also referred to images of the Reverend Edward Everett Hale’s sons, who were said to resemble their ancestor.
The Yale committee finally awarded the Hale commission to Pratt in 1912 with a $15,000 prize. The restrained, unpretentious, and idealistic portrait of Hale no doubt pleased the committee. It projects youthful innocence and idealism with a realistic, modern face — rather than the romantic, bombastic (as Seymour considered it) look of MacMonnies’ statue. After Pratt received the commission, the twelve members of the committee received a bronze replica of his reduced-size model for the statue. They were cast by Roman Bronze Works, the preeminent American art foundry established in New York in 1897. An example of these statuettes is preserved in the Society’s collections.
Pratt executed his full-size model for the statue in 1913, which was cast the same year. The unveiling in September 1914 took place 138 years to the month after Hale’s execution. Hale’s face from the Pratt statue also graced a postage stamp issued in 1925. With these monuments to Nathan Hale, Bela Lyon Pratt and Frederick MacMonnies gave the nation tangible reminders of one of its first martyred patriots and helped to promote his virtuous qualities.
1 Leverett W. Saltonstall to Cyrus P. Bradley, January 17, 1837, in George Dudley Seymour, Documentary Life of Nathan Hale (New Haven, Conn.: Privately Printed, 1941), 347.
2 Richard E. Mooney, “One Life to Lose in Four Places: The Execution of Nathan Hale,” The New-York Journal of American History 66, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 46.
[3] Diary of Frederick Mackenzie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), 1:62.
[iv] Open letter from the sculpture committee of the Sons of the Revolution, February 12, 1889, quoted in Mary Smart, A Flight with Fame: The Life and Art of Frederick MacMonnies (Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1996), 87. The original document is in the Frederick William MacMonnies Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
[v] Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture (New York: Macmillan Company, 1903), 339.
[vi] Executed in 1888, the Peters bust was shown at the 1890 Salon in Paris, but MacMonnies destroyed it later that year, having decided it was a poor likeness. Smart, A Flight with Fame, 74.
[vii] Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Frederick MacMonnies, September 16, 1890, quoted in Smart, A Flight with Fame, 97. The original manuscript is in the MacMonnies Papers, Archives of American Art.
[viii] Bela Lyon Pratt to Sarah Victoria Whittlesey Pratt, April 14, 1907, Bela Lyon Pratt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
[ix] George Dudley Seymour to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, January 6, 1906, quoted in Kathryn Greenthal, et al, American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 317. The original manuscript is in the Papers of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.
[x] Wilson Brownell (son of Crary Brownell), interview with Kevin Tulimeri, Nathan Liverant and Son, Colchester, Conn., March 20, 1999, The Society of the Cincinnati, Washington, D.C.