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Nathan Hale, the famous American revolutionary, was hanged by the British in 1776 for being a spy and is reputed to have eyed the noose with this stoic comment: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Moses Dunbar, a little-known British Loyalist, was the only civilian convicted by a civil court for high treason against the state of Connecticut. He was hanged in 1777.

Virginia Anderson, a University of Colorado professor of history, has won a $50,400 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship that will help her explain how these two colonial farm boys wound up on opposite sides of the revolution, and what lessons their divergent paths hold.

Anderson is examining the revolution through a different lens—not focused on the founders and not based on the presumed success of the revolutionaries or the assumed myopia of Loyalists.

The lives of Hale and Dunbar each concluded at the end of a rope, but their backgrounds also had common elements. Though they never met, Hale and Dunbar were reared in comparable farming communities in Connecticut, and “thus their opposing political affiliations are not readily explained by social or economic status.”

A pivotal element, Anderson suggests, was the different social networks the young men joined.

Dunbar was eight years older than Hale. In 1764, he married Phoebe Jerome, who was pregnant with their first child. They joined the Church of England. These moves estranged Dunbar from his father, who cut off most economic support, and from the larger Congregationalist community of Connecticut.

The Dunbars found camaraderie in the Anglican Church in New Cambridge.

Hale, on the other hand, went to Yale University at 14 and graduated at 18, meantime having amassed a “self-consciously sophisticated” circle of friends who looked forward to lives as “colonial gentlemen of learning, wit and ambition.”

After graduation, Hale missed his social network and wrote often to his former classmates. “Nathan Hale would have been a Facebook guy,” Anderson says.

“Politics barely figured into his correspondence until the war began; then letters became a means by which the correspondents nudged each other toward military service,” Anderson states.

Political principles may have influenced their engagement, but the letters mainly suggest that the young men were eager to reconstitute their college group, she adds.

Once enlisted, Hale answered George Washington’s call for a volunteer spy. Hale was captured in New York and hanged.

Dunbar, on the other hand, saw the British occupation of New York as his salvation, Anderson observes. Phoebe had died, and Dunbar was isolated, harassed and destitute. As a means of supporting his family, she infers, Dunbar enlisted in a Loyalist regiment on Long Island. He was captured when he returned to Connecticut to remarry and fetch his children.

“Thus for both Hale and Dunbar, the train of events that culminated in their executions commenced with their participation in social networks that initially had nothing to do with politics or war,” Anderson writes.

“Whigs and Tories were made, not born, and their political positions developed over time within the context of their everyday lives and relationships and without knowledge of how the revolution would end,” Anderson adds.

“There was nothing inherently Whiggish about Hale’s friendship with his classmates, or Loyalist about Dunbar’s social ties to fellow Anglicans … even though these networks would eventually acquire contrasting political significance.”

The social networks in which the men embedded themselves are “not the sole cause but are a significant cause” of their political trajectories, Anderson contends.

Anderson will use the NEH fellowship to complete a book on Dunbar and Hale. She plans to title it “The Martyr and the Traitor,” and says she aims to make it accessible to the general public as well as scholars.

Anderson’s fellowship was awarded under the “We the People” program, which encourages and strengthens the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture.

Anderson notes her gratitude for the fellowship, which provides “the gift of time” and is “incredibly important for people working in the humanities.”