Curious regulars surely eyed Captain Montresor’s white marquee, where a young American officer captured out of uniform on Long Island now waited for the hangman to summon him to his death. At age twenty-one, Captain Nathan Hale deserved a longer life and a better fate. “He was calm,” Montresor later reported, “and bore himself with gentle dignity.” Born and raised in Connecticut, Hale was described by a fellow officer as having “very fair skin, blue eyes, flaxen or very light hair which was always kept short.… His bodily agility was remarkable.” At Yale, which he entered at fourteen, he was
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