John Hale

“ To any one born and bred outside of a certain circle and unacquainted with the intricate weave of the social fabric of certain conservative New England towns, such a condition is inconceivable. No one would have denied the possibility of such a happening more decidedly than John Hale himself when he graduated from college with distinct literary honours, and set out upon a year of travel, before taking a congenial position offered him by his alma mater. ”

“ Now, to the mountain eye, Hale appeared no more than the ordinary man, and even a close observer would have seen no more than that his face was clean-cut and thoughtful, that his eye was blue and singularly clear and fearless, and that he was calm with a calmness that might come from anything else than stolidity of temperament—and that, by the way, is the self-control which counts most against the unruly passions of other men—but anybody near Hale, at a time when excitement was high and a crisis was imminent, would have felt the resultant of forces emanating from him that were beyond analysis. ”

“ Hale passed the night at the tavern, and at dawn went out to look for the expected boat. To his great joy he saw one moving toward the shore, with several men in it. Not doubting they were his friends, he hastened toward the beach, where, as the vessel touched the shore, he was astounded by the sight of a barge bearing British marines. He turned to flee, when a loud voice called, "Surrender or die!" Looking back he saw six men standing erect, with muskets leveled at him. ”

“ Hale dreaded the last spur before the little Gap was visible, but he hurried up the steep, and when he lifted his apprehensive eyes, the gladness of the earth was as nothing to the sudden joy in his own heart. The big Pine stood majestic, still unscathed, as full of divinity and hope to him as a rainbow in an eastern sky. Hale dropped his reins, lifted one hand to his dizzy head, let his transit to the ground, and started for it on a run. ”

“ Hale walked long that night in the moonlit woods up and around Imboden Hill, along a shadow-haunted path, between silvery beech-trunks, past the big hole in the earth from which dead trees tossed out their crooked arms as if in torment, and to the top of the ridge under which the valley slept and above which the dark bulk of Powell's Mountain rose. It was absurd, but he found himself strangely stirred. She was a child, he kept repeating to himself, in spite of the fact that he knew she was no child among her own people, and that mountain girls were even wives who were younger still. ”

“ The Kentuckians are coming!” And, at double quick, the Guard rushed back to find it a false alarm and to see men laughing at them in the street. The truth was that, while the Falins had a general hostility against the Guard, their particular enmity was concentrated on John Hale, as he discovered when June was to take her first trip home one Friday afternoon. Hale meant to carry her over, but the morning they were to leave, old Judd Tolliver came to the Gap himself. He did not want June to come home at that time, and he didn't think it was safe over there for Hale just then. ”

“ In the shadows below, it smote the mists into tatters; leaf and bush glittered as though after a heavy rain, and down Hale went under a trembling dew-drenched world and along a tumbling series of water-falls that flashed through tall ferns, blossoming laurel and shining leaves of rhododendron. Once he heard something move below him and then the crackling of brush sounded far to one side of the road. He knew it was a man who would be watching him from a covert and, straightway, to prove his innocence of any hostile or secret purpose, he began to whistle. ”

“ It was a boy, and one of twelve children, whose father, Richard Hale, had emigrated in early life from Newberry, in Massachusetts, to Coventry, and there married Elizabeth Strong, a charming maiden eighteen years of age. He was a descendant of Robert Hale, or Hales, who settled in Charlestown, in 1632, and who seems to have been a scion of the Hales of Kent, for he bore their coat-of-arms—three broad arrows feathered white, on a red field.
Both Richard and Elizabeth Hale were of the strictest sect of the Puritans of their day. They revered the Bible [Pg 4] as the voice of God ”

“ A few years ago he entered the political arena, and at the general election held in the spring of 1887 was elected to represent the county of Carleton in the Dominion parliament at Ottawa. Mr. Hale is a director of the St. John Valley Railway. He takes an interest in Masonry, and is a member of the Woodstock lodge; and also a member of the Woodstock Royal Arch Chapter. In politics he is a Liberal; and in religion an adherent of the Free Baptist church. Mr. Hale has been twice married. On the 20th June, 1869, to Rhoda, daughter of the late George McGee; she died on the 16th June, 1870. ”

“ It is said that two of Deacon Hale's sons fell in love with her youngest daughter, Alice [Pg 9] Adams, who, at Deacon Hale's desire, came to live permanently in the family in 1770 or 1771, while his second son, John, married her eldest daughter, Sarah Adams, on December 19, 1770.
The lives of both these women, Sarah and Alice Adams, are sufficient witnesses to the high character of the new mother added to the Hale household. To several of his biographers it has seemed quite probable that Nathan Hale wrote one of his last two letters to this mother. ”

“ To this home Richard Hale, married May 2, 1746, at the age of twenty-nine, brought his young bride, Elizabeth Strong. If Richard Hale's pedigree was a good one, his wife, Elizabeth Strong, came from a family even more finely endowed. The first of her ancestors who came to America was Elder John Strong. He was one of the found [Pg 5] ers of Dorchester, now a part of Boston; later he helped to found Northampton, Massachusetts. ”

“ Tradition tells us that Hale was conveyed from Norwalk to Huntington Bay on a sloop, and was landed from her yawl two hours before daybreak in the neighborhood of a place called "The Cedars." Near there a Widow Chichester, a stanch loyalist (called "Widow Chich") , kept a tavern, which was the resort of all the Tories in that region. Hale passed this dangerous place with safety before cock-crowing, and at a farm-house a mile distant he was kindly furnished with breakfast and a bed for repose after his night's toil. ”

“ It is a just reproach to a nation of nearly sixty million freemen, rich and powerful beyond any other people on the globe, that the memory of Nathan Hale, their self-sacrificing benefactor in purpose, and a true and noble martyr in the cause of the liberty they enjoy, has been, until lately, absolutely neglected by them; that no "monody, eulogy, monument of marble or of brass," dedicated to him by the public voice, appears anywhere in our broad land. ”

“ Then we shut them in, in the dark, and cross the well-cleared roadway to the shed, and so home again. Certainly Mrs. Empson's kerosene lamp is in her window. That must be her light which gives a little halo in that direction in the falling snow. That looks like society.
And this time Huldah undresses the baby, puts on her yellow flannel night-gown,—makes the whole as long as it may be,—and then, still making believe be jolly, lights another lamp, eats her own supper, clears it away, and cuts into the new Harper which John had brought up to her the day before. ”

“ So ended, in an atmosphere of mingled Christian faith, fortitude, and hope, and of savage barbarism and brutality, the beautiful life-drama of Nathan Hale, the early martyr for the cause of human freedom in the grand struggle for the independence of our country. It is a cause for just reproach of our people that their history, poetry, oratory, and art have, for more than a century, neglected to erect a fitting memorial to his memory—either in the literature of the land he so loved that he freely gave his young life a sacrifice for its salvation from bondage, or in bronze or marble. ”

“ Hale watched her while she munched a striped stick of peppermint. Her crimson bonnet had fallen from her sunlit hair and straight down from it to her bare little foot with its stubbed toe just darkening with dried blood, a sculptor would have loved the rounded slenderness in the curving long lines that shaped her brown throat, her arms and her hands, which were prettily shaped but so very dirty as to the nails, and her dangling bare leg. ”

“ The principal authorities for Hale's biography are Burnet's Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale, London, 1682, 8vo; and the brief account given in Wood's Athenae Oxon. ed. Bliss, iii. 1090-6. Of more recent lives the most ambitious is Memoirs of the Life, Character, and Writings of Sir Matthew Hale, knt., Lord Chief Justice of England, by John (afterwards Sir John) Bickerton Williams, LL.D., F.S.A., London, 1835, a careful compilation marred by the author's painful desire to edify. ”

“ Hale had risen early, as everyone must if he would get his breakfast in the mountains, even in the hotels in the county seats, and he sat with his feet on the railing of the hotel porch which fronted the main street of the town. He had had his heart-breaking failures since the autumn before, but he was in good cheer now, for his feverish enthusiasm had at last clutched a man who would take up not only his options on the great Gap beyond Black Mountain but on the cannel-coal lands of Devil Judd Tolliver as well. ”

