Its courts gathered from time to time some of the leading members of the bar from the whole country, not for a few hours, as now with our railroad facilities, but for days and weeks together. All these things helped to create a very high order of public spirit—that force which, often wholly unregarded, is yet so powerful in moulding the character and giving direction to the life. One other element in this communal influence must not be omitted—its intense patriotism. From the beginning to the close of the Revolutionary struggle the records of the county of Litchfield are stamped with the evidence of the most enthusiastic loyalty to the cause of the struggling colonies. At the time of the Boston Port Bill, Litchfield had forwarded a liberal contribution for the aid of the poor of that city. When the equestrian statue of King George, of gilded lead, was missing from the Bowling Green in New York, it was shortly found in the dwelling-house of Oliver Wolcott in this village, was melted down by his daughters and their friends, and furnished forty thousand bullets, which were sent to our soldiers in the field, to be afterwards forwarded by them, from the muzzles of their muskets, to the king’s Hessians, with the hissing compliments of the American colonies. No town excelled her in the proportionate number or quality of the men she sent into the field (at one time every able-bodied man in the town being, it is said, at the front), nor in the suffering and loss which they endured. Thirty out of a company of thirty-six who surrendered at Fort Washington, New York, “died miserable deaths from cold, hunger, thirst, suffocation, disease, and the vilest cruelties from those to whom they had surrendered on a solemn promise of honorable treatment.” This had made Ethan Allen, a native of this village, and, as is well known, a professed infidel, grind his teeth and exclaim: “My faith in my creed is shaken; there ought to be a hell for such infernal scoundrels as that Lowrie,” the officer in charge of the prisoners. Nor were these days so remote that their influence was unfelt. In 1810 the spirit of ’76 was not seriously diminished, and many of the principal actors in the stirring scenes of the Revolutionary struggle were still alive. Colonel Tallmadge, one of the most dashing and able cavalry officers of the army, Governor Oliver Wolcott, Jr., a member of Washington’s cabinet, and many other soldiers of the Revolution and actors of less note, were residents of the village at the time of the coming here of Lyman Beecher. When we note the burning patriotism which was always so marked a characteristic of Henry Ward, we must remember that he drank it in in his youth from its primitive sources among the old soldiers of Litchfield. We give his description of the village as it appeared to him in his childhood, although a part of it is out of chronological order. It is found in an article entitled “Litchfield Revisited,” written in 1856: