On this morning 250 years ago, the British hanged a 21-year-old American schoolteacher as a spy, and in trying to make him disappear quietly, they accidentally made him immortal. His name was Nathan Hale, and it is worth sitting with just the last few hours of his life. He had been caught the night before, behind British lines on Long Island, carrying notes on enemy positions hidden in his shoes. There was no real trial. A man out of uniform with military intelligence on him was a spy by the rules of war, and the sentence for spying was death by hanging, no ceremony, no honor. General Howe ordered it done in the morning. What we know of that morning comes mostly from the enemy, from British officers who were there, and it is the small human cruelties that stay with you. Hale asked for a clergyman to attend him in his final hours. The request was refused. He asked for a Bible. That too was denied. He was a devout young man about to die, and they would not give him even that comfort. A British officer named Montresor, watching, was troubled enough by the young man's composure to later make sure his story was told. In his last moments Hale was allowed to write a couple of letters, one to his mother, one to a fellow officer. He wrote them, and then the British provost marshal, a notoriously brutal man named Cunningham, took those letters and destroyed them in front of him. The reason given was chilling in its pettiness: so that the rebels should not know they had a man in their ranks who could die with such firmness. They did not just want to kill him. They wanted to erase him. Then they marched him to the gallows, and there, according to the accounts that survived, this young schoolteacher who had failed at the one dangerous mission he ever attempted, stood calmly and spoke about duty and country with a steadiness that unnerved the men sent to kill him. The famous words attributed to him, that he only regretted having but one life to lose for his country, may be polished or borrowed from a play he loved. But everyone who was there agreed on the essential truth beneath the wording: he met his death without flinching, and he made even his executioners remember him. And that is the irony that redeems the whole sad morning. Cunningham burned the letters so no one would know how bravely Hale died. It did not work. The story got out anyway, carried by the very enemies who watched it, and a young man the British tried to erase became one of the most enduring symbols of the Revolution, honored two and a half centuries later, on this exact day, as the first American to die spying for his country. They denied him a Bible and a chaplain and burned his last words, and still they could not make him small.