Into this family was born a son, June 24, 1813—“the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh child, somewhere thereabouts,” as he himself says in a speech before the London Congregational Board, with that forgetfulness of numbers which was always characteristic of him. In fact, the ninth child, the eighth living at the time. It was in one of his favorite months, that of June, “which bursts out from the gates of heaven with all that is youngest, and clothed with that which is the most tender and beautiful,” that he began his career. The grandmother, Roxana Foote, being with her daughter at the time, and remembering her own two favorite sons, who died in youth, named the new-born infant after his uncles, Henry and Ward. They were stirring times, those of the early summer of 1813. The second war of our national independence was then in progress, and tidings had just reached the village that Fort Brown had been captured by the United States forces. Lyman Beecher says of those times: “Our dangers in the war of 1812 were very great, so great that human skill and power were felt to be in vain. Thick clouds begirt the horizon, the storm roared louder and louder; it was dark as midnight, every pilot trembled, and from most all hope that we should be saved was taken away; and when from impenetrable darkness the sun burst suddenly upon us and peace came, we said: ‘Our soul is escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and we are escaped.’” Across the water Napoleon was rallying from the disaster of his Russian campaign, and making the Continent again resound with the roar of his cannon. Not only did these events stir mind and heart of all alike, but the increased taxation and the high prices that resulted from a world at war were severely felt in the parsonage. Mrs. Lyman Beecher wrote: “We feel the war somewhat more than we should one between the Turks and Crim Tartars, inasmuch as, for the most part, every article is double or treble the former price, and some things even more than that.” These were also the days of the inauguration of some of those great moral movements that are even now in progress in this State and in the land. It was but the year before that the General Association of Connecticut, under the leadership of Lyman Beecher, had taken decided action upon the temperance question. In speaking of it he says: “I was not headstrong then, but I was heart-strong—oh! very, very! From that time on the movement went on, not only in Connecticut but marching through New England and marching through the world. Glory to God! Oh! how it wakes my old heart up to think of it!” Morals in general at this time were at a low ebb, and he secured the organization of a “General Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals in the State.”