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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Man Without a Country, and Other Tales," Edward Everett Hale employs a poignant narrative style characterized by emotional depth and moral introspection. Central to the titular novella is the heart-wrenching story of Philip Nolan, an American who, after renouncing his country, faces the profound consequence of living without it. This tale serves as a critique of disloyalty and emphasizes the vital connection between an individual and their nation, resonating within the broader context of post-Civil War America, when national identity was under scrutiny. The other tales in this collection showcase Hale's versatility, blending adventure, romance, and philosophical themes that reveal the complexities of human experience and morality. Hale, a prominent clergyman, and writer of the late 19th century, was deeply influenced by the political climate of his time. His reflections on patriotism, loyalty, and democracy stem from a rich background in literature and social reform. His work often sought to inspire readers to reflect on their own responsibilities to society, drawing from his own convictions and activism in various social causes, including abolitionism. This collection is highly recommended for readers seeking a multifaceted exploration of identity and morality intertwined with compelling narratives. Hale's engaging prose and profound insights make it essential reading for anyone interested in American literature, reflecting the era's tensions and aspirations. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Man Without a Country, and Other Tales
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection presents Edward Everett Hale's The Man Without a Country alongside a wide array of companion pieces that display his versatility as storyteller, satirist, and public moralist. Drawn from his nineteenth‑century output, it gathers narratives and sketches, items identified as From the Ingham Papers, and other occasional writings into a coherent view of his craft. The volume’s scope extends from compact fictions to chaptered narratives and documentary-styled compositions, concluding with a checklist of Edward E. Hale’s writings and notes that aid orientation. Together these selections invite readers to encounter Hale’s literary voice as it worked in concert with his civic imagination.
As the collection’s touchstone, The Man Without a Country establishes Hale’s method of fusing narrative urgency with ethical inquiry. Set in motion by a disciplinary sentence that banishes a young American officer from any news of his nation, the tale uses a maritime frame to probe belonging, allegiance, and the costs of indifference. Written in the wartime climate of its time, its tone is sober yet compassionate, designed to move readers toward reflection rather than spectacle. Its sustained afterlife within American letters explains its prominence here, where it anchors the broader exploration of duty and identity that the remaining pieces pursue.
Several entries appear under the rubric From the Ingham Papers, a flexible fictional framework Hale employed for essays, stories, and mock documents. The device allows an editorial persona to present letters, dispatches, and reports with a convincing air of immediacy, turning the commonplace machinery of print culture into a narrative engine. In materials such as Special Despatch, Letter from Captain Ingham, and The South American Editor, official and journalistic forms are mined for humor, perspective, and moral emphasis. By shifting among voices and formats, Hale invites readers to test appearances, weigh competing claims, and recognize the responsibilities that accompany public communication.
The range of subjects is notably broad. Maritime and exploratory interests surface in The Last of the Florida and The Last Voyage of the Resolute, while A Piece of Possible History plays with history’s contingencies. Urban and seasonal concerns appear in Christmas Waits in Boston. Other selections, including The Old and the New, Face to Face, A Thumb-Nail Sketch, and The Dot and Line Alphabet, adopt the forms of portrait, comparison, and applied ingenuity. My Double, and How He Undid Me, presented as one of the Ingham Papers, adapts a comic premise to examine overwork and identity. The Children of the Public unfolds across chapters, sustaining Hale’s attention to civic life.
Across the volume the reader encounters short stories, sketches, satirical pieces, and documentary facsimiles such as official letters and despatches. There are chaptered narratives with an essayistic spine, brief character studies, and experimental examinations of communication systems. The inclusion of items designated as From the Ingham Papers signals Hale’s interest in framing devices that blur the boundary between report and invention. Alongside these imaginative works, the collection provides a bibliographic listing of Edward E. Hale’s writings and editorial notes, reinforcing its function as both a reading experience and a compact reference. The multiplicity of text types testifies to Hale’s range and purpose.
