But One Life, by Samantha Wilcoxson

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“If I had ten thousand lives, I would lay them all down.”

In the early 1770’s, Nathan Hale is a young philosophy student at Yale. There, he, his brother, and their friend, Ben Tallmadge, are busying themselves with intellectual debate and occasional mischief.

Only too soon, their patriotic ideals of revolution and liberty would be put to the test. Forced to choose between love and duty, young Nathan has to face the harsh personal cost of deeply held beliefs as he leaves to become Washington’s spy.

In this powerful novel of friendship and sacrifice, Samantha Wilcoxson paints a vivid portrait of a young man’s principled passion and dedication to his ideals, turning the legend into flesh and blood.

This is the touching and thought-provoking story of how an ordinary boy grew into an extraordinary man – an American hero.

My Review

Samantha Wilcoxson’s But One Life, a biographical novel of Nathan Hale, is thoroughly and deeply researched, immersing the reader in a convincing, detailed recreation of late 18th century colonial life in the United States. The influences on Hale’s life are clearly delineated: faith, bolstered by his brother Enoch’s even deeper religious conviction; classical thought (translated through a popular play of the time, Joseph Addison’s Cato), and the beliefs fostered and developed through debate and discussion during his years at Yale, especially in the Linonian Society.

Hale is a hero to many citizens of the United States, for his actions and his attributed last words: I only regret that I have but one life to give to my country – but he is also a tragic figure, a young man who allowed his impatient desire to contribute to the colonists’ War of Independence against Great Britain to be his downfall.  Unsuited for the role he takes on, untrained and working against his friends’ advice, his bold gesture of patriotism results in his death by hanging. Wilcoxson does not shy away from this interpretation, showing Hale’s actions in his last days as they were: naïve and bound to fail.

Wilcoxson’s novel fleshes out Hale’s life with a writer’s imagination, although only a failed romance strays far from the established facts. Hale’s life may have been one lived in a limited geography, but the ideas of thinkers and statesmen travelled to his world, as did news of the clashes between colonists and British troops even as early as his years at Yale. Here lies my only quibble with But One Life: other than reports of two uprisings involving violence, very little background into the causes of the growing frustration of the colonists with Britain is given: the Stamp and Townsend acts, resulting in taxation without representation; the Port Act, and the insistence by the British parliament that they had political control of the colonies. The discussions at Yale, especially in the Linonian Society, could have provided an ideal vehicle for background, which, while it may be familiar to readers educated in schools in the United States, may not be to readers from other countries.

Nonetheless, But One Life is a solid, well written biographical novel of a man seen by many as an American hero. Recommended.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Samantha Wilcoxson is an author of emotive biographical fiction and strives to help readers connect with history’s unsung heroes. She also writes nonfiction for Pen & Sword History. Samantha loves sharing trips to historic places with her family and spending time by the lake with a glass of wine. Her most recent work is Women of the American Revolution, which explores the lives of 18th century women, and she is currently working on a biography of James Alexander Hamilton.

Published

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