‘Pray God to bless the flag’
By Tom Range, Sr.

“If you are ever tempted to say a word or to do a thing that shall put a bar between you and your family, your home, and your country, pray God in His mercy to take you that instant home to His own heaven.  Stick by your family; forget you have a self while you do everything for them.  Think of your home, write and send, and talk about it.  Let it be nearer and nearer to your thought, the farther you have to travel from it; and rush back to it when you can.  And for your country and for that flag, never dream a dream but of serving her as she bids you, though the service carry you through a thousand hells.  No matter what happens to you, no matter who flatters you or who abuses you, never look on another flag, never let a night pass but you pray God to bless that flag.  Remember that behind all these men you have to deal with, 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.  Stand by Her as you would stand by your mother.”

Philip Nolan, Lieutenant-USA (b. circa 1790, d. 1863) as adopted from ”A Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale, published 1863.

A short story entitled “A Man Without a Country” was published anonymously in the magazine “Atlantic Monthly” in late 1863.  The author was later identified as Edward Everett Hale, a clergyman and an active pro-Union supporter of the Civil War.  His character Philip Nolan was a U.S. Army officer who was convicted of treason for his complicity in a plot staged by Aaron Burr in 1805 to either dismember the Union or to lead an invasion of Mexican territory in the Southwest, or both. 

The charges were at best ambiguous.  Burr was acquitted of all charges in a trial presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1807.  While the disgraced former vice president Burr was acquitted, lesser figures in the plot, including U.S. military members were not.  The author Hale places his character Philip Nolan on trial for his role in the plot.

Nolan is a young artillery officer posted to an army fort on the Mississippi.  He was bored with the inactivity of Army life and was prone to the blandishments of Aaron Burr, who was recruiting soldiers for his activities in the West.  At a court martial trial for treason, Nolan blurted out “D the United States!  I wish I may never hear of the United States again!”

The presiding officer of the court martial was quick to comply with the young lieutenant’s request.  On September 23, 1807 he was sentenced to exile aboard a U.S. Navy ship.  He was to be isolated from all contact with the crew, except for officers at infrequent meals aboard ship.  He was allowed newspapers, but they were censored of any items concerning America. Even advertisements for U.S. businesses were excised.

The court martial ordered Nolan exiled for life.  He was to be transferred from one naval ship to another and under no condition was he to be allowed to leave the ship while in port, in no matter what country the warship would be visiting.  In total, the fictional Nolan was incarcerated in twenty different vessels until his death in 1863.  He knew only that the United States was expanding by counting the stars appearing on the national flag flying on the ships’ masts.  As his death approached, they numbered 34. 

When he felt that his end was near, Nolan prevailed upon a sympathetic naval officer to fill him in on over 50 years of American history.  The new states, steamships, railroads, the settlement of the West by European immigrants; all were disclosed to the now old and dying man.  The naval officer refused to relate to the exile the events of the Civil War, which was raging in 1863.  Its details would have broken the old man’s heart.

In his Bible, Nolan wrote these instructions, “Bury me in the sea; it has been my home, and I love it.  But will not some one set up a stone for my memory at Fort Adams or at Orleans that my disgrace may not be more that I ought to bear?  Say on it: In Memory of Philip Nolan, Lieutenant in the Army of the United States. ‘He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands.’ ”

While Philip Nolan was fictional, the author Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) probably based his character on an incident in the career of the Ohio politician Clement Vallandingham (1820-1871).  Vallandingham, a leader of the “Copperhead” faction of the Democratic Party, was a supporter of the secessionist Southern states making up the Confederacy. 

In May 1863 he was tried for treason by a military tribunal in Ohio and found guilty.  His remarks at the time included his view that he didn’t want to belong to the United States.  As with the fictional Philip Nolan, the court obliged.  He was transported under a flag of truce to Confederate forces that welcomed this Northerner advocating their cause. 

Vallandingham emigrated to England where he resided for a period during and after the war and was then allowed to return to Ohio during the Reconstruction Period.

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