Unifying the disparate forms are concerns that recur throughout Hale’s career: civic responsibility, national belonging, personal conscience, and practical reform. He writes with a steady balance of sentiment and wit, favoring clarity, anecdote, and illustrative incident over ornament. Ships and cities alike become stages on which questions of loyalty, service, and neighborliness are tried. Scientific and technological novelties—communication codes, dispatch systems, editorial networks—serve not as curiosities but as instruments for social connection. The result is a body of work that treats literature as an active participant in public life, urging readers toward empathy joined to action.
Taken together, these works remain significant for the way they model a literature of engagement—entertaining, accessible, and oriented toward the common good. By moving confidently among genres, Hale demonstrates how narrative, satire, and quasi-documentary forms can illuminate shared problems without sacrificing pleasure. The collection preserves the historical textures of nineteenth-century American discourse while speaking beyond its moment, inviting contemporary readers to consider how stories shape civic imagination. Its enduring appeal lies less in any single tour de force than in the composite portrait it offers: a writer bringing craft to bear on the intertwined claims of identity, community, and duty.
Historical Context
Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909), born in Boston, entered Harvard at thirteen and graduated in 1839. He was the son of newspaper editor Nathan Hale and Sarah Everett, sister of statesman Edward Everett (1794–1865), and the grand-nephew of Revolutionary martyr Nathan Hale. Ordained a Unitarian minister in 1846, he took the pulpit of South Congregational Church in Boston in 1856. His formation in Boston’s reformist, abolitionist, and intellectual circles, alongside figures like James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and his steady contributions to the Atlantic Monthly after its founding in 1857, shaped a civic-minded fiction that undergirds the tales gathered in this collection.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) supplied the crucible for Hale’s most famous patriotic fiction, notably The Man Without a Country, first published in 1863 in the Atlantic. Naval controversies that rattled international law animate other pieces: the Confederate cruiser Florida was seized by USS Wachusett in Bahia, Brazil, in October 1864 in violation of Brazilian neutrality, and later sank near Newport News. Alongside the Trent Affair of 1861 and the sinking of the Alabama off Cherbourg in 1864, these episodes, finally tempered by the Treaty of Washington in 1871 and the Alabama Claims arbitration, inform Hale’s treatments of loyalty, honor, and diplomacy at sea.
Mid-century journalism and the telegraph transformed how Americans understood war and the world. Samuel Morse’s code and lines spread in the 1840s; the first transatlantic cable flashed briefly in 1858 and was permanently laid in 1866, while the Associated Press, founded in 1846, coordinated news. Dispatches, bulletins, and the rhetoric of immediate communication seep into Hale’s narrative method. The Ingham Papers mimic dossiers and letters, reflecting a culture of speed and verification. The Dot and Line Alphabet gestures toward codes and pedagogy, and The South American Editor suggests the relay of foreign intelligence through Boston and New York offices, where translation, timing, and credibility mattered.
Maritime exploration and Anglo-American comity form another thread. The Arctic search for Sir John Franklin, missing since 1845, enthralled readers. HMS Resolute, abandoned in ice in 1854, was found adrift in 1855 by New London captain James Buddington, refitted at American expense, and ceremonially returned to Queen Victoria on 12 December 1856. The event symbolized scientific cooperation and goodwill that outlasted wartime frictions. Later, timber from Resolute became a desk presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. The Last Voyage of the Resolute draws on this shared seafaring saga, where exploration, labor, and diplomacy intersect in the moral imagination of the period.
Antebellum and Gilded Age reforms nourished Hale’s Social Gospel commitments. Massachusetts led common school reforms under Horace Mann from 1837; Boston’s charities and settlement efforts expanded with immigration and industrialization; and the Boston Fire of 1872 strained civic resources. As a pastor and organizer, Hale founded Lend a Hand clubs and popularized the motto later collected in Ten Times One is Ten in 1870. Stories such as The Children of the Public and Christmas Waits in Boston weigh municipal duty against private benevolence, dramatizing how public schools, relief agencies, and voluntary associations tried to address poverty, juvenile welfare, and the moral education of an urban democracy.
