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Roger Sherman

Roger Sherman, alone of his country's founders, signed the four major documents which led up to and established the United States of America - the American Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution.

Roger Sherman was born April 19, 1721, in Newton, Massachusetts. He was the third of William and Mehetable Wellington Sherman's seven children, and the fourth generation living in America. William Sherman moved his family to Stoughton in 1723, and Roger's only formal education was in the school there. The elder Sherman was a farmer and a cordwainer or shoemaker. Roger took up his father's shoemaking trade. Following William Sherman's death in March, 1741, Roger had to assume the support of his mother and four younger brothers and sisters. He was twenty-one years old that April.

On March 14, 1742, Roger Sherman joined the Congregational Church at Stoughton. In June of the next year, he and his family went to live in New Milford, Connecticut, where his elder brother, William, had moved three years before. Roger's self-taught skill in mathematics brought him an appointment from the Connecticut General Assembly as surveyor for the county of New Haven, in October, 1745.

Sherman purchased a house and lot in the Park Lane section of the town in May, 1748, with more than seventeen acres adjacent and seventy additional acres. Some of this property was ceded to his mother as her inherited share of his father's real estate.

In November, 1749, Roger Sherman was married to Elizabeth Hartwell of Stoughton. They had a family of seven children, three of whom died in infancy. William and Roger Sherman had established a genera] merchandise store in New Milford by 1750. Roger had also embarked on another business venture in 1750 - the issuance of almanacs.

Roger Sherman found that depreciated bills of Rhode Island and New Hampshire circulated on a par with Connecticut currency of higher value, forcing down the worth of the latter. He had a pamphlet printed in 1752, protesting the "evil consequences of a fluctuating medium of exchange." He declared that, if the paper money of the two said colonies were outlawed, the Connecticut inhabitants, because of "fruitful soil," their sufficient industry, and the "divine blessing thereon," could have all the necessities and as good a medium of exchange as any people in the world.

After Litchfield County was set up in May, 1752, Roger's appointment as surveyor for New Haven County was changed to the new county, which included New Milford. With his fees from surveying he was able to invest in land. By 1756, he ranked seventeenth in the list of New Milford property owners.

Another avenue of achievement was to open up for Sherman through his own efforts and work. A New Haven lawyer whom he had consulted about a court petition for a neighbor asked to see his notes. Roger was then advised by this attorney that he should study law. This he did in his spare moments. In 1754, Sherman was appointed an attorney by the Litchfield County Court, and soon developed a very busy law practice. His improved financial status had enabled him to send his two younger brothers to the College of New Jersey.

Roger Sherman was elected a New Milford selectman in 1754. He was appointed a justice of the peace the following year and a justice of the quorum or county court in 1759. In May, 1755, Sherman was chosen for a six-month term as a representative in the Connecticut General Assembly, then meeting during the year at both Hartford and New Haven, dual capitals of the colony. He was again elected to the Assembly in August, and re-elected two years later. He then served in this post while he lived in New Milford.

Roger Sherman suffered a great loss in the death of his wife in October, 1760. This was probably the main reason for his move with their children to New Haven the following June. By this time, his mercantile interests were extended to stores in Wallingford and New Haven.

Transferring his church membership to the White Haven Church, Sherman was soon active in its affairs. In May, 1763, Sherman married Rebecca Prescott, twenty years his junior, and a distant cousin of William Prescott of Bunker Hill fame. By this second marriage, Roger had seven children, one of whom did not survive childhood.

Roger Sherman was chosen a representative to the General Assembly from New Haven in 1764 and was re-elected until 1766, when he became an assistant or member of the Governor's Council. He continued to hold this post until 1785. From 1766 to 1789, he served as judge of the Connecticut Superior Court, and from 1765 to 1776 as treasurer of Yale College.

When the members of the Massachusetts delegation to the First Continental Congress were at New Haven, on their way to Philadelphia in mid-August, 1774, Roger Sherman, a Connecticut delegate, came to see them. ". . . a solid, sensible man," John Adams recorded in his diary, continuing that Sherman had read Otis' Rights in 1764 and thought that the author had conceded "away the rights of America." Sherman felt "the reverse of the declaratory act was true, namely, that the Parliament of Great Britain had authority to make laws for America in no case whatever."

At the First Continental Congress, John Adams commented in his diary that Roger Sherman spoke "often and long, but very heavily and clumsily." Adams criticized the speakers frankly. Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry, both of Virginia, and William Hooper of North Carolina, he asserted, were "the orators."

On October 24, 1774, in Congress, Roger Sherman, Eliphalet Dyer, and Silas Deane signed the American Association representing their colony. Under the Association, the delegates formed a nonimportation, nonconsumption, and nonexportation agreement on behalf of their constituents. They hoped to obtain redress of the colonists' grievances against oppressive British acts by this "most speedy, effectual, and peaceable measure."

