The distance was so great from the more populous part of the town to Saint John's on Church Hill, and the road thereto so steep, in hot weather dusty, in wet deep in mud, that it had become the Richmond custom to worship within the Capitol, in the Hall of the House of Delegates. But during this August of the year 1807 the habit was foregone. It was the month in which Aaron Burr, arrested in Alabama in January, brought to Richmond in the early spring, and, since the finding of a true bill, confined in the penitentiary without the town, was to be tried for his life on the charge of high treason. Early and late, during the week, every apartment of the Capitol was in requisition, and though the building itself was closed on Sunday, the Capitol Square remained, a place of rendezvous, noise, heat, confusion, and dispute. There was in the town a multitude of strangers, with a range from legal, political, military, and naval heights, through a rolling country of frontiersmen, to a level of Ohio boatmen, servants, and nondescript. Many were witnesses subpoenaed by the Government, others had been called by Burr, and yet others brought upon the scene by varied interests, or by the sheer, compelling curiosity which the trial evoked. One and all were loudly and fiercely partisan. The lesser sort and ruder fry congregated in numbers beneath the trees about the Capitol, and it was thought with propriety that during this month church-going ladies would prefer to attend Saint John's. Here, therefore, on a Sunday in mid-August, the Reverend John Buchanan preached to a large and noteworthy assemblage.