The political landscape after Appomattox framed debates within Hale’s civic satires. Reconstruction (1865–1877) introduced the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and the Fifteenth in 1870, while questions of federal capacity and local responsibility multiplied. Simultaneously, the patronage-heavy spoils system and congressional pork-barrel practices drew scrutiny, anticipating the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. Hale’s narratives about budgets, barrels, and bureaucrats transpose Boston ward politics onto national dilemmas of taxation, public works, and administrative ethics. His fiction urges a republican stewardship in which elected officials, editors, clergy, and citizens share accountability for the public purse and for the equitable delivery of services.
The magazine revolution shaped Hale’s forms, voices, and audiences. He wrote under editors James Russell Lowell and William Dean Howells at the Atlantic, and himself edited Our Young Folks (1865–1873) and Old and New (1870–1875). The period favored serial publication, conversational essays, and experiments in realism. My Double, and How He Undid Me mordantly stages clerical overwork amid proliferating committees and clubs. A Piece of Possible History toys with counterfactual logic to probe contingency in civic life. Across the collection, pseudo-documents, parables, and moral anecdotes exhibit a didactic but playful trust in print culture to test reforms and to tutor the conscience.
Hale’s outlook was hemispheric and global. Boston’s merchants traded along Atlantic routes, and American policy from the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to postbellum commercial expansion kept Latin America in northern newspapers. Filibustering ventures like William Walker’s in Nicaragua and the Paraguayan War of 1864–1870 provided contexts for editors, envoys, and captains who populate these tales. Such settings, alongside European and colonial ports, place American identity in conversation with migration, maritime law, and international arbitration. Living to see the Spanish-American War in 1898 and serving as Chaplain of the U.S. Senate from 1903 to 1909, Hale traced the nation’s passage from sectional crisis to global responsibility.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Man Without a Country
After rashly renouncing the United States during a court-martial, young officer Philip Nolan is condemned to spend his life at sea, forbidden even to hear his country’s name; the story follows his exile and deepening sense of patriotism.
Naval Papers on 'The Florida' (The Last of the Florida; Special Despatch; Letter from Captain Ingham, in Command of the Florida)
A pseudo-documentary trio tracing the pursuit and fate of the Confederate raider Florida through reports and letters, blending naval adventure with satire of wartime journalism and reflections on neutrality and international law.
A Piece of Possible History
A speculative vignette sketching a plausible episode in near-contemporary American affairs, meant to show how contingent choices could redirect national history.
The South American Editor
A humorous sketch of an editor tasked with covering South America despite scant facts, lampooning parochialism and the manufacture of 'foreign news.'
Selections from the Ingham Papers: Brief Sketches (The Old and the New, Face to Face; A Thumb-Nail Sketch; The Dot and Line Alphabet; One of the Ingham Papers)
Short essays and jeux d’esprit attributed to Frederick Ingham: a dialogue between past and present, a miniature character study, a playful symbol system of dots and lines, and a meta-piece establishing the Ingham manuscript conceit.
The Last Voyage of the Resolute
An account of the Arctic exploration ship Resolute—abandoned in the ice, recovered by Americans, and returned—told as a tale of endurance, seamanship, and international goodwill.
My Double, and How He Undid Me
A harried clergyman recruits a lookalike to share his public duties, only to have the double’s success unsettle his life and authority, with comic and cautionary results.
The Children of the Public (Chs. I–Last: The Pork-Barrel; Where Is the Barrel?; My Life to Its Crisis; The Crisis; Chapter Last)
A reformer’s narrative about securing public support for children’s welfare, charting the search for funding, bureaucratic obstacles, a personal turning point, and a practical program for civic responsibility.
Fausta's Story
A woman’s first-person account of love and loyalty tested amid political unrest and perilous errands, told with the urgency of confession.
The Skeleton in the Closet
A domestic mystery in which a long-hidden document exposes a compromising secret, forcing a reckoning between public honor and private history.
Christmas Waits in Boston
A seasonal city sketch following the quiet labors that bring Christmas to the overlooked, celebrating communal charity and urban fellowship.
Edward E. Hale's Writings
A bibliographic catalogue summarizing Hale’s published works and their themes.
Notes
Editorial annotations that supply context, sources, and clarifications for the pieces in the volume.
The Man Without a Country, and Other Tales
THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.
FROM THE INGHAM PAPERS.
This story was written in the summer of 1863, as a contribution, however humble, towards the formation of a just and true national sentiment, or sentiment of love to the nation. It was at the time when Mr. Vallandigham had been sent across the border. It was my wish, indeed, that the story might be printed before the autumn elections of that year—as my "testimony" regarding the principles involved in them—but circumstances delayed its publication till the December number of the Atlantic appeared.
It is wholly a fiction, "founded on fact[2q]." The facts on which it is founded are these—that Aaron Burr sailed down the Mississippi River in 1805, again in 1806, and was tried for treason in 1807. The rest, with one exception to be noticed, is all fictitious.
It was my intention that the story should have been published with no author's name, other than that of Captain Frederic Ingham, U.S.N. Whether writing under his name or my own, I have taken no liberties with history other than such as every writer of fiction is privileged to take—indeed, must take, if fiction is to be written at all.
The story having been once published, it passed out of my hands. From that moment it has gradually acquired different accessories, for which I am not responsible. Thus I have heard it said, that at one bureau of the Navy Department they say that [pg 006] Nolan was pardoned, in fact, and returned home to die. At another bureau, I am told, the answer to questions is, that, though it is true that an officer was kept abroad all his life, his name was not Nolan. A venerable friend of mine in Boston, who discredits all tradition, still recollects this "Nolan court-martial." One of the most accurate of my younger friends had noticed Nolan's death in the newspaper, but recollected "that it was in September, and not in August." A lady in Baltimore writes me, I believe in good faith, that Nolan has two widowed sisters residing in that neighborhood. A correspondent of the Philadelphia Despatch believed "the article untrue, as the United States corvette 'Levant' was lost at sea nearly three years since, between San Francisco and San Juan." I may remark that this uncertainty as to the place of her loss rather adds to the probability of her turning up after three years in Lat. 2° 11' S., Long. 131° W. A writer in the New Orleans Picayune, in a careful historical paper, explained at length that I had been mistaken all through; that Philip Nolan never went to sea, but to Texas; that there he was shot in battle, March 21, 1801, and by orders from Spain every fifth man of his party was to be shot, had they not died in prison. Fortunately, however, he left his papers and maps, which fell into the hands of a friend of the Picayune's correspondent. This friend proposes to publish them—and the public will then have, it is to be hoped, the true history of Philip Nolan, the man without a country.
With all these continuations, however, I have nothing to do. I can only repeat that my Philip Nolan is pure fiction. I cannot send his scrap-book to my friend who asks for it, because I have it not to send.
I remembered, when I was collecting material for my story, that in General Wilkinson's galimatias, which he calls his "Memoirs," is frequent reference to a business partner of his, of the name of Nolan, who, in the very beginning of this century, was killed in Texas. Whenever Wilkinson found himself in rather [pg 007] a deeper bog than usual, he used to justify himself by saying that he could not explain such or such a charge because "the papers referring to it were lost when Mr. Nolan was imprisoned in Texas." Finding this mythical character in the mythical legends of a mythical time, I took the liberty to give him a cousin, rather more mythical, whose adventures should be on the seas. I had the impression that Wilkinson's friend was named Stephen—and as such I spoke of him in the early editions of this story. But long after this was printed, I found that the New Orleans paper was right in saying that the Texan hero was named Philip Nolan.
If I had forgotten him and his name, I can only say that Mr. Jefferson, who did not forget him, abandoned him and his—when the Spanish Government murdered him and imprisoned his associates for life. I have done my best to repair my fault, and to recall to memory a brave man, by telling the story of his fate, in a book called "Philip Nolan's Friends." To the historical statements in that book the reader is referred. That the Texan Philip Nolan played an important, though forgotten, part in our national history, the reader will understand—when I say that the terror of the Spanish Government, excited by his adventures, governed all their policy regarding Texas and Louisiana also, till the last territory was no longer their own.
