Nathan Hale spied on the British in 1776 and was hanged because of it. Before he mounted the scaffold, he reportedly uttered the famous phrase, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
His country, the 13 former British colonies that formed a tenuously United States, had been conjured into existence only a few months earlier by the Declaration of Independence on July 4. If Hale hadn’t said precisely those words–or if he’d been quoting the British playwright Joseph Addison–it didn’t really matter. The new United States needed just such dying words to consecrate the …read more
Source: The Huffington Post
