ossible thing to save
the people of Michigan. He surrendered. Canada remained unannexed; the
white settlers of Michigan were not delivered to the tender mercies of
the Indians, and General Hull paid the penalty of the independent stand
he had taken.

He probably foresaw that he must face a terrible ordeal. The whole
country appeared to be roused against him, and Hull at once became the
best-hated man in America. A court-martial was appointed.

At first it was hoped that he would be convicted of treason, but the
evidence showed that this charge could not be sustained. He was tried
for cowardice in face of the enemy, found guilty, and sentenced to be
shot. The latter part of the sentence President Madison remitted, in
consideration of his past eminent services in the army. So, stamped with
indelible disgrace by all who did not know the facts, a ruined and
dishonored man, in his sixty-first year General Hull went back to the
farm in Newton that had come to him through his wife. Here, surrounded
by the most devoted affection, he passed his few remaining years.

A ruined and discredited man he truly was,--the reputation and the honor
due him from his countrymen irrevocably lost and by no fault of his own.
Yet his grandson, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, asserts that he was not
once heard to say an unkind word about the government that had treated
him so cruelly.

After his death, in 1825, one of his daughters wrote the story of his
life from his own writings, and the Rev. James Freeman Clarke sketched
for the world an outline of his grandfather's services in Michigan.
This shows that the man who, in his youth, tried to dissuade his friend
Nathan Hale from accepting the role of martyr, himself, in his old age,
bravely and gently endured a martyrdom compared to which the ostracism
he predicted for Hale, even if he succeeded in his mission, was but a
passing dream.

(5) _Stephen Hempstead_

To Stephen Hempstead, a sergeant in Nathan Hale's company in 1776, we
are indebted for the most reliable account that is known of Hale's
movements after he left New York in the service from which he was not to
return. Sergeant Hempstead removed to Missouri after the war, and this
account was first published in the _Missouri Republican_ in 1827. His
own words describing his last days with Hale are these:

"Captain Hale was one of the most accomplished officers, of his grade
and age, in the army. He was a native of the town of Covent