If any reader considers the invention of a cousin too great a liberty to take in fiction, I venture to remind him that "'Tis sixty years since"; and that I should have the highest authority in literature even for much greater liberties taken with annals so far removed from our time.
A Boston paper, in noticing the story of "My Double," contained in another part of this collection, said it was highly improbable. I have always agreed with that critic. I confess I have the same opinion of this story of Philip Nolan. It passes on ships which had no existence, is vouched for by officers who never lived. Its hero is in two or three places at the same time, under a process wholly impossible under any conceivable administration [pg 008] of affairs. When my friend, Mr. W.H. Reed, sent me from City Point, in Virginia, the record of the death of PHILIP NOLAN, a negro from Louisiana, who died in the cause of his country in service in a colored regiment, I felt that he had done something to atone for the imagined guilt of the imagined namesake of his unfortunate god-father.
E.E.H.
ROXBURY, MASS., March 20, 1886.
* * * * *
I supposed that very few casual readers of the New York Herald of August 18th observed, in an obscure corner, among the "Deaths," the announcement—
"NOLAN. Died, on board U.S. Corvette Levant, Lat. 2° 11' S., Long. 131° W., on the 11th of May, PHILIP NOLAN."
I happened to observe it, because I was stranded at the old Mission-House in Mackinaw, waiting for a Lake Superior steamer which did not choose to come, and I was devouring to the very stubble all the current literature I could get hold of, even down to the deaths and marriages in the Herald. My memory for names and people is good, and the reader will see, as he goes on, that I had reason enough to remember Philip Nolan. There are hundreds of readers who would have paused at that announcement, if the officer of the Levant who reported it had chosen to make it thus:—"Died, May 11th, THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY." For it was as "The Man without a Country" that poor Philip Nolan had generally been known by the officers who had him in charge during some fifty years, as, indeed, by all the men who sailed [pg 009] under them. I dare say there is many a man who has taken wine with him once a fortnight, in a three years' cruise, who never knew that his name was "Nolan," or whether the poor wretch had any name at all.
There can now be no possible harm in telling this poor creature's story. Reason enough there has been till now, ever since Madison's administration went out in 1817, for very strict secrecy, the secrecy of honor itself, among the gentlemen of the navy who have had Nolan in successive charge. And certainly it speaks well for the esprit de corps of the profession, and the personal honor of its members, that to the press this man's story has been wholly unknown—and, I think, to the country at large also. I have reason to think, from some investigations I made in the Naval Archives when I was attached to the Bureau of Construction, that every official report relating to him was burned when Ross burned the public buildings at Washington. One of the Tuckers, or possibly one of the Watsons, had Nolan in charge at the end of the war; and when, on returning from his cruise, he reported at Washington to one of the Crowninshields—who was in the Navy Department when he came home—he found that the Department ignored the whole business. Whether they really knew nothing about it or whether it was a "Non mi ricordo," determined on as a piece of policy, I do not know. But this I do know, that since 1817, and possibly before, no naval officer has mentioned Nolan in his report of a cruise. [pg 010]
But, as I say, there is no need for secrecy any longer. And now the poor creature is dead, it seems to me worth while to tell a little of his story, by way of showing young Americans of to-day what it is to be A Man Without a Country<[1q]/span>.
* * * * *
Philip Nolan was as fine a young officer as there was in the "Legion of the West," as the Western division of our army was then called. When Aaron Burr made his first dashing expedition down to New Orleans in 1805, at Fort Massac, or somewhere above on the river, he met, as the Devil would have it, this gay, dashing, bright young fellow, at some dinner-party, I think. Burr marked him, talked to him, walked with him, took him a day or two's voyage in his flat-boat, and, in short, fascinated him. For the next year, barrack-life was very tame to poor Nolan. He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great man had given him to write to him. Long, high-worded, stilted letters the poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have in reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered at him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection for a politician the time which they devoted to Monongahela, hazard, and high-low-jack. Bourbon, euchre, and poker were still unknown. But one day Nolan had his revenge. This time Burr came down the river, not as an attorney seeking a place for his office, but as a disguised conqueror. He had defeated I know [pg 011] not how many district-attorneys; he had dined at I know not how many public dinners; he had been heralded in I know not how many Weekly Arguses, and it was rumored that he had an army behind him and an empire before him. It was a great day—his arrival—to poor Nolan. Burr had not been at the fort an hour before he sent for him. That evening he asked Nolan to take him out in his skiff, to show him a canebrake or a cotton-wood tree, as he said—really to seduce him; and by the time the sail was over, Nolan was enlisted body and soul. From that time, though he did not yet know it, he lived as A Man Without a Country.
