The Man Without a Country and Other Tales by Edward E. Hale

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THE

MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

AND

OTHER TALES.

BY

EDWARD E. HALE,

AUTHOR OF "IN HIS NAME," "TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN," "HOW TO DO IT," "WHAT
CAREER," ETC., ETC.

BOSTON:

ROBERTS BROTHERS.

1891.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by

TICKNOR AND FIELDS,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

CONTENTS.

THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

THE LAST OF THE FLORIDA

A PIECE OF POSSIBLE HISTORY

THE SOUTH AMERICAN EDITOR

THE OLD AND THE NEW, FACE TO FACE

THE DOT AND LINE ALPHABET

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE RESOLUTE

MY DOUBLE, AND HOW HE UNDID ME

THE CHILDREN OF THE PUBLIC

THE SKELETON IN THE CLOSET

CHRISTMAS WAITS IN BOSTON

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." 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 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 deg. 11' S., Long. 131 deg. 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 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 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 deg. 11' S., Long.
131 deg. 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 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.

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.

* * * * *

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 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 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 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,--

"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
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.

"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 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 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.

I remember, soon after I joined the navy, I was on shore with some of
the older officers from our ship and from the Brandywine, which we had
met at Alexandria. We had leave to make a party and go up to Cairo and
the Pyramids. As we jogged along (you went on donkeys then), some of the
gentlemen (we boys called them "Dons," but the phrase was long since
changed) fell to talking about Nolan, and some one told the system which
was adopted from the first about his books and other reading. As he was
almost never permitted to go on shore, even though the vessel lay in
port for months, his time at the best hung heavy; and everybody was
permitted to lend him books, if they were not published in America and
made no allusion to it. These were common enough in the old days, when
people in the other hemisphere talked of the United States as little as
we do of Paraguay. He had almost all the foreign papers that came into
the ship, sooner or later; only somebody must go over them first, and
cut out any advertisement or stray paragraph that alluded to America.
This was a little cruel sometimes, when the back of what was cut out
might be as innocent as Hesiod. Right in the midst of one of Napoleon's
battles, or one of Canning's speeches, poor Nolan would find a great
hole, because on the back of the page of that paper there had been an
advertisement of a packet for New York, or a scrap from the President's
message. I say this was the first time I ever heard of this plan, which
afterwards I had enough and more than enough to do with. I remember it,
because poor Phillips, who was of the party, as soon as the allusion to
reading was made, told a story of something which happened at the Cape
of Good Hope on Nolan's first voyage; and it is the only thing I ever
knew of that voyage. They had touched at the Cape, and had done the
civil thing with the English Admiral and the fleet, and then, leaving
for a long cruise up the Indian Ocean, Phillips had borrowed a lot of
English books from an officer, which, in those days, as indeed in these,
was quite a windfall. Among them, as the Devil would order, was the "Lay
of the Last Minstrel," which they had all of them heard of, but which
most of them had never seen. I think it could not have been published
long. Well, nobody thought there could be any risk of anything national
in that, though Phillips swore old Shaw had cut out the "Tempest" from
Shakespeare before he let Nolan have it, because he said "the Bermudas
ought to be ours, and, by Jove, should be one day." So Nolan was
permitted to join the circle one afternoon when a lot of them sat on
deck smoking and reading aloud. People do not do such things so often
now, but when I was young we got rid of a great deal of time so. Well,
so it happened that in his turn Nolan took the book and read to the
others; and he read very well, as I know. Nobody in the circle knew a
line of the poem, only it was all magic and Border chivalry, and was ten
thousand years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth canto,
stopped a minute and drank something, and then began, without a thought
of what was coming,--

"Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,"--

It seems impossible to us that anybody ever heard this for the first
time; but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on,
still unconsciously or mechanically,--

"This is my own, my native land!"

Then they all saw something was to pay; but he expected to get through,
I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on,--

"Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?--
If such there breathe, go, mark him well,"--

By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any
way to make him turn over two pages; but he had not quite presence of
mind for that; he gagged a little, colored crimson, and staggered on,--

"For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,
Despite these titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,"--

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