Part 3

"I will undertake it."

Some of his best friends remonstrated. One of them, afterwards the famous general William Hull, then a captain in Washington's army, has recorded Hale's reply to his own attempt to dissuade him.

"I think," said Hale, "I owe to my country the accomplishment of an object so important. I am fully sensible of the consequences of discovery and capture in such a situation. But for a year I have been attached to the army, and have not rendered any material service, while receiving a compensation for which I make no return. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary for the public good becomes honorable by being necessary."

He spoke, as General Hull remembered, with earnestness and decision, as one who had considered the matter well, and had made up his mind.

Having received his instructions, he traveled fifty miles along the Sound as far as Norwalk in Connecticut. One who saw him there made a very wise remark upon him, to the effect that he was "too good-looking" to go as a spy. He could not deceive. "Some scrubby fellow ought to have gone." At Norwalk he assumed the disguise of a Dutch schoolmaster, putting on a suit of plain brown clothes, and a round, broad-brimmed hat. He had no difficulty in crossing the Sound, since he bore an order from General Washington which placed at his disposal all the vessels belonging to Congress. For several days everything appears to have gone well with him, and there is reason to believe that he passed through the entire British army without detection or even exciting suspicion.

Finding the British had crossed to New York, he followed them. He made his way back to Long Island, and nearly reached the point opposite Norwalk where he had originally landed. Rendered perhaps too bold by success, he went into a well-known and popular tavern, entered into conversation with the guests, and made himself very agreeable. The tradition is that he made himself too agreeable. A man present suspecting or knowing that he was not the character he had assumed, quietly left the room, communicated his suspicions to the captain of a British ship anchored near, who dispatched a boat's crew to capture and bring on board the agreeable stranger. His true character was immediately revealed. Drawings of some of the British works, with notes in Latin, were found hidden in the soles of his shoes. Nor did he attempt to deceive his captors, and the English captain, lamenting, as he said, that "so fine a fellow had fallen into his power," sent him to New York in one of his boats, and with him the fatal proofs that he was a spy.

September twenty-first was the day on which he reached New York--the day of the great fire which laid one-third of the little city in ashes. From the time of his departure from General Washington's camp to that of his return to New York was about fourteen days. He was taken to General Howe's headquarters at the Beekman mansion, on the East River, near the corner of the present Fifty-first Street and First Avenue. It is a strange coincidence that this house to which he was brought to be tried as a spy was the very one from which Major André departed when he went to West Point. Tradition says that Captain Hale was examined in a greenhouse which then stood in the garden of the Beekman mansion.

Short was his trial, for he avowed at once his true character. The British general signed an order to his provost-marshal directing him to receive into his custody the prisoner convicted as a spy, and to see him hanged by the neck "to-morrow morning at daybreak."

Terrible things are reported of the manner in which this noble prisoner, this admirable gentleman and hero, was treated by his jailer and executioner. There are savages in every large army, and it is possible that this provost-marshal was one of them. It is said that he refused him writing-materials, and afterwards, when Captain Hale had been furnished them by others, destroyed before his face his last letters to his mother and to the young lady to whom he was engaged to be married. As those letters were never received this statement may be true. The other alleged horrors of the execution it is safe to disregard, because we know that it was conducted in the usual form and in the presence of many spectators and a considerable body of troops. One fact shines out from the distracting confusion of that morning, which will be cherished to the latest posterity as a precious ingot of the moral treasure of the American people. When asked if he had anything to say, Captain Hale replied:

"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

The scene of his execution was probably an old graveyard in Chambers Street, which was then called Barrack Street. General Howe formally notified General Washington of his execution. In recent years, through the industry of investigators, the pathos and sublimity of these events have been in part revealed.

In 1887 a bronze statue of the young hero was unveiled in the State House at Hartford. Mr. Charles Dudley Warner delivered a beautiful address suitable to the occasion, and Governor Lounsberry worthily accepted the statue on behalf of the State. It is greatly to be regretted that our knowledge of this noble martyr is so slight; but we know enough to be sure that he merits the veneration of his countrymen.

GENERAL WASHINGTON'S OTHER SPIES.

The reader would scarcely expect at this late day to get new light upon the military character of General Washington. But, in truth, scarcely a month passes in which some of our busy historical students do not add to our knowledge of him. Recently Mr. H.P. Johnston published in the Magazine of American History some curious documents, hitherto unknown, exhibiting Washington's methods of procuring intelligence of the movements of the British army.

Like a true general, he knew from the first all the importance of correct and prompt information. How necessary this is, is known to every one who remembers vividly the late war, particularly the first few months of it, before there was any good system of employing spies. Some terrible disasters could have been avoided if our generals had obtained better information of the opposing army's position, temper, and resources.

