Revisiting the ‘Man Without a Country’

This column was first published in July 2021. 

Edward Everett Hale almost did it.

The eighteenth-century minister and writer almost achieved literary immortality with his short story, “The Man Without a Country.”

There was a time, according to a piece by Alexander Zaitchik in the Los Angeles Review of Books, when Hale’s was ubiquitous in American public education — a patriotic flag-waver perfect for the Fourth of July.

Army Lt. Philip Nolan, the story’s titular character, swears allegiance to Aaron Burr — of the famous Hamilton/Burr pistol duel — and is tried for treason. At the trial, Nolan renounces his country: “D--n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” (“Damn” being such strong language in 1863, especially when used against one’s nation, that it was partially obscured.)

Like a character in an O. Henry short story or a Twilight Zone episode, the judge grants Nolan’s request. He is sentenced to live out his life on a series of ships at sea, where officers, sailors and guests are never to mention the United States or tell him news of his former country. He is forbidden to see maps or receive updates on its citizens, including his family.

He becomes … dum dum dum … the Man Without a Country.

(Spoiler alert: The next two paragraphs reveal the ending of a 158-year-old story.)

Predictably, at least by jaded twenty-first-century standards, Nolan has a complete change of heart. Fifty-six years on a boat will do that to a guy. On his deathbed and still at sea, he displays a self-made map of the U.S., complete with educated guesses about which territories have become states. The captain reneges on the judge’s long-ago order and tells Nolan news of the nation, including as much as he can recall about the Civil War, which Nolan missed completely.

An hour later, Nolan is dead, but not before tucking into a nearby Bible his request for an epitaph: “He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands.”

For obvious reasons, the story is a good choice to teach a particular type of patriotism that advocates never questioning one’s superiors or criticizing authority. The Man Without a Country learns to value his nation above all.

One can see how the story would have appealed to certain audiences during two world wars and their aftermaths, when belief in American exceptionalism was at its zenith, and also how the story would have fallen out of favor in the decades since, when the nation has had to interrogate its shortcomings.

But the story’s obscurity is a shame, because beneath its jingoism and obvious moralizing are complexities that deserve exploration.

The story’s narrator, a younger man, attempts to have Nolan pardoned, yet can find nobody in the government who even remembers the man’s name, let alone his crime. “They pretended there was no such man, and never was such a man. They will say so at the Department now!” the narrator writes. “Perhaps they do not know. It will not be the first thing in the service of which the Department appears to know nothing!”

The story further hints that Nolan’s trial was performative in nature — “to while away the monotony of the summer” — and that other conspirators, perhaps those of higher rank or from better families, escaped punishment. Or, as the narrator puts it, “The big flies escaped — rightly for all I know.”

The appropriateness of Hale’s sentence, both its excessive length and his country-club prison aboard a boat, is worthy of discussion, as is the reality of scapegoating and the advantages of wealth, power and rank.

These topics need not be debated to the exclusion of a larger moral — the importance of loyalty to one’s country — but alongside it. The story makes a point to call out the likes of “every Bragg and Beauregard who broke a soldier’s oath two years ago, and of every Maury and Barron who broke a sailor’s,” references to U.S. Army and Navy leaders in the South who renounced their country and joined the Confederacy.

In a modern era that has forgotten the honorable, vital role that protest played in forming our nation, and where too many of our friends and neighbors are willing to turn a blind eye to the flying of the Confederate flag or the insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, maybe “The Man Without a Country” is more worthy of a literary reevaluation this Independence Day than ever before.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

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