dams,
got up, for _spectacles_, a string of courts-martial on the officers
there. One and another of the colonels and majors were tried, and, to
fill out the list, little Nolan, against whom, Heaven knows, there was
evidence enough--that he was sick of the service, had been willing to
be false to it, and would have obeyed any order to march any whither
with anyone who would follow him had the order been signed, "By
command of His Exc. A. Burr." The courts dragged on. The big flies
escaped, rightly for all I know. Nolan was proved guilty enough, as I
say; yet you and I would never have heard of him, reader, but that,
when the president of the court asked him at the close whether he
wished to say anything to show that he had always been faithful to the
United States, he cried out, in a fit of frenzy--

"Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States
again!"

I suppose he did not know how the words shocked old Colonel Morgan,
who was holding the court. Half the officers who sat in it had served
through the Revolution, and their lives, not to say their necks, had
been risked for the very idea which he so cavalierly cursed in his
madness. He, on his part, had grown up in the West of those days, in
the midst of "Spanish plot," "Orleans plot," and all the rest. He had
been educated on a plantation where the finest company was a Spanish
officer or a French merchant from Orleans. His education, such as it
was, had been perfected in commercial expeditions to Vera Cruz, and I
think he told me his father once hired an Englishman to be a private
tutor for a winter on the plantation. He had spent half his youth with
an older brother, hunting horses in Texas; and, in a word, to him
"United States" was scarcely a reality. Yet he had been fed by "United
States" for all the years since he had been in the army. He had sworn
on his faith as a Christian to be true to "United States." It was
"United States" which gave him the uniform he wore, and the sword by
his side. Nay, my poor Nolan, it was only because "United States" had
picked you out first as one of her own confidential men of honour that
"A. Burr" cared for you a straw more than for the flat-boat men who
sailed his ark for him. I do not excuse Nolan; I only explain to the
reader why he damned his country, and wished he might never hear her
name again.

He never did hear her name but once again. From that moment, Sept. 23,
1807, till the day he died, May 11