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The Man Without a Country

Edward Everett Hale · patriotic short fiction, 1863·1 hrs in the original·original at gutenberg.org

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A rash oath becomes a life sentence: In 1807, the impressionable Lieutenant Nolan, swept up in Burr's schemes, cries 'Damn the United States!' at his court-martial, and the court obliges him by ordering that he never hear his country's name again, a sentence the Navy quietly enforces for over half a century.
Exile strips away his bravado: Early swagger collapses when Nolan, reading aloud Walter Scott's lines beginning 'This is my own, my native land,' chokes, hurls the book into the sea, and retreats to his cabin for two months, never the same man again.
Moments of grace and longing punctuate the decades: He mans a cannon heroically in a frigate battle and earns a commodore's sword, translates for freed slaves whose anguish at being kept from home mirrors his own, and accidentally asks at dinner what has become of Texas, a territory that has been cut from every newspaper he was allowed to read.
On his deathbed he reveals a secret shrine: The dying Nolan shows his captain a state-room decorated with a hand-painted American eagle, a portrait of Washington, and a map of the United States drawn from memory, then begs to be told the names of the thirty-four states whose stars he has counted on the flag.
He dies loyal and asks only for a stone: Nolan dies peacefully after hearing fifty years of American history condensed into one conversation, leaving a note asking to be buried at sea and requesting a memorial inscription reading that he loved his country as no other man has loved her, but no man deserved less at her hands.

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•Why it earns a slot

Published in the Atlantic Monthly in December 1863 at the height of the Civil War, the story was reprinted in over half a million copies within a year and read aloud in blockade squadrons and army camps, making it one of the most widely circulated pieces of American patriotic literature ever written.

Philip Nolan, a young U.S. Army officer seduced into Aaron Burr's conspiracy, curses the United States at his court-martial and is sentenced to have his wish granted: he spends the next fifty-six years transferred from ship to ship, never permitted to hear his country's name or news. Over those decades he comes to love the country he renounced with a devotion that consumes him, and he dies at sea, surrounded by a hand-drawn American flag and a map of the nation he could never return to.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: gutenberg.org.

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The Man Without a Country

•Why it earns a slot

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