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The Martyr and the Traitor - Nathan Hale, Moses Dunbar, and the American Revolution (Hardcover)
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The Martyr and the Traitor - Nathan Hale, Moses Dunbar, and the American Revolution (Hardcover)
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Two men from Connecticut, each embarked on a dangerous mission,
slipped onto Long Island in September 1776. Only a few weeks
earlier, British forces had routed the Continental Army and taken
control of New York City. The future of the infant American
republic, barely two months old, looked bleak. One of the men, a
soldier disguised as a schoolmaster, made his way to the British
fortifications on Manhattan and began furtively taking notes and
making sketches to bring back to the beleaguered American general,
George Washington. The second visitor had quite different plans. He
had come to Long Island to accept a captain's commission in a
loyalist regiment, an undertaking that obligated him to return to
Connecticut and recruit more farmers to join the King's forces. As
events turned out, neither man completed his mission. Instead, each
met his death at the end of a hangman's rope, one executed as a spy
for the American cause and the other as a traitor to it. In this
book, Virginia Anderson traces the lives of these two men, Nathan
Hale and Moses Dunbar, to explore how middle-class men made
decisions on a daily basis amidst the uncertainties of war that
determined not just their own fates but also the ways in which they
have been remembered or forgotten in history. Hale uttered a line
that has become famous ("I only regret, that I have but one life to
lose for my country") and, after being captured and executed as a
spy by the British, and the Americans winning the war, has been
memorialized as a martyr to the Revolutionary cause. His life is
neatly contrasted with Dunbar, a Loyalist who was captured and
sentenced to death by the Connecticut Assembly. This braided
narrative, intertwining the lives of Hale and Dunbar, offers a
poignant snapshot of the political loyalties men forge in momentous
times, how their families shaped and reacted to those decisions,
and how difficult it is to judge individuals' decisionmaking in
wartime without the benefit of hindsight, when the outcome is
dependent on complex factors. This book bridges"great man"
biographies about the American Revolution and the "bottom up"
social histories of common men, and the histories of patriots and
loyalists. Its accessible style makes it appropriate for anyone
interested in Revolutionary America.
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