What Burr meant to do I know no more than you, dear reader. It is none of our business just now. Only, when the grand catastrophe came, and Jefferson and the House of Virginia of that day undertook to break on the wheel all the possible Clarences of the then House of York, by the great treason-trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that distant Mississippi Valley, which was farther from us than Puget's Sound is to-day, introduced the like novelty on their provincial stage, and, to while away the monotony of the summer at Fort Adams, got up, for spectacles, a string of court-martials on the officers there. One and another of the colonels and majors were tried, and, to fill out the list, little Nolan, against whom, Heaven knows, there was evidence enough—that he was sick of the service, had been willing to be false to it, and would have obeyed any order to march any-whither with [pg 012] any one who would follow him had the order been signed, "By command of His Exc. A. Burr." The courts dragged on. The big flies escaped—rightly for all I know. Nolan was proved guilty enough, as I say; yet you and I would never have heard of him, reader, but that, when the president of the court asked him at the close, whether he wished to say anything to show that he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried out, in a fit of frenzy—
"D——n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!"
I suppose he did not know how the words shocked old Colonel Morgan, who was holding the court. Half the officers who sat in it had served through the Revolution, and their lives, not to say their necks, had been risked for the very idea which he so cavalierly cursed in his madness. He, on his part, had grown up in the West of those days, in the midst of "Spanish plot," "Orleans plot," and all the rest. He had been educated on a plantation where the finest company was a Spanish officer or a French merchant from Orleans. His education, such as it was, had been perfected in commercial expeditions to Vera Cruz, and I think he told me his father once hired an Englishman to be a private tutor for a winter on the plantation. He had spent half his youth with an older brother, hunting horses in Texas; and, in a word, to him "United States" was scarcely a reality. Yet he had been fed by "United States" for all the years since [pg 013] he had been in the army. He had sworn on his faith as a Christian to be true to "United States." It was "United States" which gave him the uniform he wore, and the sword by his side. Nay, my poor Nolan, it was only because "United States" had picked you out first as one of her own confidential men of honor that "A. Burr" cared for you a straw more than for the flat-boat men who sailed his ark for him. I do not excuse Nolan; I only explain to the reader why he damned his country, and wished he might never hear her name again.
He never did hear her name but once again. From that moment, September 23, 1807, till the day he died, May 11, 1863, he never heard her name again. For that half-century and more he was a man without a country.
Old Morgan, as I said, was terribly shocked. If Nolan had compared George Washington to Benedict Arnold, or had cried, "God save King George," Morgan would not have felt worse. He called the court into his private room, and returned in fifteen minutes, with a face like a sheet, to say—
"Prisoner, hear the sentence of the Court! The Court decides, subject to the approval of the President, that you never hear the name of the United States again."
Nolan laughed. But nobody else laughed. Old Morgan was too solemn, and the whole room was hushed dead as night for a minute. Even Nolan lost his swagger in a moment. Then Morgan added—[pg 014]
"Mr. Marshal, take the prisoner to Orleans in an armed boat, and deliver him to the naval commander there."
The Marshal gave his orders and the prisoner was taken out of court.
"Mr. Marshal," continued old Morgan, "see that no one mentions the United States to the prisoner. Mr. Marshal, make my respects to Lieutenant Mitchell at Orleans, and request him to order that no one shall mention the United States to the prisoner while he is on board ship. You will receive your written orders from the officer on duty here this evening. The court is adjourned without day."