An attentive study of the dispatches of Napoleon Bonaparte will show the importance which he attached to intelligence of this kind. He kept near him at headquarters an officer of rank who had nothing to do but to procure, record, and arrange all the military news which could be gleaned from newspapers, correspondents, and spies. The name of every regiment, detachment, and corps in the enemy's service was written upon a card. For the reception of these cards he had a case made with compartments and pigeon-holes. Every time a movement was reported the cards were shifted to correspond, so that he could know at a glance, when the cards were spread out upon a table, just how the troops of the enemy were distributed or massed. Every few days, the officer in charge had to send the emperor a list of the changes which had taken place. This important matter was intrusted to a person who knew the languages of the different nations engaged in the war.

It was Bonaparte's perfect organization of his spy system which enabled him to carry out his plan of always having a superior force at the point of attack. These two were the great secrets of his tactical system, namely, to have the best information and the most men at the decisive moment.

Bonaparte was a trained soldier; but when Washington took command of the army in July, 1775, he had had very little experience of actual warfare. That little, however, was precisely of the kind to prove the value of correct information. For the want of it, he had seen General Braddock lead an army into the jaws of destruction, and he may have still possessed in some closet of Mount Vernon the coat with four bullet-holes in it which he had himself worn on that occasion. There are no warriors so skillful either at getting or concealing information as Indians, and all his experience hitherto had been in the Indian country and with warlike methods of an Indian character.

Hence it is not surprising to discover that the first important act which he performed at Cambridge was to engage a person to go into the city of Boston for the purpose of procuring "intelligence of the enemy's movements and designs." An entry in his private note-book shows that he paid this unknown individual $333.33 in advance.

A person who serves as a spy takes his life in his hand. It is a curious fact of human nature that nothing so surely reconciles a man to risking his life as a handsome sum in cash. General Washington, being perfectly aware of this fact, generally contrived to have a sum of what he called "hard money" at headquarters all through the war. Spies do not readily take to paper money. There are no Greenbackers among them. In the letters of General Washington we find a great many requests to Congress for a kind of money that would pass current anywhere, and suffer no deterioration at the bottom of a river in a freshet. He preferred gold as being the "most portable." He wrote in 1778 from White Plains:

"I have always found a difficulty in procuring intelligence by the means of paper money, and I perceive that it increases."

It continued to increase, until, I suppose, an offer of a million dollars in paper would not have induced a spy to enter the enemy's lines. In fact, the general himself says as much. In acknowledging the receipt of five hundred guineas for the secret service, he says that for want of a little gold he had been obliged to dispense with the services of some of his informers; and adds:

"In some cases no consideration in paper money has been found sufficient to effect even an engagement to procure intelligence; and where it has been otherwise, the terms of service on account of the depreciation have been high, if not exorbitant."

The time was not distant when paper money ceased to have any value, and Governor Jefferson of Virginia paid his whole salary for a year (a thousand pounds) for a second-hand side-saddle.

During the later years of the war, the city of New York was the chief source of information concerning the designs and movements of the enemy. General Washington, as early as 1778, had always two or three correspondents there upon whose information he could rely if only they could send it out to him. Sometimes, when his ordinary correspondents failed him, he would send in a spy disguised as a farmer driving a small load of provisions, and who would bring out some family supplies, as tea, sugar, and calico, the better to conceal his real object. Often the spy was a farmer, and sometimes quite illiterate. As it was unsafe for him to have any written paper upon his person, he was required to learn by heart the precise message which he was to deliver in the city, as also the information which he received from the resident correspondent.

The messenger frequently entered the city in the disguise of a peddler, a fact which suggested to Horace Greeley, when he was a printer's apprentice in Vermont, the idea of a story which he called "The Peddler-Spy of the Revolution." I once had in my hand a considerable package of his manuscript of this tale; but even as a boy he wrote so bad a hand that I could not read much of it. It is possible that this manuscript still exists.

These methods of procuring intelligence in New York were all abused by real peddlers, who, when they were caught selling contraband goods to the enemy, pretended to be spies, and so escaped the penalty. At length the general chiefly depended upon two persons, one called "Culper Senior," and the other "Culper Junior," who may have been father and son, but whose real names and qualities have never been disclosed. General Washington's secrecy was perfect. His most confidential officers, except one or two who had to be in the secret, never knew enough of these men to be able to designate them afterwards. When Benedict Arnold fled to New York after his treason, the American spies there were panic-stricken, as they very naturally concluded that Arnold must have been acquainted with their names and residences. General Washington was able to assure them that such was not the fact, and it is even probable that only one individual besides himself knew who they were. This was Major Benjamin Tallmadge, a native of Long Island, who frequently received the dispatches from New York and forwarded them to headquarters. The letters were commonly taken across the East River to Brooklyn; thence to a point on the Sound about opposite to Rye or Portchester; and were thence conveyed to camp.

The dispatches from the Culpers were generally written in invisible ink, which was made legible by wetting the paper with another liquid. It was a matter of no small difficulty to keep the spies in New York supplied with the two fluids, and also with the guineas which were requisite for their maintenance. At first the spies wrote their letters on a blank sheet of paper; but that would never do. General Washington wrote: