I am indeed willing to acknowledge what I have done, an error and presumption. I will call it an error and presumption because I swerved from the accustomed flowery paths of female delicacy.

I became an actor in that important drama with an inflexible resolution to persevere through the last scene, when we might be permitted and acknowledged to enjoy what we had so nobly declared we would possess, or lose with our lives - Freedom and Independence!

Such is my experience - not that I ever mourned the loss of a child, but that I consider myself as lost!

Happy for America, happy for Europe, perhaps for the world when, on the delivery of Cornwallis's sword to the illustrious, the immortal Washington, or rather by his order, to the brave Lincoln, the sun of Liberty and Independence burst through a sable cloud, and his benign influence was, almost instantaneously, felt in our remotest corners!