One Life to Give: Martyrdom and the Making of the American Revolution

by John Fanestil

The famous words of patriots, such as Nathan Hale's "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country," have echoed through the centuries as embodiments of the spirit of the American Revolution. Despite the immortalized role these quotes play in America's historical narrative, their origins remain obscure. We know little about what inspired words like these and how this spirit of sacrifice inspired the revolution itself. What was going on in the hearts and minds of young men who risked their lives for the revolutionary cause? The answer lies in the untold story of the spiritual backdrop of the American Revolution. One Life to Give presents Nathan Hale's execution on September 21, 1776, as the culmination of a story that spans generations and explains why many young American men reached the personal decision to commit to the revolutionary cause even if it meant death. As John Fanestil reveals, this is the story of how martyrdom shaped the American Revolution. In colonial America, countless young revolutionaries, like their forebears, were raised and trained from infancy to understand that divine approval was attached to certain kinds of deaths--deaths of self-sacrifice for a sacred cause. Young boys were taught to expect that someday they might be called to fight and die for such a cause, and that should this come to pass, their deaths could be meaningful in the eyes of others and of God. Fanestil traces the deep history of the tradition of martyrdom from its classical and Christian origins, ultimately articulating how the spirit of American martyrdom animated countless personal commitments to American independence, and thereby to the war. Only by understanding the inextricable role played by martyrdom can we fully understand the origins of the American Revolution.

272 pages, Hardcover

Published August 3, 2021

Reviews

[Kathrine Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first glance the title threw me off. When I began reading the book, I expected a historical novel set in eighteenth-century America with the Revolution at the crux of the story. I knew Fanestil had to have been deliberate about the title. And so, what I discovered rather, was a stirring chronicle of martyrdom and faith-based world view as the driving forces in the American Revolution. Fanestil explores the roots of self-sacrifice and bravery among young soldiers in the face of death that fueled the revolutionary fervor.

While eschewing banal and superficial grandiloquence, Fanestil also avoids gratuitous death scene descriptions. Instead, he weaves the narrative with insight bringing together people, places, and cultural and spiritual contexts that fed into the tributary of colonial America.

One Life to Give is a page turner, a tour de force I attribute to Fanestil’s classic, scholarly style and to the captivating story of the twenty-one-year-old Nathan Hale--his capture, courage, and virtuous exhortation to witnesses before his execution. In doing so, Fanestil cuts a new cloth and lays bare the sacrificial fabric of the American Revolution informed by English Protestant martyrdom and its divinely ordained providential history.

This book serves to give weight and honor to the decisions, and the consequences that epitomize those sacred decisions such as Nathan Hale’s, in opposing “a perceived tyrant.” Those decisions and consequences informed by faith and cultural tradition are brought into brilliant focus by the superb skill in Fanestil’s writing. The fifty-some pages of notes lend credence to his scholarly approach and docent the reader into a fuller understanding of the subject.

One Life to Give is a must-read for anyone wanting to truly understand how the spiritual, social, and technological constructs stitched the very substrate of the American Revolution.
Kathrine Page