Next I remark, as a new corroboration of the modesty ever so prominent
in him, that not once throughout the whole of this correspondence does
he make any, the slightest, allusion to himself in connection with the
Revolutionary War, comparatively recent as it then was. Besides that the
general tenor of the correspondence might have supplied occasions for
such allusions, special opportunities were at hand while skirting the
battlegrounds and other localities of his military operations in the
war, even in his journeys between Mount Vernon and Philadelphia; yet
they are never once made. The casual mention of his "_Old Sergeant
Cornelius_," whom he happened to want as a workman about his grounds at
Mount Vernon, is the sole reference that could wake up the mind to his
having had anything to do with the Revolution. He had helped to pave the
way for that great event by the influence of his high character thrown
into the scale when the early questions of resistance or submission were
in agitation; he had helped it on by his attachment to constitutional
liberty at that epoch though his fortune was at stake, and friendships
among the highborn and cultivated from the parent State then among his
associates in Virginia--could a bosom like his have been swayed by such
thoughts; he had helped it on by the special weight of name he had won
in arms fighting side by side with the proud generals and troops of
Britain confident of victory, but saved from annihilation by his inborn
fearlessness and superiority, when death was all around him and dismay
everywhere in Braddock's disastrous fight--their silent homage crowning
the head of their deliverer; his triumphant sword at Yorktown put the
crowning hand to the immortal work--the work that founded this great
nation; yet we could never infer from a word or hint in the course of
these letters, from first to last, that he had anything to do with the
work, except as the name of "_Sergeant Cornelius_" incidentally falls
from his pen with only a rural object. What a lesson! Some extol