“ With a groan Hale tumbled from his horse. Fool that he was, he had forgotten the sensitive pride of the mountaineer, even while he was thinking of that pride. He knew that fun might be made of her speech and her garb by her schoolmates over at the Gap, and he was trying to prepare her—to save her mortification, to make her understand.
“Why, June, little girl, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. You don't understand—you can't now, but you will. Trust me, won't you? I like you just as you are. I LOVE the way you talk. But other people—forgive me, won't you?” ”

“ Hale said, “stand aside, Judd!” Bub leaped to the door with a Winchester—his eyes wild and his face white.
“Watch out, men!” Hale called, and as the men raised their guns there was a shriek inside the cabin and June stood at Bub's side, barefooted, her hair tumbled about her shoulders, and her hand clutching the little cross at her throat.
“Stop!” she shrieked. “He isn't here. He's—he's gone!” For a moment a sudden sickness smote Hale's face, then Devil Judd's ruse flashed to him and, wheeling, he sprang to the ground. ”

“ No doubt he did, Hale thought, keep peace or mischief with or against anybody with that face of his. That was a common type of the bad man, that horseman who had galloped away from the gate—but this old man with his dual face, who preached the Word on Sundays and on other days was a walking arsenal; who dreamed dreams and had visions and slipped through the hills in his mysterious moccasins on errands of mercy or chasing men from vanity, personal enmity or for fun, and still appeared so sane—he was a type that confounded. ”

“ She had cried out impulsively to save Hale, but Dave would not understand. No, in his eyes she had been false to family and friends—to the clan—she had sided with “furriners.” What would her father say? Perhaps she'd better go home next day—perhaps for good—for there was a deep unrest within her that she could not fathom, a premonition that she was at the parting of the ways, a vague fear of the shadows that hung about the strange new path on which her feet were set. The old mill creaked in the moonlight below her. ”

“ June lost the subtlety in Miss Hale's emphasis, but she fell with instant submission under such gentle authority, and though she could say nothing, her eyes glistened and her lips quivered, and without looking to Hale, she followed his sister out of the room. Hale stood still. He had watched the meeting with apprehension and now, surprised and grateful, he went to Helen's parlour and waited with a hopeful heart. ”

“ HALES, JOHN (1584–1656) , the 'ever memorable,' was born in St. James's parish, Bath, on 19 April 1584. His father, John Hales, of an old Somersetshire stock, had an estate at Highchurch, near Bath, and was steward to the Horner family. After passing through the Bath grammar school, Hales went to Oxford on 16 April 1597 as a scholar of Corpus Christi College, and graduated B.A. on 9 July 1603 (Oxf. Univ. Reg., Oxf. Hist. Soc., ii. iii. 243) . His remarkable learning and philosophic acumen brought him under the notice of Sir Henry Savile, and secured his election as fellow of Merton in 1605. ”

“ John Root handed to his wife their daughter's letter; she read it, and gave it to Grace, who read it, and gave it to her grandmother. No one read it aloud. To read aloud in such trials is not the custom of New England.
Boston, Dec. 24, 1848.
Dear Father and Mother,—It is dreadful to disappoint you all, but I cannot come. I am all ready, and this goes by the carriage that was to take me to the cars. But our dear little Horace has just been brought home, I am afraid, dying; but we cannot tell, and I cannot leave him. You know there is really no one who can do what I can. ”

“ By I.W. Stuart, Hartford, 1856.
[11] A statue in plaster, modeled from a description of Hale's features and person, has been made by E.S. Wood, sculptor. It represents an athletic young man, with his coat and vest removed, his neck and upper portion of his chest bared by the turning down of the collar of his ruffled shirt, and holding in his right hand, which is resting upon his hip, the rope with which he is about to be suspended from the tree. The face of the martyr is an excellent ideal of the character of the young hero.
John André ”