A story from the days of the America that used to be and that still lives in the hearts of her native children. Who punishes treason now? Is there even such a word, such a concept anymore? Is the very concept of a country, a nation, a motherland, obsolete? Should it be?
"Remember that behind officers and government, and people even, there is the Country Herself, your Country, and that you belong to her as you belong to your own mother."
I suppose that very few casual readers of the "New York Herald" of August 13th observed, in an obscure corner, among the "Deaths," the announcement,
"NOLAN. DIED, on board U.S. Corvette Levant, Lat. 2° 11' S., Long. 131° W., on the 11th of May: Philip Nolan."
I happened to observe it, because I was stranded at the old Mission-House in Mackinac, waiting for a Lake-Superior steamer which did not choose to come, and I was devouring, to the very stubble, all the current literature I could get hold of, even down to the deaths and marriages in the "Herald." My memory for names and people is good, and the reader will see, as he goes on, that I had reason enough to remember Philip Nolan. There are hundreds of readers who would have paused at that announcement, if the officer of the Levant who reported it had chosen to make it thus:—"Died, May 11th, THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY." Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
~ Sir Walter Scott
Radio play:
The original story in the December, 1863, edition of The Atlantic:
