The Martyr and the Traitor: Nathan Hale, Moses Dunbar, and the American Revolution by Virginia DeJohn Anderson (review)

Virginia DeJohn Anderson's The Martyr and the Traitor focuses on the lives of two Connecticut colonists, the American Patriot Nathan Hale, and the American Loyalist Moses Dunbar. Anderson's gripping dual biography and narrative account reveals both the life and death consequences of choosing sides in what was a civil war and how future generations remember those choices. While most Americans know Nathan Hale from his stirring, but almost certainly apocryphal last words, "I regret that I have only one life to lose for my country," Moses Dunbar's loyality to England, however, made him an obscure figure to scholars and wholly forgotten to the general public.

Anderson provides parallel chapters tracing the major events of the lives of Hale and Dunbar. This structure allows readers to see two young men, who, despite being several years apart in age and growing up in the same colony, lived very different lives. The older Dunbar grew up as the second son of a struggling Puritan farmer. At no point in his life did Moses find real economic comfort. Impulsive, outspoken, and stubborn to a fault, Dunbar married at the young age of seventeen, converted to the Anglican Church and when the Anglo-American imperial crisis broke out, remained loyal to the Empire. Hale's life was a stark contrast. Sickly, introspective, and intelligent, Hale's life was economically comfortable as his family ranked among the leading members of their community. While Moses had to live on family property and eventually migrate in hopes of establishing a stable life for his growing family, young Nathan attended Yale, forged deep friendships centered on a literary circle of young bachelors, and seemed destined for a professional life of the mind.

Although she never explicitly states it, Anderson suggests that the background biographies of Dunbar and Hale provide the keys to understanding why one became a Loyalist and the other a Patriot. To Moses, the Revolution threatened social, political, and economic upheaval and dislocation, all of which offended his deep Anglican faith and risked wrecking his desire to establish a comfortable life of farming. Hale, by contrast, young, single, educated, and somewhat lonely in his post-college life, viewed British actions as a threat to his future. The Revolution offered Hale an opportunity to defend colonial liberty, while making his mark upon the world. Ultimately, their background-driven decisions "show how two equally honorable young men could follow their consciences and yet reach opposite conclusions about the merits of American Independence" (p. 6). Dunbar, in his typical outspoken fashion, openly declared his loyalty early in the conflict. Compelled by honor and fear of what the Revolution could unleash, his decision to recruit for the British army led to his capture, conviction, and execution for high treason (one of only three Connecticut loyalists to be convicted). Hale, also driven by honor and his youthful desire to prove his worth, volunteered to spy for Washington's army only to be captured and executed by the British. His stoicism and defiant last words, that whatever they may have actually been, coupled with the American victory secured Hale's immortality as a martyr of the Revolution. At the same time, this American victory banished Moses to obscurity and permanently tainted his actions as treasonous.

Students and general readers should come away from Anderson's excellent work with an appreciation that the Revolution's history was a much more complicated story than our popular mythology often allows.