Sherman was re-elected to the Second Continental Congress and attended in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775. He was one of a committee of seven appointed June 24, 1775, to put the militia "in a proper state for the defence of America." During John Adams' determined struggle in Congress toward independence all through the fall of 1775 and the winter and spring of 1776, mentioned before, Roger Sherman, Adams declared, was "always on my side." His description of his staunch ally was not entirely flattering, though: "Sherman's air is the reverse of grace; there cannot be a more striking contrast to beautiful action than the motions of his hands. . . . But he has a clear head and sound judgment."

Roger Sherman and John Adams were on the committee of five, appointed October 26, 1775, to consider the request of New Hampshire to Congress concerning civil government for that colony. Although this committee's members, Adams recounted, were as "well disposed to encourage the enterprise as could have been found in Congress," their report was not agreed upon and brought before Congress until November 3. Adams tried to have the words, "Province," "Colonies," and "Mother Country" eliminated from the report. Only the latter was left out, even by this group whose members, Adams asserted, were "all as high Americans as any in the house," except possibly Christopher Gadsden, a South Carolina delegate. However, the resolution passed by Congress, described earlier, was "a triumph, and a most important point gained."

Four days after Lee's motion for independence, on June 11, 1776, in the Congress, Roger Sherman was voted on the committee of five to draft the Declaration of Independence. The following day he was chosen for the committee to prepare "and digest" a form of confederation for the colonies.

At Hartford, on June 14, 1776, the Connecticut General Assembly approved the resolution, "that the Delegates in Congress ... be, and they are hereby, instructed to propose to that respectable body to declare the United American Colonies free and independent States." Sherman voted for independence on July 2 and was a Connecticut signer.

With four others, he had been appointed to the newly created Board of War on June 13, and he was chosen more than a week later to represent Connecticut on a committee to investigate the military disasters in Canada. In February, 1777, John Adams wrote that there were very few delegates in the Continental Congress who had been with him in the first Congress. "Mr. S. Adams, Mr. Sherman and Coll. R. H. Lee, Mr. Chase and Mr. Paca, are all that remain. The rest are dead, resigned, deserted or cutt up into Governors, etc. at home."

Connecticut ratified the Confederation in February, 1778. In his diary for 1779, John Adams observed that "Mr. Sherman, of Connecticut, and Dr. Franklin made an essay towards a confederation about the same time. Mr. Sherman's was best liked, but very little was finally adopted from either. . . ." This is in definite contrast to James Madison's view of Franklin's draft, given earlier.

On June 9, 1778, Roger Sherman was one of four members added to the Board of Treasury. In a letter to Governor Jonathan Trumbull written in October of that same year, Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth suggested that Connecticut give free grants from the Western lands claimed by the state to soldiers of the states which had not yet joined the Confederation, as well as to her own soldiers. This was not approved, but grants were later made to Connecticut soldiers from these lands.

Roger Sherman served in Congress through 1781 and again in 1783 to 1784. At home, he was on the Connecticut Committee of Safety, 1777-1779. In January, 1778, Sherman was a Connecticut delegate to the price-fixing convention held at New Haven and chairmaned the committee which prepared the report of the meeting. He was mayor of New Haven from 1784 to 1793.

In May, 1783, Sherman and Roger Law were chosen by the State General Assembly to revise the Connecticut laws and make such changes as they judged "proper and expedient." The Connecticut General Assembly declined to send delegates to the Annapolis Convention. Under the new Constitution, Roger Sherman served as a Connecticut representative in the first Congress at New York, from 1789 to 1791.

On March 28, 1789, Samuel A. Otis wrote of the delay in organizing the Congress. He did not suppose there was much prospect of another convention "when such men as father Sherman says `try it first,' " nor did the writer expect an early effort at amendments. Sherman himself had opposed the addition of a bill of rights in his published letters for ratification. He felt such rights, guaranteed under the state constitution, needed more than "paper protection." To secure them, it was necessary to elect representatives "as strongly interested in preserving those rights as any of the subjects."

During a debate in the House of Representatives, on June 8, 1789, Sherman said he did not suppose the Constitution to be perfect, but his opinion was "that we are not at present in circumstances to make it better." He declared it was "at wonder that there has been such unanimity in adopting it, considering the ordeal it had to undergo; and the unanimity which prevailed at its formation is equally astonishing. . . ."

In 1790, when memorials against slavery were presented to the House of Representatives by the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and other groups, Sherman suggested they be referred to a committee of one from each state. His motion for this passed forty-three to fourteen.

Roger Sherman was elected in May, 1791, to fill the unexpired term of Dr. Johnson in the Senate. He died on July 23, 1793. "About sunsetting," wrote President Stiles of Yale, "a bright Luminary set in New Haven.... He was an extraord Man - a venerable uncorrupted Patriot!"

Dorothy Horton McGee. Framers of the Constitution. . Dodd Mead & Co., NY. 1968.

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