Nathan Hale

On the morning of September 22, 1776, a 21-year-old Connecticut schoolteacher was led to a makeshift gallows in a Manhattan orchard and hanged as a spy by British forces. Nathan Hale had volunteered for what everyone understood was a suicide mission — to infiltrate British lines on Long Island and gather intelligence for George Washington's battered Continental Army after its disastrous defeat in the Battle of Brooklyn. He was caught, denied a Bible and a clergyman, and executed before noon.

What made Hale immortal was what he reportedly said before the noose tightened. "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" — a sentiment drawn from Joseph Addison's play Cato, which Washington himself had staged for his troops — became the defining statement of Revolutionary sacrifice. Whether his exact words, the sentiment was consistent with everything those who knew him described: a young man of unusual conviction who understood exactly what he was volunteering for.

Hale had graduated from Yale at 18, taught school in Connecticut, and been commissioned as a captain in the Continental Army before he turned 21. He had no intelligence training, no disguise beyond a civilian coat, and no extraction plan. His mission was almost certainly doomed from the start. Connecticut named him its official state hero, and a statue of him stands outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.