One Life for Liberty; B. Akers

THEFREEMAN IDEAS ON LIBERTY One Life for Liberty by Becky Akers A British artillery park, Sunday, September 22, 1776. It wants an hour to noon, but the sun glares mercilessly on the cannon, and the Redcoats milling about mop their brows. There's not much breeze, but what there is stinks of smoke: It blows from the south, where New York City lies smoldering after yesterday's fire. In front ofthe park is a tree.A cart and horse wait under it. A noose dangles overhead. In the cart stands a young and outrageously handsome man. He's serene, confident, almost cheerful. His hands are bound behind him. OthelWise,no one would guess he's about to die, like a murderer, like a thief. The hangman scrambles into the cart beside him, tugs the noose tight around his neck, tells him if he's got anything to say, he better say it now. He sweeps the British with eyes as blue as the East River behind them. "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country."

With those words, Captain Nathan Hale of the 19th Connecticut Regiment of the Conti nental Army is hanged for espionage. He is 21 years old. Old enough to have starved and marched for a year in Washington's army. Too young to have left anything but mundane letters and a matter-of-fact journal of his months as a Continental officer. Captain Hale wrote no inspired treatises on liberty, no books extolling freedom. He BeckyAkers has writtena novelon NathanHalefor which she is seeking publication. worked on a different, larger manuscript, that of the American Revolution. Historians often distort the Revolution into a class war of merchants against farmers, with independence from England the Patriots' only aim. But contemporaries knew exactly what the Revolution was about. Its commander-in chief was famous for calling George III "a tyrant," his government a "diabolical minis try," for exhorting his troops to "show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth." 1 The Congress running it was comprised of members like the Adamses, who lived, breathed, and dreamed liberty. ("But while I do live," John Adams said during debate on the Declaration of Independence, "let me have a country, and that a free country." Cousin Sam had written in 1772, "The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the willor legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.") Then there was the English convert cheering it on with such sentiments as "Gov ernment, even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.,,2 A man showed how much he valued freedom, how he wanted to live free of excises and restrictions on travel and regulations about how and where he conducted business, just by joining up.