Nathan Hale, Roger Sherman, and One Noble Scot

Monumental heroes well known, little known, and unknown

L ast week I wrote about the art of the American Revolution, mostly John Trumbull’s. The best of it is at the art gallery at Yale, then a Patriot hotbed. This week I’ll go colony-wide and look at heroes Nathan Hale and Roger Sherman. And I’ll say something nice about a noble Scot on the wrong side.

I’ll start with Hale (1755–1776), a savant, Yale class of 1773, born to an affluent family in Coventry, southeast of Hartford. On orders from General Howe, he was hanged on September 22, 1776, for spying. His execution was possibly on 66th and Third Avenue in Manhattan, the site now, funnily enough, of a Banana Republic. Or he may’ve been hanged near the Yale Club, across the street from Grand Central.

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” are Hale’s famous last words before he died with grace and courage. By 1776, he was a regiment captain and a fervently patriotic teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. He was also a green recruit to Washington’s new spy network and was arrested after only a week undercover in New York posing as a Dutch teacher looking for work. He’d admitted to a Loyalist posing as a Patriot that he was a rebel. In another take, a Loyalist cousin serving with Howe fingered him. His spy notes, in Latin, were tucked in his pockets along with, of all things, his Yale diploma. Not a very Dutch thing to have. He was no George Smiley.

Monuments to Hale dot the landscape, at Yale, the State Capitol in Hartford, downtown in New York not far from the stock exchange, and on the CIA campus in Virginia. No one knows what he looked like except that he was tall, blond, and blue-eyed. This ideal alone would make him a Yankee matinee idol, but character counts, too. Putting aside his naïveté in espionage, Hale evokes principle, stoicism, reserve, civic-mindedness, and reverence for God, country, and words. And put “youthful” before every quality. How to get the look right?

Frederick MacMonnies’s 1893 bronze sculpture, in the heart of Manhattan’s Financial District, is best known. His has Hale with arms and ankles bound, his coat rumpled, and his long hair tied in back. His shirt is open, exposing his neck. The pose is right, but the face is generic, and bronze does nothing for blue-eyed blonds.

Bela Pratt’s Hale, originally commissioned for Nathan’s alma mater in 1912, and unveiled in 1914, is more composed and minimalist. Its Yale-alumnus patron thought that MacMonnies’s statue was too bombastic. Pratt used a model from southeastern Connecticut where Hale taught. He thought the model was a Connecticut Yankee type. A copy of the statue is at CIA headquarters. Pratt’s bronze palette is lighter, so Hale seems fairer. It works. Hale is so slender that he could slip under a locked door, as any good spy could.

The Nathan Hale Homestead in Coventry, a house museum, belonged to the Patriot’s parents but was built a few months after he died. Set in spacious fields, it’s a handsome Colonial Georgian pile with next to nothing of Nathan in it.

Roger Sherman (1721–1793) is the Patriot heavyweight few know. He was New Haven’s first mayor and the longtime treasurer of Yale, but he dwells on Olympus as the only man to sign all four of the nation’s founding documents: the Articles of Association in 1774, the Declaration in 1776, the Articles of Confederation in 1777, and the Constitution in 1787. He was a player in all four, often as the éminence grise and dealmaker.

John Adams said of Sherman that he was “one of the soundest and strongest pillars of the Revolution even if his air is the reverse of grace,” and Adams was no Cary Grant, so Sherman must have been, let’s say, a tad rustic. Jefferson said Sherman was “a man who never said a foolish thing in his life.” Ralph Earl’s portrait from around 1775 suggests that their takes were on the mark. Sherman, like Hale, was a savant but lacked a Yale education or any education aside from what he learned from life and independent study. Sitting in a Windsor chair, he looks the part — stiff, angular, wary, taking our measure, calculating. A listener rather than a talker. No periwigs for him. Homespun is his speed.

First a cobbler, Sherman then wrote almanacs, served as a judge, and taught religion at Yale. Adams called him “an old Puritan,” and a Puritan frame of mind was a natural fit for a movement aimed at shedding a monarchy, an aristocracy, and an Anglican mise-en-scène. He was one of five members of the committee that drafted the Declaration. He’s best known for the Constitution’s Connecticut Plan, the compromise that gave us a House apportioned by population, alongside a Senate of two senators per state. James Madison’s Virginia Plan set forth a scenario in which both bodies would be proportional, but Sherman wasn’t to be snookered. He knew that under Madison’s plan, Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York would call the shots.

Sherman would be appalled to know that senators are now elected by voters, who are quickly misled and manipulated. Senators, in his view, ought to represent state legislatures. So true. The 17th Amendment, according to which senators are directly elected by each state’s voters rather than by its legislature, has created more showboats than MGM. To paraphrase the dirty cop Comey, “86 17.” Not as catchy as “Keep Cool with Coolidge,” but you get the point.

Sherman was also the power behind Article 1, Section 8, which enumerated the powers of Congress with Yankee specificity. Worried about the elasticity of Article 1, Section 8’s “necessary and proper” clause — “Congress shall have the power to . . . make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers” — Sherman pushed for the Tenth Amendment, reminding Americans that undelegated powers stay with the states or people. Lotta good that did anyone. Once born, the cute and cuddly baby beast of the federal government mutated and moistened. We know it today as the Swamp.

