kotorielle

Tuesday at noon, a color guard will lay a wreath at the Nathan Hale statue in City Hall Park. The Sons of the Revolution do it every year. This year is the 250th, so there is a reception after, and a special exhibition at Fraunces Tavern.

The statue is a thirteen-foot bronze by Frederick MacMonnies on a pink granite base, unveiled in 1893. Hale faces City Hall. His hands are tied behind his back. He is twenty-one forever, which is the age he was on the morning of September 22, 1776, when the British hanged him as a spy.

Nobody can prove where that happened.

Three plaques in Manhattan claim the site. One is on a building at Third Avenue and 66th Street. One is on the Yale Club at 44th and Vanderbilt, which is fitting, since Hale graduated from Yale in 1773. City Hall Park, then just the Common, is the third. A British officer's diary puts the hanging at “the Royal Artillery Park near the Dove Tavern at the old Post Road.” The Post Road is Third Avenue now, which is why 66th Street has the best paper claim. The Yale Club plaque says the artillery park was there instead. Grand Central gets mentioned too. Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, gets mentioned with nothing behind it at all.

His capture site is unconfirmed. His burial site is unconfirmed. So are the words.

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Nobody wrote that down at the time. The account comes from a British captain, John Montresor, who was there and who spoke with an American captain the next day. What he carried across was plainer: that Hale behaved with composure and resolution, that he thought it the duty of every good officer to obey orders, and that he asked the onlookers to be prepared to meet death in whatever shape it came. The famous line reads like a line from Addison's Cato, a play everyone in the colonies knew. He may have meant something like it. The record does not have it.

What the record has: a captain, twenty-one, who volunteered, was caught, and was hanged without trial on the order of General Howe. A rope. A date.

What the ground has now: at Broadway and Chambers, where the statue stands, a food truck parks at lunch and a line forms. At Third and 66th, there is a Starbucks and a block of apartments with fire escapes. Both are corners where people wait for coffee and lunch. Neither looks like a gallows, and both are claimed.

On Tuesday the wreath goes down at the foot of the statue in one of three places that claim him, on a date nobody disputes. The rest, the ground and the speech, we built afterward, and we keep tending it. That may be the honest monument: not the place he died, but the place we decided to remember him.