Emerging Revolutionary War welcomes back guest historian Avellina Balestri

As I have increased research and work on my American Revolution trilogy All Ye That Pass By, I have noticed a trend towards making this particular season between the anniversary of Nathan Hale’s hanging (September 22, 1776) and John Andre’s hanging (October 2, 1780) into a strange sort of macabre festival I have dubbed “Hangemtide.” I suppose one could consider it a sort of Halloween for historical enthusiasts, as the autumnal chill starts to creep into the air, greenery dies, and horror releases hit the market. But a strange pseudo-religious reality I have observed is a tendency to treat these hangings as secular passion plays of a kind, connected by a secular Advent calendar of daily memorials, with the overarching takeaway being a strange sense of catharsis for the salvation of a newborn nation.

As a Catholic, I very well know the thematic beats, and I can sense them in an unsettling way in these commemorations. We must have our scapegoat; a man, or two, must die so the nation might live in our origin myth. But though the narrative may comfortably place Hale as the first Christ-figure, it uncomfortably assures that Andre is the second. We as the audience, while intended to shed tears for the first, are meant to bay for the blood of the second. Perhaps we may pity him in passing moments, but never so much that we truly desire him to be spared. His death is a foregone conclusion of the ritual which must be affirmed. We are recalling the traditional readings on Passion Sunday, and hardly realize it. We have, perhaps, lost the much greater plot of Christianity, that in the death of each, the other perishes, and in every death, we partake, in the killing and the dying, and in every human catastrophe, there is planted the original Passion Tree, no less in the past than in the present. History is not safe from our iniquity, nor from grace breaking in upon it, oftentimes painfully.

Touching back upon the historical events being remembered according to our national needs, I have often gently chided friends involved in “Hangentide” that I am ever on call to be the defense lawyer Major Andre never got should they wish to shuttle me into the past on circuit. I do not intend to make that defense the core of my current thesis, but put simply, I believe that if he had received a proper legal defense, Andre may well have had his sentence reduced based on extenuating circumstances. But that was not to be, because it could not be, not in the narrative as it is presented to us over and over again. This was a necessary death; a payment to Justice itself. It is language used to mask what was essentially a revenge hanging for both Hale’s execution at the hands of Crown forces and Arnold’s betrayal of the revolution for hard cold coin. The true foundation stone of “Hangemtide” is a satisfaction we are meant to share in nearly 250-year-old retribution. It is meant to, in some way, bring the country together through our most primal tribal instinct. But does it?

Then as now, Americans were deeply polarized in what they believed and what they wanted America to be. They also were profoundly at odds in terms of who they deemed to be their heroes. For example, from a Loyalist American perspective, Andre was far from an enemy of America, but rather someone seeking to save her from unsavory usurpers. He would not only

have been seen as the heroic martyr for everything everyone believed just a few years before, but in many cases, their personal friend who brought people from across the united empire together through his winning ways and valiant example. In addition to this, the Loyalists would have viewed the rebels as having no right to execute anyone because they had no lawful authority.

“Justice” had fled from them when they forswore allegiance to their rightful king. This likewise would have made their expressions of shock regarding Arnold’s “treason” nearly comical, given that each and every one of them had committed treason already. As such, Andre’s death would have been deemed nothing less than murder by many Americans, regardless of all appeals the board of inquiry-turned-tribunal made to “the law and usage of nations” in order to deny Andre clemency and absolve themselves of responsibility for their own actions.

The simple fact is the rebels who sat in judgment over Andre were not forced to hang him, and there were many options on the table which would have allowed them both to save face and grant him at least some small measure of mercy (or at least greater opportunities to obtain it). But they ruthlessly chose the noose. It was a ruthless time, and everyone had bloody hands and dirt under their fingernails to some extent, but that doesn’t put lipstick on a pig. Revenge remains a rotten justification for cruel deeds, then as now, yet people continue to justify it, because we invest ourselves in it for self-righteous cheap thrills. I do find it noteworthy that there is generally a different attitude attached to, for example, the story of Lord Derwentwater, who was executed for treason during the 1715 Jacobite uprising. Everyone knew that he could be killed according to the letter of the law, for he played a significant role in the Rising (indeed, with fewer extenuating circumstances than Andre). Still, most people have not questioned that George I’s decision to carry out the death sentence as opposed to extending the young man leniency was ruthless and reflected poorly on him.