Sherman kept no diaries, wrote no memoirs, and passed on The Five’s multiple invites, so he got plaques and only one full-size sculpture. That’s in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol crypt among other civic notables, two from each state. The other Connecticut hero is Jonathan Trumbull, the Revolutionary War governor and de facto chief commissary about whom I wrote last week. Chauncey Ives, a Connecticut-born sculptor living and working in Rome, carved both of them, giving Sherman a toga. A critic wrote in 1903 that “of all the dead men there,” referring to the then 90 sculptures in the crypt, Sherman and Trumbull “seem the most conscious of being dead.”

Most history-minded Americans think that tiny Connecticut remained unscathed during the Revolution, but no, it didn’t. For starters, in July 1779, Tryon’s Raid targeted New Haven, Norwalk, and Fairfield, all port towns on Long Island Sound. The British General Henry Clinton hoped to distract and engage Washington’s army, then mostly in New Jersey and West Point.

The story is juicy. Locals often saw British ships in the Sound on patrol, but on July 4, there seemed more boats than usual. The Fourth was a Sunday, so townspeople were busy praying and preparing a parade for July 5 and likely a bacchanal for the Declaration’s third anniversary — America 003. Was a raid on New London or Newport in the works? No. Early next morning, British Generals William Tryon and General George Garth launched a double-prong attack, part in East Haven, east of New Haven’s harbor, where Tryon’s troops, though doing some damage, were advancing as slow as snails while Patriot militia fired on them from trees, from behind fences, and from rooftops and then disappeared. Jacob Thorpe, a Connecticut militiaman from ye olde North Haven, where I grew up, was killed. He was my cousin and one of close to a hundred of my family members who fought on the Patriot side over the yearslong war. None, zero, nunca, zilch fought for the king and taxation without representation.

In the wee hours of July 5, a 20-year-old lookout in West Haven, west of the harbor, spotted a squadron of British ships headed his way. He fired a signal gun. Before long, Garth’s troops landed at Savin Rock in West Haven — in my day, a honky-tonk amusement park with a roller coaster, hot dog joints, and pits for cock fights.

Fifty British ships, red, white, and blue ensigns flying, filled the patch of water by Savin Rock, and flat-bottomed boats landed infantry on the beach. It was as if the whole British Empire was about to descend. Ringing church bells roused local militias. It was D-Day, but the bad guys were doing the invading. The only kraut was Hessian. By the West River bridge, the Patriots had managed to mount an effective stand, but after a firefight the Brits pushed through. By late afternoon, they’d made it to New Haven’s town green and the Yale campus, marching through what would become an Irish and then Italian ghetto, a slum and Black Panthers headquarters, and now home to Yale’s medical complex.

Today, across from the West River are three radiating boulevards, at the start of which, in a small park, is the Defenders’ Monument, a bronze behemoth from 1910 depicting a cannon manned by three types. One is a well-to-do, forty-something merchant in uniform, another is a yeoman farmer, and a third is a young Yale student. They look dressed by L.L. Bean, but it’s still effective. The thinking in 1910 was that the British had Wellington, the French had Napoleon, and the Germans had Frederick the Great, all revered. We Americans had Washington and Grant, but we particularly cherish what the monument’s sponsors called “men of lesser fame,” still men of valor. A nice American touch. We’re an egalitarian country.

Once in a deserted New Haven center, Garth delivered a public address that his men had posted everywhere along the way. It called the local cause “the ungenerous and wanton insurrection” and warned, “Your town, your property, and yourselves lie within the grasp of the power you have ungenerously construed as fear.” Abandon the frenzy and accept British immunity, or else.

As night fell, though, Garth and Tryon took stock. Tryon’s troops in East Haven were stuck two miles away. The Brits were sitting ducks. Though New Haven looked abandoned, potshots rang. Their commander, General Clinton, had ordered them either to capture the town and the countryside or skedaddle “within 24 or 48 hours,” before a larger militia could muster. They decided to retreat.

Today, West Haven’s busy main drag is Campbell Avenue, named for William Campbell, a Scotsman and seasoned professional soldier who went from a grunt to second-in-command of Garth’s elite British regiment. Recalling the horrors to which the English had submitted the Scots after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Campbell had ordered troops under his and Garth’s command to desist from looting, promising on-the-spot court martials of anyone who disobeyed. He was especially solicitous of West Haven’s Congregational minister, who’d broken his leg.

Campbell died while searching for a road circumventing where the Defenders’ Monument now sits. While he was helping a young Patriot who lay wounded, possibly a trap, a musket ball killed him. He’s buried somewhere there, but he wasn’t forgotten. In 1891, the townspeople erected a small granite memorial bearing Campbell’s name, date of death, and the inscription “Blessed Are the Merciful.” It’s thought to be the only memorial to an overseas enemy combatant in America. That is, unless we count the freak Platner’s Nazi tattoo. Who wouldn’t shudder to think what lurks on AOC’s caboose? I bet it’s not Mount Rushmore.

After Campbell’s death, the Lobsterbacks reverted to their thieving norm. Houses were looted but not burned until their stores of booze were found, so the melee that night was a drunken one. Sherman’s house was among those sacked. His son’s house was burned. Bullets whizzed through windows, knicking furniture and leaving holes in walls. Yale President Ezra Stiles called the looting promiscuous, but he exaggerated. Things got rowdy, but most of the town center was unmolested. That’s 300 houses, four churches, and the Yale campus. “’Tis too pretty a place to burn,” Garth said, and away they went. Patriots fired randomly and in stealth at their rear positions to dissuade them from changing their minds.