ROGER SHERMAN. The education of the boy was limited, being confined to the ordinary ROGER SHERMAN, of whom Connecti- | son, William, we are told, was a farmer cut is justly proud, as the companion in moderate circumstances. He resided in legal ability and fame of Oliver at Newton, Massachusetts, where, on Ellsworth, one who, in acuteness, force the nineteenth of April, 1721, his son of character and conscientious fidelity, Roger was born. illustrates the foremost virtues of her soil, was of an old English family, traced to the days of the Tudors. The rudimentary instruction of the country Shermans of Yaxley, in the County of Suffolk, sent, in 1634, three emigrants to America. Two of them were brothers-Samuel, one of the early settlers of Connecticut, and John, the great divine and eminent mathematician, whose praise was in all the churches and at Harvard, and who carried his simple lessons of piety, on the wings of his popular almanac, to the humblest households. Their cousin, Captain John Sherman, as he was called, settled in Watertown, Massachusetts. "He was," says a recent New England historian, "a soldier of high courage, and that his education had not been neglected, his beautifully legible and clerkly hand, which still perpetuates the records of Watertown in Massachusetts, as well as the phraseology of the records themselves, bear ample testimony." He was the great-grandfather of Roger Sherman. His grand 1 'Hollister's History of Connecticut, II. 439. schools of the time; not so the learning he derived from observation and the exercise of his naturally sagacious intellect. He was self-taught, so far as that phrase can be applied in a world where we are all mutually dependent as well for instruction and knowledge as for other things. The contrast, perhaps, between his early education and the intellectual profession in which he gained his reputation, has enhanced the sense of his acquisitions. He died a famous member of the bench, reverenced for his services to the Constitution. He begun life as an apprentice to a shoemaker, and pursued the trade long enough to be ranked high in the list of worthies who have transcended their calling, and been honored as sons of St. Crispin. The death of his father, in 1741, threw the care of his mother and younger brothers and sisters upon him when he was nineteen, and it is recorded to his credit that he made libe ral provision for their welfare. So far from his narrow education producing a proportionate narrowness of mind, he outstripped his opportunities, and gave his brothers a liberal education, that they might enjoy benefits of which he felt that he stood in need. At the age of twenty-two, the family removed to New Milford, in Connecticut, where his elder brother had preceded him. There the two opened a store together, and the trade of shoemaker was abandoned. He was not loath, in after life, to recall his first occupation. Once when he was placed on a committee of Congress to examine some army accounts, he surprised his companions by his accurate tests of a bill for shoes, when he frankly accounted for his proficiency by mentioning his old calling. It is recorded as proof of his studies and acquisitions, that two years after he came to Connecticut, he was appointed a surveyor of land for Litchfield County, in which he resided, a duty to which few shoemakers render themselves equal.1 The law, however, was the profession for which he was destined. The story is told of an incident in his early life, while he was yet a shoemaker, which served to fix his taste and encourage his fondness for legal study. One of his neighbors had a difficulty on hand requiring the interposition of a lawyer, and intrusted Astronomical calculations, says his biographer, of so early a date as the year 1748, have been discovered among his papers, made by him for an almanac then published in New York; so that it would seem he had some thing in his composition of his ancestor, the excellent John Sherman, of whom we have spoken, whom Dr. Mather pronounced "one of the greatest mathematicians that ever lived in this hemisphere of the world." the statement of the case to young Sherman, who was about visiting the place where the practitioner resided. To present the matter clearly, Sherman committed the points to paper, and consulted his notes when he came to explain the affair to the lawyer. "Give me the paper," said he, "it will assist me in my petition to the court." The young apprentice blushed at the request, and delivered the manuscript. It was pronounced an able petition as it stood, and the writer being ques tioned as to his pursuits, was advised, so runs the story, to turn his attention to the law. Some eminent authority in England has pronounced it an essential prerequisite of success at the bar, that the candidate for favor should, among other pressures of fortune, have lost his property, be married, and have a wife and children on his hands for support. The strong mental impulses of Sherman hardly required this stimulus; but it is certainly true that he had his way to make in the world, and that he had a wife and increasing family about him. He married, at the age of twenty-eight, Miss Elizabeth Hartwell, of Stoughton. Five years afterwards, having qualified himself entirely by his private studies, he was admitted an attorney at law. The following year he was made a Justice of the Peace at New Milford, and sent by the people of the place as a representative to the Colonial Assembly. In 1759, he was appointed Judge of the Court of Common Pleas for the county. Removing to New Haven in 1761, he was appointed to the same offices in his new county, at first justice. and town representative, and, in 1765, pressed upon Connecticut, were doubt Judge of the Common Pleas. less well and maturely considered by The opening of the contest found him well prepared for the issue. He was chosen a delegate to the first Continental Congress of 1774. John Adams, passing through New Haven on his way to that body in August, was waited upon by Sherman, and in his Diary reports a brief conversation with him. "He is between fifty and sixty, a solid, เ The following year, he was appointed an assistant, or member of the council, to the upper house in the Legislature, and the same year was appointed Judge of the Superior Court. He enjoyed the two offices for nineteen years, when a law was passed rendering one person incapable of holding both, upon which he resigned the former, and continued judge of the court till 1789, a period of twenty-three years. When he finally resigned the station, it was to take his seat in the first Congress under the Constitution. The duties which he thus discharged were both of a political sensible man. He said he read Mr. and judicial character. As representa- Otis' As representa- Otis' Rights,' etc., in 1764, and tive in the Assembly during the whole thought that he had conceded away the period of the French War, be became intimately acquainted with the exertions and strength of the colony put forth in the national defence. Whoever, it has been often remarked, would study the Revolution in its elements, must turn his attention to the previous period. The people of the colonies not only learnt their power, and gained military experience in the field, but the seeds were sown both of aggression on the part of the mother country and resistance on the part of her children. The war with France, terminated by the peace of Versailles in 1763, had brought not only an enormous expenditure to England, but imposed extraordinary privations and losses upon the colonists. If Great Britain found reason to tax her American possessions, they had equal reason for consideration letter of reminiscences, dated 1822, and relief. As member of the council, these questions, which were especially rights of America. He thought 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 "—opinions quite up to the Massachusetts standard. Adams afterwards records Sherman as a staunch supporter of independence in Congress. His talents were appreciated in that body, for we find him a member of important committees, particularly those appointed to prepare a plan of confederation and the Declaration of Independence. He was also employed as a member of the Board of War and Ordnance, of the Marine Committee, and of the Board of Treasury-thus completing a round of the most responsible duties intrusted to the new government. In a brief Jefferson recalled his impressions of |