Like Andre, Derwentwater’s death is more than a blow for the victim: it was an act of vengeance that does not shine a kind light upon humanity. But in the case of Derwentwater, many Hanoverians tried to intervene to save his life, or aided his loved ones in trying to seek mercy. In Andre’s case, even revolutionaries who claimed to be “sympathetic” to his “unfortunate” situation did not really put out to try and save him. There appears to be a shift between one type of civil war and another in terms of interpretation, with one becoming an Enlightenment experiment which otherized more starkly those who stood against what was advertised as “the cause of all mankind.” This has left its mark on our current perception of the conflict, encouraging us to advocate a “no mercy” verdict simply because it is attached to the revolutionary ethos which we have been taught to view as the primary conduit of patriotic expression. America, for all her organic history that is full of vibrant complexity, is infantilized by the narrative that overemphasizes its republican birth date.

The fact is that Americans can fall in love with Andre for just being Andre, and not solely identify him with the drama of his final mission, when he was sent to cut a deal with Arnold to keep his King’s territorial expanse from being piecemealed. Though frankly, this too is admirable on Andre’s part, as many Americans at the time found it to be, regardless of Arnold being a self-serving skunk no matter what side he was on. Serving a pious sovereign, even to the point of death, is one of the highest of honors acknowledged by all cultures across the length and breadth of history, which is why Andre acknowledged his death as the most glorious hour of his life, with the only disgrace being reflected upon those who put him there. Americans are not homogenous in how we perceive the legacy of our British forebears, nor have we ever been, and besides that, some things transcend partisanship, such as the virtues of courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice embodied in a chivalric young man who tied the blindfold over his own eyes and put the rope around his own neck.

But his heroic end is simply the culmination of his short yet full life. I personally remember him with the greatest fondness because he was a vivacious and endearing human being who radiated unforgettable warmth and light long before getting his neck cruelly snapped. There are so many stories about him demonstrating his charm, humor, creativity, caffeinated energy, cultural tastes, vast array of hobbies, love of his family and friends, love of his sovereign, love of life, generosity, and ultimately piety. This, above all else, is the fundamental reason I love John Andre, and find him one of my favorite characters to write in my trilogy: because he represents something of the essence of “Merry England,” our mother whose heritage is heartiness. He indeed died for the honor of a woman: Lady Britannia, as one of her noblest sons, though he was a commoner born of immigrant parents, refugees given shelter by British kings. That bright legacy outshines the verdict that left the figure of Mercy weeping, the tablets of the Beatitudes held aloft in her hands to remind us how far we fall.

Sadly, Andre is all too often reduced in popular culture to an always-already doomed figure, who can be misrepresented in any number of ways to make his death something we as an audience can live with. This happens to another favorite of mine, Major Patrick Ferguson, who also features in my trilogy and likewise was a hero of American Loyalists, fighting and dying alongside them in the Carolinas. It is not merely that these figures lose; it is that they must lose, that we must in some may cheer on their loss. This is then used to distort our every impression of them or their actions. They have become folkloric villains who, at best, receive a sort of patronizing nod for daring to defy the inevitable march of progress, and at worst we treat them with all the venom unleashed upon modern political opponents. But perhaps the outcome of our first civil war was not quite so inevitable due to progress being so utterly enticing. Perhaps some elements of progress which the likes of Andre and Ferguson fought against with tremendous zeal are nothing more or less than our punishment.

But all Christians would affirm that Providence is sovereign over all, and everything that unfolds will ultimately be worked to good. Both Nathan Hale and John Andre, separated by political allegiances and joined by death, had religious upbringings and educations and would likely take joint comfort in this belief. It was said that inside Andre’s coat on the day of his hanging, he had placed a paper with the words of an English hymn, written in his own hand from memory. It begins: “Hail, sovereign love that first began the scheme to rescue fallen man! Hail, matchless, free, eternal grace that gave my soul a hiding place!” Another haunting stanza reads: “Enwrapt in thick Egyptian night and fond of darkness more than light, madly I ran the sinful,

‘secure’ without a hiding place. But thus the eternal council ran: ‘Almighty Love, arrest that man!’ I felt the arrows of distress, and found I had no hiding place.” An angel ultimately leads the supplicant to Jesus for succor: “On Him almighty vengeance fell, which must have sunk a world to hell; He bore it for a sinful race, and thus became their hiding place.” It concludes: “A few more rolling suns at most shall land me on fair Canaan’s coast; there I shall sing the song of grace and see my glorious hiding place! Exalt the Lord, His praise proclaim! Let every saint now raise his name! Forevermore, we’ll see His face, the face of Christ our Hiding Place!”

Beyond the tide of worldly tumult and political polarization, and yes, even beyond our lust for revenge, this is a message I believe with all my heart that both Hale and Andre would want us to remember. And this, we may hope, is the bedrock of their brotherhood in that glorious hiding place.