The Reluctant Spy

The Reluctant Spy

Nate lived quietly in the shadows. As the sixth of ten brothers, he was mostly ignored. Frail and sickly, he stayed indoors by the fireplace. While other boys explored frontier forests, he burrowed into books. When his brothers plowed fields alongside their father, he talked poetry with his mother. By age eleven, this bookworm was fluent in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. No one was surprised when he became Yale College’s youngest student at age fourteen or when he graduated with top honors when he was only eighteen.

By now, colonial America was a hotbed of revolution. Down south, Patrick Henry electrified Virginia’s House of Burgesses with his immortal words “Give me liberty or give me death!” But Nate was a gentle and meek scholar. Some even whispered that he was fainthearted or maybe cowardly. While other young men were taking up arms, this teacher retreated to the safety of his classroom.

Then came the British siege of Boston. Embarrassed to be thought a coward, he joined the local militia. Yet when his students marched off to war, Nate stayed behind. While they shed their blood on the battlefield, he hid in his classroom. But a sentence in a letter from a Yale classmate gnawed at him: “Our holy religion and the honor of God demand that we defend our country.” That single line put steel in the frail bookworm’s spine.

Soon after, he joined George Washington’s army. When they made him a supply officer, he was relieved that his duties kept him far from battle. But a line in another letter jabbed at his conscience: “Now is the time for great men to immortalize their names in the defense of their country.” When Washington needed a volunteer to spy out British troop strength on Long Island, Nate surprised everyone by impulsively stepping forward.

Never was a spy more fearful. Maybe that’s why he was spotted within hours of landing in Manhattan. He was arrested and dragged before British general William Howe. He was summarily condemned as a spy, sentenced to death, and locked in a greenhouse for the night. We might wish that Nate faced his death with dignity. Instead, he shook with fear and vomited repeatedly. He asked for a Bible, but it was refused. At dawn he begged for a chaplain, but that, too, was denied. He was marched down the road to a tree by the local tavern. His knees buckled, but his resolve didn’t. As the noose was placed around his neck, Nate quoted a line from Joseph Addison’s play Cato, spoken by the Roman patriot Cato as he is being martyred: “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”

When Nate’s brothers came to reclaim his body, the British had already dumped it in an unmarked grave. Though the body was never recovered, a grateful nation hasn’t forgotten Nate or his full name: Nathan Hale. Surely he immortalized his name with sacred honor in the defense of his country. If we wish to pass on to our children the liberties given to us at such great sacrifice, we ought to recall another line from Cato. Surely Nate had read these words too:

He who fears death has already lost the life he covets.

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

John 15:13, NIV