I have always supposed that Colonel Morgan himself took the proceedings of the court to Washington City, and explained them to Mr. Jefferson. Certain it is that the President approved them—certain, that is, if I may believe the men who say they have seen his signature. Before the Nautilus got round from New Orleans to the Northern Atlantic coast with the prisoner on board the sentence had been approved, and he was a man without a country.
The plan then adopted was substantially the same which was necessarily followed ever after. Perhaps it was suggested by the necessity of sending him by water from Fort Adams and Orleans. The Secretary of the Navy—it must have been the first Crowninshield, though he is a man I do not remember—was requested to put Nolan on board a government vessel [pg 015] bound on a long cruise, and to direct that he should be only so far confined there as to make it certain that he never saw or heard of the country. We had few long cruises then, and the navy was very much out of favor; and as almost all of this story is traditional, as I have explained, I do not know certainly what his first cruise was. But the commander to whom he was intrusted—perhaps it was Tingey or Shaw, though I think it was one of the younger men—we are all old enough now—regulated the etiquette and the precautions of the affair, and according to his scheme they were carried out, I suppose, till Nolan died.
When I was second officer of the "Intrepid," some thirty years after, I saw the original paper of instructions. I have been sorry ever since that I did not copy the whole of it. It ran, however, much in this way:—
"WASHINGTON (with a date, which have been late in 1807).
"SIR—You will receive from Lieutenant Neale the person of Philip Nolan, late a Lieutenant in the United States Army.
"This person on his trial by court-martial expressed with an oath the wish that he might 'never hear of the United States again.'
"The Court sentenced him to have his wish fulfilled.
"For the present, the execution of the order is intrusted by the President to this Department. [pg 016]
"You will take the prisoner on board your ship, and keep him there with such precautions as shall prevent his escape.
"You will provide him with such quarters, rations, and clothing as would be proper for an officer of his late rank, if he were a passenger on your vessel on the business of his Government.
"The gentlemen on board will make any arrangements agreeable to themselves regarding his society. He is to be exposed to no indignity of any kind, nor is he ever unnecessarily to be reminded that he is a prisoner.
"But under no circumstances is he ever to hear of his country or to see any information regarding it, and you will specially caution all the officers under your command to take care, that, in the various indulgences which may be granted, this rule, in which his punishment is involved, shall not be broken.
"It is the intention of the Government that he shall never again see the country which he has disowned. Before the end of your cruise you will receive orders which will give effect to this intention.
"Respectfully yours,
"W. SOUTHARD, for the Secretary of the Navy."
If I had only preserved the whole of this paper, there would be no break in the beginning of my sketch of this story. For Captain Shaw, if it were he, handed [pg 017] it to his successor in the charge, and he to his, and I suppose the commander of the Levant has it to-day as his authority for keeping this man in this mild custody.
The rule adopted on board the ships on which I have met "the man without a country" was, I think, transmitted from the beginning. No mess liked to have him permanently, because his presence cut off all talk of home or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of peace or of war—cut off more than half the talk men liked to have at sea. But it was always thought too hard that he should never meet the rest of us, except to touch hats, and we finally sank into one system. He was not permitted to talk with the men, unless an officer was by. With officers he had unrestrained intercourse, as far as they and he chose. But he grew shy, though he had favorites: I was one. Then the captain always asked him to dinner on Monday. Every mess in succession took up the invitation in its turn. According to the size of the ship, you had him at your mess more or less often at dinner. His breakfast he ate in his own state-room—he always had a state-room—which was where a sentinel or somebody on the watch could see the door. And whatever else he ate or drank, he ate or drank alone. Sometimes, when the marines or sailors had any special jollification, they were permitted to invite "Plain-Buttons," as they called him. Then Nolan was sent with some officer, and the men were forbidden to speak [pg 018] of home while he was there. I believe the theory that the sight of his punishment did them good. They called him "Plain-Buttons," because, while he always chose to wear a regulation army-uniform, he was not permitted to wear the army-button, for the reason that it bore either the initials or the insignia of the country he had disowned.
